And Now We Have Everything: On Motherhood Before I Was Ready

by Meaghan O'Connell

Part of me loved this feeling of being steamrolled by life, of being totally fucked.

Thinking too much, generally, felt like self-harm.

The biggest problem of all was that I loved the baby so immediately and desperately, I knew I could never actually escape. I was not just trapped in our apartment with my tits out, I was also trapped in love with him. I could never go back to before.

Maybe under the stress of new parenthood, whatever adult personality I’d concocted was being stripped for parts, and I would be left with only my teenage core.

“Taking care of a baby is sort of like driving down the highway,” an old co-worker’s wife told me when I was pregnant as we sat at a picnic table in their upstate backyard. “It’s incredibly boring but you can’t look away.”

What if having a hard time adjusting to motherhood wasn’t some moral failure or a failure of imagination? What if we thought of the whole endeavor like we do work? Like how a career starts out with a lot of dues-paying, a lot of indignity, a lot of feeling unappreciated and complaining to your friends but then incrementally gets easier or more fulfilling. You get better at it. It becomes part of you. And you start to think, Well, what else would I do all day?