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

by Meaghan O'Connell

Some days I couldn’t tell whether I wanted marriage or not. Were the parts of me that resisted just trained to construct elaborate rationalizations for why I didn’t want this thing I might not get anyway? And weren’t the hesitations all some version of It might not work out? Sometimes it felt like I spent my whole life trying to tell the difference between fear and circumspection. I was always trying not to want things. I knew I could convince Dustin to get married; he had told me as much: “You wanting it makes me want it too.” But did I want it enough for both of us? Did I want to be married enough to campaign for it and risk taking the blame if things went south?

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. 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. I tried to communicate in a gesture that I didn’t agree with their method,

I’ll know, soon, that just because something is hard and takes work and doesn’t come naturally doesn’t mean it isn’t worthwhile. It doesn’t mean anything. I’ll know that as long as we can talk to each other, we aren’t doomed. But we have to do it on purpose. We have to try now. Ugh.

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.