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

by Meaghan O'Connell

I was sure, scared of how sure I was.

I was always trying not to want things.

None of this deciding-how-you-feel-about-marriage crap. No weighing options, no making your case to a boyfriend who wasn’t sure if he wanted to get married. No putting off babies to the very last minute, no pretending you didn’t care, no playing it cool for so long you didn’t even remember how to have real desire, real hope. These women, the dreaded mommy bloggers, at least knew what they wanted.

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.

I had wanted a baby the way you want things you can’t have, dreams you know you won’t pursue, or not yet. Like, One day, when we open a restaurant, or One day, when we live in an Airstream trailer, or One day, when we make artisanal caramels on a goat farm. Dustin and I had a lot of these. I was ashamed to want a baby, to be that sort of woman. And, worse, to want to bring a child into our barely established lives.

Dustin was trying to take away my baby, the one I’d tried to be so cool about.

That could have—should have, maybe—been the end of it, the objective truth I was after, but did I have it in me to undo something that was already there, something I yearned for, bad idea or no?

We created a death.

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.

My heart rate was sky-high; psychologically, I was in extremis. “I want to die!” I yelled to them repeatedly, but no one did anything.

I felt like a madwoman, existentially alone, climbing the walls. Then came a strange, unwelcome solidarity with all women. The certainty that we were damned.

My doctor gave birth to my baby.

Day and night bled into each other, coalescing into one big nightmare. My clothes were indistinguishable from pajamas. A lamp was always on. We were in the middle of what felt like an ongoing emergency. Like someone was playing a practical joke on us. Endure the car crash of childbirth, then, without sleeping, use your broken body to keep your tiny, fragile, precious, heartbreaking, mortal child alive.

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.

My body was shorthand, living proof. It stood for everything I couldn’t say.

“You don’t know what it’s like,” Dustin said, his voice quivering now. “You don’t hear him scream whenever you leave, even for a few minutes. You can just pull out a boob—”

body felt like a tube of meat with legs and Super Soakers where my breasts should be,

Freer than I’d ever felt when I’d had endless afternoons, no ticking clock.

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.

I couldn’t figure out whether motherhood was showing me how strong I was or how weak.

We defined ourselves against each other—or I did—like siblings.

Of course I’d seen it coming. Did she think I was a fool? What I hadn’t seen coming was me.

Maybe under the stress of new parenthood, whatever adult personality I’d concocted was being stripped for parts, and I would be left with only my teenage core.

There was no mother I wanted to be.

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.

“Mama’s here,” I said to him, using that word out loud for the first time and feeling it, too, as if my vulnerability were what called the name, the role, into being.

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 love you, I think. Sorry for all the sexual rejection.

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.

Now Dustin still felt familiar but not quite safe to confide in, like he was too invested in my feelings for me to be honest with him. When all your thoughts are shitty and even you don’t trust them, why communicate them to the person you are

I could have sat Dustin down and told him to wait for me on the other side. Let’s let the dust settle and accept that I’m a nursing mammal and everything’s in flux and we’re scared but know that in a year or so, everything will be different.

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.

perfect birth, but she didn’t give up and get the epidural like I did. Her baby, when he finally came, came barreling out of her so quickly and so traumatically, she got an extremely debilitating fourth-degree tear. She’d been seeing a pelvic-floor therapist, a godsend, and was healing and progressing, but sex was still something she couldn’t quite contemplate. She couldn’t ride her bike or go running. For the first few weeks, she couldn’t even sit down. Despite all that, she went back to work when the baby was six weeks old. She didn’t have a choice. “It was really dark,” she says. “No kidding.” “I imagined all these things I’d do on my maternity leave.” “Ha.” “Exactly.” Talking to her, I realize that when I replay my own labor in my head, a sort of compulsive Monday-morning quarterbacking I can’t stop doing, I imagine that if I had only “stuck it out” and had the vaginal birth I aspired to, everything would have gone perfectly. But there are all kinds of ways for things to go badly.

“Your baby will only be a baby once” sounds less like a threat than a small mercy.

Wasn’t this life at its most elemental? Wasn’t this what I was working toward with writing?

It did not occur to me that we could simply muddle through. Learn as we go. Change things later. Forgive ourselves.

I had to get low down before I could learn to see and then say out loud what it was I needed.

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 yet, I know I never got shit done then either.

When I hear this I put down the bowl I am scrubbing and brace myself on the sink and sob. I’m a little horrified by how much her words affect me and how much I needed to be forgiven by this woman I’ve never met for what I think of as my poor performance.

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?

I hide out, paint my toenails, watch TV, think about how maybe there are just some people who are baby people and some people who aren’t, and I’m not.

It occurs to me I had a baby just to feel this free when I’m away from him.