The Push

by Ashley Audrain

how many months

Nobody talked about the feeling of being woken up after forty minutes of sleep, on bloodstained sheets, with the dread of knowing what had to happen next.

I was desperate to know who she was before she became my mother.

I was just trying to keep her alive. I was focused on her eating and her sleeping and the probiotic drops that I could never seem to remember. I was focused on getting through the days as they rolled like boulders into one another.

You used to care about me as a person—my happiness, the things that made me thrive. Now I was a service provider. You didn’t see me as a woman. I was just the mother of your child.

Instead I was always looking for what was wrong with us.

I didn’t really know how we were doing financially, or how much we had saved. My mind raced back, trying to remember the last bank statement I’d seen. You paid our bills. I didn’t keep track of what we earned and spent. I felt the foolishness rise inside me.

Do whatever you do during the day when I’m not here.”

But I was on the cusp of the age when women worry about disappearing to everyone but themselves, blending in with their sensible hair, their practical coats. I see them walk down the street every day as though they’re ghosts. I suppose I wasn’t ready to be invisible yet. Not then.

“You know, there’s a lot about ourselves that we can’t change—it’s just the way we’re born. But some parts of us are shaped by what we see. And how we’re treated by other people. How we’re made to feel.”

I am capable of moving beyond my mistakes. I am able to heal from the hurt and pain I have caused.

Many things about motherhood are softened when we talk or write about them. When I became a mother myself, this especially stood out to me in writing and in film—the washed-over birth scenes and the idyllic children, the tired but fulfilled mother. I wanted to write from a darker place of motherhood, because it can be very ugly and terrifying at times, even if you are privileged to be raising children in the best of circumstances.

Someone once told me that her friend confessed she didn’t like her own child very much—not just because of a particularly tough phase, but because she genuinely didn’t like who she was. I had never heard such a candid feeling expressed by a mother before. There is increasingly more discourse among women about the failed expectations of motherhood, but there are still taboo truths that few women will share, like regretting the decision to have a child, or not feeling the love they thought they would.

We’re still living in a time when women’s voices are often devalued, ignored, or questioned without merit. We’ve seen this in the way society treats women who speak out publicly, as an example. There’s no question this broader societal attitude has an impact on an individual level in the domestic lives of women. Being ignored, not believed, or even gaslighted can be a form of trauma. The idea of the “crazy woman” or the “hysterical mother” has existed for a long time, and it creates fear and silences women, particularly where there is a power imbalance.