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

by Meaghan O'Connell

Strangely, I never imagined the baby. Only me, a mother.

I tried not to think about what life was like just a week ago. Thinking too much, generally, felt like self-harm.

But the thought of ritual, of social nicety, of looking them in the eyes and trying to hold a conversation at a time like this felt ridiculous, impossible.

I had planned to be in pain for a day or two and then ready to go for long walks in the sun with my baby, enjoying time away from work. I had planned for this part to be “hell,” but when I’d imagined it, I imagined us overwhelmed but happy, having maintained our sense of humor. I thought the hell would be logistical, not emotional.

Now I was me, but not. Me, but worse. It seemed so unfair, this on top of everything else.

I wanted us to seem happy to them, as ridiculous as it was, like we were coping well. I didn’t want my friends to walk out of our house and back onto the sidewalk and cringe at each other. I didn’t want them to lie in bed that night feeling grateful it was me and not them.

An outsider might find it easy to dismiss this as ridiculous, especially considering you can walk into any grocery store and buy a canister of formula. But, then, an outsider hasn’t lain in bed at night facing the harrowing uncertainty of motherhood, desperate to know she was giving her baby “the best start possible.”

My dog-eared copy of The Womanly Art of Breastfeeding had a section called “How Important Is Breastfeeding, Really?” Answer: “Extremely! There is almost nothing you can do for your child in his whole life that will affect him both emotionally and physically as profoundly as breastfeeding.” Anyone with a grown child—anyone who’s a person!—probably can’t read that without scoffing. But before I had the baby, how did I know that?

I thought about how wild it was that a person could see me and not know why I was so disheveled. I could be anyone. I could be a hungover child. I felt like I should be wearing a sign around my neck. Something like NEW MOTHER. Or CURRENTLY BREASTFEEDING.

Breastfeeding at this point didn’t feel like a success so much as an assault, something coming at me faster than I could cope with, happening almost constantly. Tell me what to do! I wanted to scream. You do it if you know so much.

(breastfeeding: an unpaid internship you don’t get to put on your résumé),

I felt as hungry for the minutiae of their circumscribed days as they were but I was also filled with self-loathing for caring at all. We sounded so desperate, we moms. So boring. Can you believe this is what our lives have been reduced to? I wanted to say. Remember when we were real people? Remember feeling in charge of your life?

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.

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.

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?

The Longest Shortest Time.

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.

With stuff this big, almost any way of looking at it can be true. We all talked like we were going to eventually reach some grand conclusion, some correct stance, but in fact it was different for everybody, impossible to pin down. Was childbirth traumatic or transcendent? Was pregnancy a time of wonder and awe or a kind of temporary disability? Were we supposed to fit our lives around our children or fit our children into our lives? My feelings changed every minute, depending on my mood and on the company I kept. It felt essential, though, to keep asking the questions.