Happy and You Know It

by Laura Hankin

Dr. Clark was MIT educated and polished—the kind of woman who looked like she ate scientific journals for breakfast and then worked out for two hours afterward to burn off all the calories.

If you mastered wellness, you could be efficient and centered and smoking hot, for you! All you had to do was drink fancy juice, take a lot of yoga classes, and put a five-hundred-dollar jade egg up your vagina, and then you could start having the orgasms your body was meant to have! You’d never disappoint your partner by turning down sex ever again, because you’d be so empowered and energetic that you’d want it all the time!

Breastfeeding was supposed to be natural. A cow could get a calf to suckle at her teat, and yet Amara, who had a degree from a well-regarded university and had handled some of the most famous celebrities in the world, couldn’t get Charlie to latch onto her nipple.

The most narcissistic rock star on the planet was no match for the average six-month-old.

Besides, when she let herself think about it, she liked the idea of a mini Amara-Daniel hybrid waiting for her at the door, hurtling into her when she came home from work, before she’d even had time to set down her purse. Of the three of them snuggling in bed on Sunday mornings, bleary and content, the little nugget watching idiotic cartoons while Amara and Daniel passed the New York Times back and forth. She was going to lean the fuck in and master that mythical beast known as Having It All.

But she couldn’t relax. She was a woman, she was black, and now she was a mother. She had to be twice as good—no, three times as good—as everyone else.

She tried reaching out to contacts at other shows, but nobody seemed to be interested in hiring new mothers. (Or word had spread that she was crazy for how she’d left Staying Up, and no one wanted to work with her. She suspected that might play a part too.) She was never alone. She was so lonely.

Back in Claire’s hometown, the church drummed it into the girls at Sunday school that they were special, meant to be cherished, but that ultimately, husbands were the boss. Apparently you could get a degree from Harvard and a fancy New York apartment, and still, some things would stay the same.

Whitney stood in the center of the room, and though she smiled and looked around with everyone else, her arms were folded across her chest like a teenager on the sidelines of a dance. The hostess becomes the hosted, an old-time narrator voice intoned in Claire’s head, and for a brief moment, she looked for Amara, wanting to say it to her, before shaking herself out of the impulse.

Whitney wanted to be generous and kind. She wanted to be the woman on her Instagram—her best self, whose most confessional transgressions were Today I got a little grumpy with Hope or Sometimes I wish I could sleep for a million years!

Arrogant, self-involved Grant had no idea what he’d done.

Her whole childhood seemed to take place in that golden afternoon light, where everything felt safe and warm, where she never doubted for a moment that her mother and father loved her, where her mother made her elaborate breakfasts in the morning and taught her piano in the afternoons (never yelling, always encouraging) and read her L. M. Montgomery books before bed, where they all took trips to Istanbul and Paris, and sunned at Caribbean resorts, and her parents drank and laughed and drank some more.

Her entire grandiose view of herself as a special talent had come tumbling down, a pyramid crumbling into dust. She’d paraded from Ohio to New York like an emperor but—surprise!—she hadn’t been wearing any clothes. The story didn’t talk about the emperor afterward, did it? How he felt when everyone realized that he’d been duped, that his expensive new suit was no suit at all?

“You wrote the only good part of the number one song in the country, and you’re going to give up? Don’t be an idiot. Why are you trying to just be the girl in someone else’s band?”

Over the weekend, Claire sat down to write something beautiful and revealing and true. She turned off her phone and put it in the bathroom. She looked at herself in the mirror. “Stop being a waste of space,” she told her reflection. She lit a fucking candle.

Whitney modeled a new kind of motherhood in which a woman could be gorgeous and empowered and selfless at the same time, all without breaking a sweat.

Could a person get addicted to wellness like cocaine and have to keep doing more and more to get the same high? Pretty soon the moms would be injecting collagen straight into one another’s asses and insisting that they’d never felt better.

He could pout, but they were not going to have one of those partnerships where Amara made Charlie do his homework and Daniel took him to the zoo.

That was one of the strangest things about motherhood. You could love your baby to pieces, be thankful every day for his ten tiny toes and his piercing wail and his all-consuming existence, and yet still mourn the life you’d had before. And somehow it wasn’t cool to say that, to treat the birth of a baby as the death of something else. You had to be all joy, all gratitude. But she missed Sundays alone in her apartment, listening to music. She missed cherishing a cup of coffee, sipping it slowly all the way down to its dregs. She missed going out like this with a friend, letting the night take her where it wanted. All this had disappeared, and she’d never gotten the chance to properly grieve.

Amara met Daniel at business school. It had been a momentary life-path mistake that she’d made with heavy encouragement from her parents, and she’d realized within her first month that she was not interested. People partied like they were back in college, except with an even greater urgency, because they’d experienced the real world and knew what it was like. More than classes or grades, the important thing at business school was the schmoozing.

He had a bit of a socialist streak and wanted to change the business world from the inside.

It struck her that bringing a kid into a marriage was like getting a huge promotion, but with no raise and still having to do all your old work of being a good partner too. Despite the promise of fairy-tale weddings, marriage was work. But she’d gotten very lucky with her coworker.

“Oh,” she said, giddy. “I can’t wait for you to meet Claire!” Introducing two people who were both grade A excellent was one of life’s great joys.

Yup, he was totally cheating on Gwen. He reminded her of Marcus from Vagabond, actually—that same kind of golden-boy gleam that came from a high success rate of getting women into bed.

Why was there no fucking TrueDaddy? The answer was clear. Because men wouldn’t fall for it. Not that they were smarter—Amara firmly believed she could trounce the average man in a battle of wits—but because they weren’t primed from birth like women were, told that they could be anything they wanted to be while handicapped at every turn by invisible forces, told that they were more than just their looks while also culturally programmed to believe that their value was tied to their desirability.

Men aged into silver foxes while women aged into obsolescence. And when you added in children, oh, that was when everything really went to shit. Because even though fathers stamped children with their last names, the world didn’t ask as much of them. No one really expected fathers to consider giving up their careers to put their children first, to stop managing a company and start managing a household. Women had to grapple with a choice that men never did while remaining uncomplaining and generous so that they didn’t nag their husbands straight into the arms of less complicated lovers.

Every one of them was living through a moment of radical personal change when they were no longer the stars of their own lives, when they were shaken by a depth of worry they’d never before experienced. They knew they were supposed to shoulder their transformation uncomplainingly and selflessly, like “good” mothers, while also maintaining the body weight and grooming habits of a Disney Channel ingenue. It made a lot of them a little crazy, and it made some of them a lot crazy.