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

by Meaghan O'Connell

Did I want to be married enough to campaign for it and risk taking the blame if things went south?

Somewhere around twenty-six or twenty-seven we had started taking better care of ourselves, drinking less, cooking more, getting our hair dyed at the salon instead of using a box at home. Maybe what I’m saying is we just had more money.

I do not intellectually subscribe to the idea that expense is a reliable indicator of quality, but I suppose that when it comes down to it, my gut is ruled by the illusions of capitalism.

I was in his T-shirt feeling a brand-new sort of bodily vulnerability, like what if a spider crawled up my leg and up my birth canal and bit the baby?

“Okay,” she said. “Obviously you are going to have the baby but I am totally willing to humor you by having this debate.”

It made me want to put sad music on in my headphones and walk around feeling like the protagonist of my own life.

MOOD

I told myself that I was willing to get an abortion for him. Of course I was. Right? That’s what a reasonable person would say.

Yikes

“We know we want a kid eventually,” he said. “In a couple of years we can have one.” “But isn’t that kind of dumb? To be like, Well, we want you but not yet. Sorry, the timing is off. I mean, isn’t this bigger than that?” “Come on. We can have this baby again in a couple of years.” “This baby?” My voice broke.

Once we are married. We can do it again! It will be the same baby.” I laughed out loud. “Dustin,” I said. “That’s literally what it won’t be, this particular baby.” This was weirdly unlike him; he was normally correcting my magical thinking.

I can't even wrap my head around the fact that an adult man really said this. Seriously, like not as a joke. He legit said this.

“We can have the baby again in a couple of years,” he said again. “When we’re ready.”

Wtf

Dustin was trying to take away my baby, the one I’d tried to be so cool about. The one I’d been afraid to say I wanted. The one we could decidedly not have “again” in a couple of years.

My truest feelings about the baby began and ended with I want it. It was inside of me and I wanted it, and I knew I could take care of it, but for some reason that counted for only so much. I tried to shut out that part of me. That was the hysterical woman in me. That was the baby fever. That was purely hormonal; ridiculous. That was shit you were supposed to transcend when you were a smart woman.

The war on femininity is absolutely appalling and the fact that this kind of thinking even exists makes my blood boil. F*** the patriarchy

A baby is never a particularly good idea, practically speaking,

FALSE

“I don’t feel sorry for you,” she says in her definitive, careful, sincere way. “This is a good thing.” “Huh,” we say, taking it in like a verdict. So we aren’t teenagers after all. We aren’t confessing to something.

EXACTLY. YOU'RE ALMOST 30. THIS IS NOT A CRISIS PREGNANCY

When have I ever willingly posed for, to use dating-app parlance, a full-body shot? When have I ever said, Here is my body, please look at it while I stand here smiling, and take a picture so we can remember it always.

Some days, when I catch sight of myself, an automatic, self-hating part of my brain still recoils, still thinks, Bad. My body is jutting where it should not jut. There’s no hiding it.

What I really want him to acknowledge, to feel with me, is that we are standing at the precipice of death now all the time. That it’s undeniable, part of the deal sooner or later, inextricable from life. We created a death. And how could he not take that seriously?

I say, and then I start crying.

A lot of crying occurs in this book

“Your energy and thoughts about childbirth are now positive and healthy at all times,” the woman says in a throaty monotone. A willing suspension of disbelief seems to be required.

I feel tired, sore, claustrophobic. I’m uncomfortable in my own skin, afraid of what’s to come. To the untrained eye, though, I am glowing.

In all of my natural childbirth classes, everyone raved about the magic of hot showers. I suspected, or feared, that their analgesic powers were not as advertised.

This was the worst pain I’d ever felt, but I had never had my arm cut off. That was what I always imagined to be the worst pain: having a limb chopped off. I saved ten for that, out of respect. I wanted to keep nine for the moment the baby tore his way out of my vagina. That left eight. I wanted to seem brave, so at first I said seven, but then, worried they wouldn’t understand the urgency of the situation, I came back with eight.

She was taken aback. I was taken aback that she was taken aback.

It was like going through the pain of breaking up with someone and just when you thought you were free, he shows up at your house and, I don’t know, throws knives at your uterus?

it felt like some demon (male, surely) was chopping at me from the inside with a pickax.

wishing I could wave a magic wand and give them my pain, just for a second, so they would take me seriously.

I wish this so often!

She groped and prodded and shoved unnamed objects around inside of me, trying to find the baby’s head. Oh yes, the baby. He was in there through all of this. The thought of that now seems bizarre. At the time it was so much about me, my body, my pain.

She told me, in a tone I imagined she usually reserved for informing family members that their loved one was dying, that my cervix hadn’t moved.

The rage I felt at that moment was like nothing I’d ever experienced.

I find that hard to believe. The word rage is on like every 3rd page. Surely at some point these frequent bouts of rage begin to look the same

“Hey!” he bellowed with real concern, his hands cupped around his mouth. “Where’s your baby?” He was wearing a stained undershirt and a bandanna around his neck. I laughed and spun around to face him, earphones still in. “With his dad!” The next time someone asked me that, I swore I’d look around in a panic and start patting my pockets. My baby? I don’t know, have you seen him?

“Don’t give up on one of the most incredible experiences of your life just because you have trouble at first learning a new skill. Give up, and you’ll wonder and regret. Persist, and you’ll know and be rewarded.” 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

He bought records and danced around the house with our son, and when the baby was fussy he would read to him from books of poetry, Greek myths, and Thomas Hardy novels. I’d stomp through the room rolling my eyes.

This does seem in character, yes

I hated all of them immediately.

ME AF

When 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.

When someone commented on how cute he was, I caught myself pointing out how he didn’t have any hair. I was self-deprecating on behalf of my baby. Not yet four months old and he was already a victim of my insecurity.

I kissed his head. He’d ruined my life but I loved him. I didn’t hold it against him.

I just wanted a baby, I thought. I don’t want to be a mother.

I envied him that. No one suggested he make dad friends. He got to demolish low expectations of fatherhood while I got defensive.

For the first few weeks I was always expecting to catch the baby, somehow, mid-death.

I would be pulling the car over every time I called out to him and he, an infant who couldn’t say words yet, didn’t answer. You’re being ridiculous, I would tell myself. He’s fine. I’d keep driving, then think, But what if he is dead?

we’d both sit there at the restaurant, checking our phones throughout dinner. “He’s probably not dead, right?” he’d ask. “Nah,” I’d say, happy to play the chill parent for once. “She would have called if he died.”

“You’re taking him?” Dustin said. “Yeah,” I said with a slight attitude, “clearly.”

"Slight"

I didn’t know yet that a willingness to share your unreasonable feelings was part of what love was.

LIES. This entire book is dripping with unreasonble feelings being shared

A result of my inability to say how I feel, of stuffing it down and down

If what we've seen thus far is a repression of feeling, i pale to think what full expression must be

“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.”

“I think that’s just something people tell themselves,” I say, laughing as I wipe tears away. “Well, fine. Tell it to yourself!”

“What if we just told people that it always really, really, really hurts?” she asks, and then she answers herself: “Well, that wouldn’t be very good, because you’d get everybody so frightened.” 15. 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?

Just focus on the joy, she writes. Ugh, fine.