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

by Meaghan O'Connell

We were in the middle of what felt like an ongoing emergency. Like someone was playing a practical joke on us. Endure the car crash

of childbirth, then, without sleeping, use your broken body to keep your tiny, fragile, precious, heartbreaking, mortal child alive.

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.

I sat back down and held the baby to me and felt lighter somehow. My body was shorthand, living proof. It stood for everything I couldn’t say.

I should have known to be suspicious of the supposed inherent reward of unpaid labor that can be carried out exclusively by the female body (breastfeeding: an unpaid internship you don’t get to put on your résumé), but I kept hoping it would come true. Natural childbirth was another supposed “incredible experience,” but I had fucked that one up already so there was no way I would give up on breastfeeding (wonder! regret!). I kept waiting for the reward.

In any case, I did my duty, which was sometimes lovely but more often not. Breastfeeding was not the most incredible experience of my life, and my baby is still mortal. He still gets sick. I went to great lengths to do it, for reasons I can no longer relate to. Or none other than this: I so desperately wanted to do the right thing, and I had no idea what that was yet.

We felt less like a couple than like co-workers, in service to the same human project.

you are the mother of a new baby, however, polite conversation is typically a desperate grasp at information: How does your child nap, how does he eat, what brand of diapers do you use? The trick is to answer questions honestly but be ready to disavow whatever you do if, compared to the other person’s routine, it’s too strenuous or too laid back. The fantasy is meeting another parent who does the exact same things you do so you don’t have to question or defend any of it.

I didn’t know before that when parents talked about “checking on” their children, they meant checking to make sure they weren’t dead. And when they talked about

their love for their children, maybe that was what they meant too. It was love but keener, with sharper edges, softer undersides. It was love wrapped up with desperate terror, inextricable.

What if, instead of worrying about scaring pregnant women, people told them the truth? What if pregnant women were treated like thinking adults? What if everyone worried less about giving women a bad impression of motherhood?

One day he will grow up and move away from us and we will miss him constantly. I’m still mad when he wakes me up with his screaming each morning. I still need time and space away from him, to think and read and work and feel like a person, even though I know that one day I will long for nothing but to hold him again.

I have never felt so free, so happy. It occurs to me I had a baby just to feel this free when I’m away from him.

How to explain the strange arc of parenthood to new mothers? How to tell it so that they believe you? The way things start out hard and then ease up. It is like finding more hours in the day. It is like the end of the school year, that first day of summer. It’s like you moved to a new country, and it’s beautiful but there’s a war going on. But then the war ends and you begin reconstructing yourself.