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

by Meaghan O'Connell

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.

Show me a boy’s name and I’ll show you a man who has ruined it.

Pregnancy makes me feel trapped sometimes, but other times I think, You’ll never be this free again.

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

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.

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.