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

by Meaghan O'Connell

There was no note, no alarm sounded, just the quiet organization of cells while you wait to be let in on the joke.

Ultimately both our short- and long-term goals were the same: (1) lose our virginity; (2) find love; (3) make enough money to stop shopping at Forever 21; (4) become famous writers.

course.” It was a way of checking in on your life, on what you’d be willing to lose if everything changed.

Motherhood was the farthest thing from the lives we were living but still out there waiting for us, the great “eventually,” the great “inevitably.” Of course we had more important things to do first, or that was the party line. We had our careers. Was it a defensive act, our busy-ness?

Their inner lives, or what they shared of them, could be broken down into a few themes and always included gratitude for all of God’s blessings and the desire to slow down and be more present so they could better enjoy their precious time with their precious families. Oh, and their desire to have more babies.

Instead of asking direct questions—too risky—we took moments like these as signs, played them on loops in our heads, dissected them over drinks. If this was childish, it was a cultural childishness, that of the ambitious young woman too smart for her own good.

Wanting to have a baby was a desperate quality in a woman, like wanting a relationship multiplied by a thousand, and it got more desperate with age.

Pregnancy was ten months. Everyone said nine but we knew better. Our expertise on the subject of pregnancy was a dead giveaway of our private preoccupation, much as we’d disavow it.

I was not a writer-writer. I was editing a personal-finance blog part-time for a thousand dollars a month and living off dumb-luck money I’d gotten when an internet company I worked for when I was twenty-four was acquired by Yahoo.

I was all worked up, dying to know but also wanting to spend one more night as not-a-mother.

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

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

I knew everything there was to know except none of it was particularly useful, none of it an answer to the bigger questions: What will it be like? How will it change me?

I blink, trying to get rid of the images flashing in my brain: red, slippery vagina skin ripping in two like a torn bedsheet.

I spent most of my life being just a little bit fat and always figured that pregnancy would be a nice reprieve. I imagined I would fall in love with my body and feel ready to pose for pictures in Facebook updates.

I had this image in my mind of how I’d look pregnant, mostly based on the type of woman who posed on lifestyle blogs and looked “like a beanpole that swallowed a bowling ball.”

It’s wild to feel a brand-new sensation in a place where nothing has stirred before. It feels like being tapped on the shoulder from the inside. I exist, I exist, I exist.

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.

Sometimes I forget it entirely, that I’m pregnant. I sit for hours at a coffee shop writing, and my condition slips my mind. These are good days, days when I feel like I’m liberated, just a brain floating in a vat. But the spell is broken when I stand up to go to the bathroom and try to squeeze past the necks of young Brooklyn coffee-shop men, my new stomach grazing the tips of their ears. “Sorry, sorry!” Everyone turns and sees my conspicuous body. I am a stranger who is pregnant. In this way I make more sense to them than I do to myself.

Every time someone says, “Your body is meant to do this,” I think of all the women who used to die in childbirth. All the women who still do.

Then as soon as I caught my breath and shook off the pain, I would get yanked back in, like a gust of wind through a subway tunnel, and reconvene with the bodily me, who was having her organs tightened with a belt made of barbed wire.

It’s not that my mom’s being there bothered me; it was more that I was constantly evaluating whether her being there bothered me.

I wished for a way to communicate pain more precisely than on a scale of one to ten. This was the worst pain I’d ever felt, but I had never had my arm cut off.

If I regret anything about the way I labored, it’s the fact that I let two people fish around in my vagina for the sake of their own education. And then worried they weren’t pleased with me because I was a “three.” I had been in labor for thirty hours. Fuck the world, fuck humanity, fuck God. I looked up at Dustin, scared.

I wanted the C-section so badly. I wanted it like you want a glass of water at a stranger’s house but feel like you should demur for some reason. I wanted it the way you want someone to stick a finger in your butt during sex but would never ask for it.

Day and night bled into each other, coalescing into one big nightmare.

The rage I felt at that moment was like nothing I’d ever experienced. I was strung out, under siege, depleted.

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’d never felt so physically limited before and was mentally unprepared for it.

My body, disappointing though it was, had always at least been familiar. Now I was me, but not. Me, but worse. It seemed so unfair, this on top of everything else.

The pump looked just like I’d imagined, like something you’d use to masturbate a farm animal.

The bulk of the machine was a little yellow box the size of a toaster oven that gasped and sighed with a rhythmic, mechanical sucking noise that was initially disturbing, like it was trying to tell me something but couldn’t quite find the language. There were two snaking rubber tubes that ran from the box to the air-horn-looking boob funnels and from there into baby bottles that collected the milk. The horns were where the magic happened, where your tits went. Sucked into the machine, my nipples looked like long, pink taffy, stretched and then milked.

Back then I was full of ennui and longing for some sort of structure, but now, after I’d spent six weeks in our tiny fun-house apartment, flailing with Dustin through each exhausting day (and night), all I wanted was to waste time, let my mind wander, listen to music, recover some semblance of an inner life.

I opened my laptop and immediately felt like a genius. It turned out writing was easy compared to taking care of a baby. Writing was something I knew how to do, technically. No one’s life depended on it.

Plus there was no time to procrastinate, not anymore. No time to get paralyzed second-guessing myself. I’d been afraid that having a baby would quell whatever ambition I had, but now the opposite was happening. I’d spent the past month or so rolling around in the human condition, writing essays in my head, and now I was manic, brimming with things to say. Writing was no longer the most important thing in my life, and that made me love it even more. It was dumb enough to tackle, suddenly; small enough to embolden me.

I’d had this idea of what breastfeeding would be like. Not the physical experience, but the lived reality, the timing, the way it was supposed to fit between other things. I thought it would be something happening in the background while I went about my actual life. How else would it be tolerable? The faint sucking sound of a breast pump during a conference call, a shirt lifted up on the subway, so seamlessly nobody really notices it. Baby legs kicking in the aisle of an airplane, his head and my tits hidden under a gauzy blanket. I wanted to be one of those women who, without missing a beat, pull out a boob at a restaurant, midconversation. That’s how they sell it to you: It’s so convenient! Always with you. Natural. Completely free! “Breastfeeding: It’s So Easy!” is how one popular breastfeeding website puts it (every breastfeeder with an internet connection has spent way too many late nights online reading guilt-provoking articles from lactation consultants). But this easy, natural bodily function took focus, if not on the task at hand, then on the clock. Skip a feed and you mess up the whole supply-and-demand thing. Skip a feed and the milk you didn’t express may never show up again, like a friend you cancel on too many times who no longer answers your texts. You can get a clogged milk duct, a painful, inflamed blockage that can then lead to an infection called mastitis, which is like having the flu and then getting stabbed in the tits at the same time. Worse, your bab...

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.

The whole world expects you to do it but it’s not like it waits for you. People don’t accommodate you. They don’t even know where to look when you do it.

But now that we had a child together, I worried we actually didn’t know each other at all. We felt less like a couple than like co-workers, in service to the same human project.

Dustin had embraced fatherhood but I couldn’t bring myself to say mama out loud, not until my son did. It was embarrassing; it felt goofy or fake. Who wanted to be a mother, anyway? Mom called to mind a relationship with someone, not an individual. A mom was your servant. A mom picked up the wrong thing at the supermarket. A mom needed to stop and get stamps on the way home from soccer practice and you hated her for it. A mom wore a white, collared shirt and stood at the kitchen island selling cereal in television commercials. Moms clustered on benches in the playground pulling snacks out of their bags. They took up the whole sidewalk with their goddamn strollers. Moms nagged. Moms were stressed out. I knew it was all internalized misogyny and guilt and bad public policy but I still couldn’t really get around it. There was no mother I wanted to be.

door. I just wanted a baby, I thought. I don’t want to be a mother. I want to be a writer. I want to be taken seriously. I want money. I want more time. I want to lose weight. I want to be beautiful. I want a day completely to myself, though I don’t even remember what I used to do with them when days to myself were a thing I had.

My role? My body had built his body cell by cell by cell, spent almost a year putting him together in the dark, and now I was supposed to sit back and tend to him, keep him safe and alive with my milk but also—impossibly, it felt—trust that his body would do its work, that he would keep breathing all on his own.

Death was inextricable from life. Our real task was not-killing a small, precious thing.

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.

Maybe all it takes is distraction. For you and the baby, for everyone. Think about other things. Stop thinking about all the bad things that could happen. Not because they can’t happen but because it’s the only way to calm down.

Postpartum knife dick is the term women in my Facebook-moms group coined to describe the shooting pain some of us got when we tried to do it. It was as if my body were sticking up for itself when my mind couldn’t be trusted.

You might feel “touched out,” they said, as if a sentient sack of potatoes were always, somehow, right on top of you.

When all your thoughts are shitty and even you don’t trust them, why communicate them to the person you are supposed to love the most? Or so went the argument in my head. My feelings felt dangerous. Potentially destructive.

We want milder weather, a real backyard, a change of scenery, a washer and dryer. I’m tired of carrying the stroller up the steps from the subway and waiting forever at restaurants. It’s the typical story: the hard parts of living in New York have eclipsed the magic, and once you lose sight of the magic, the whole project of living there becomes absurd.

We take turns telling our birth stories and cuddling each other’s babies and I feel myself getting manic with the thrill of finally being understood. The ability to be casually despondent, to complain to someone in shorthand and not feel like you have to insert disclaimers about how much you love your baby—I feel like if I could just be around her forever, I would be okay.