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

by Meaghan O'Connell

Who has not asked himself at some time or other: am I a monster or is this what it means to be a person? —Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star

The problem was that with every year of being by ourselves, of moving forward with work, of getting used to our freedom, of learning how to be happy, we got closer to needing to have a baby (Time’s up!) and completely upending the lives and selves we’d been building.

“Well, that’s what it says.” He came over to me, pulled off the blankets, and kissed me hard. Before we let the news settle in, he pulled off my underwear and then his and we had rushed, crazed sex. He didn’t stop to rustle around for a condom, didn’t pull out and come on my stomach. I was pregnant. We came at the same time and then collapsed. We both stared at the ceiling. Breakfast was quiet. 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?

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?

Lindsay looks down at me from her grip on the subway pole. “Babies sleep all the time anyway, don’t they?” she says. “I’m sure it will be easy enough to get writing done.” I turn away from her, full of dread but not wanting to explain myself. The time after the baby feels like an oblivion, like anything could happen. I don’t even know who I will be after him. Then the creeping revelation: If I let him, my son will be the reason I don’t do all sorts of things. I’m starting it already.

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.

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 need more money, which means we will spend $850 a month on day care and hope that, with the additional time to work, we will earn at least $851 more a month. The ridiculousness of this math is partly why we’ve spent so long splitting the time ourselves. “Our baby will be a baby only once, and I don’t want to miss out” was the sort of thing I said when I was pregnant, imagining days full of nothing but wonder. It was the sort of message that was ambient on Facebook and parenting blogs. You’ll never get this time back. It’s a threat. What was work compared to being face to face with a life unfolding before you? Now I am increasingly convinced that I do want to miss out, at least a little bit. “Your baby will only be a baby once” sounds less like a threat than a small mercy.

“If I could spend ten good minutes with him every two hours, that’d be ideal,” I say to Danielle over drinks one night. “You know, when they’re really small. And you just…look at them. And there’s nothing to do. And you know you’re supposed to talk to them but it feels insane. And you just, like, boop them with toys on the nose, like they’re dogs…boop.” I feel a wave of longing when I say this stupid word: boop. It was part of my baby language, always would be. I remember his laughter, his stillness, staring back up at me, how his eyes would flash at me a certain way and I’d be convinced we were communicating on some deeper plane, beyond words, and I want to take back all my wild urges to be elsewhere. Wasn’t this life at its most elemental? Wasn’t this what I was working toward with writing? If only I had the sort of spiritual stamina to stay in profundity longer, to not find it oppressive after ten minutes.

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? Of course, it’s not the same at all. But you can understand why someone wouldn’t want to have a job. And you can understand why someone would. 12.

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?

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. My therapist calls it expansiveness. She makes a fist, then splays her fingers out into an open palm. You expand and retract. You are on defense, and then not. You are under siege and then not. You begin to open all on your own, to seek out other people. Seek out complexity of your own. You will lie on the couch during nap time and think about opening an old cookbook and making something complicated for dinner, just because. You will consider planting a vegetable garden this year. Or taking up running again. You will go to Target alone and leave with sunglasses, a new necklace. A set of cotton pajamas. Nothing for the baby at all.

The baby and I walk home from day care together as the sun is setting. “Crow!” he says to each crow. “Airpane!” to each airplane. We stop every few blocks so I can look at him and kiss him in the crease where his nose meets his cheek. His dad, I know, is home making dinner, and will gasp and then yell from the kitchen, “You’re home” as soon as we walk through the door. We will all stand there together in a hug. We are a family. Somehow it happened. Somehow I let it. Or else it happened despite me. In the end I find it doesn’t matter.