Happy and You Know It

by Laura Hankin

At times like these, Claire thought that maybe God did exist, not as some benevolent being or terrifying father, but as the omniscient equivalent of a prank show host. An Ashton Kutcher kind of God.

The Internet goes wild for beautiful young moms who make all the regular moms feel hopeful. Whitney is an achievable unicorn to them, like if they just drink enough kale smoothies and meditate for ten minutes a day, they’ll wake up in her perfect life,”

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.

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.

Introducing two people who were both grade A excellent was one of life’s great joys.

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. And now moms weren’t even allowed to acknowledge how much work it all was anymore. Modern women of privilege had to claim that their manic exercise routines were about strength, not a body ideal; that their beauty regimens were all natural, designed for emotional balance and skin health, rather than for looking nubile for as long as possible.

There was another reason she didn’t want to tell him. She’d fallen in love with him for so many reasons, but chief among them was how much he respected her. He trusted her judgment. He came to her with quandaries and asked for her advice. He’d never been one of those men who’d run from her ambition, from her forceful opinions, even though plenty of other guys had. Where past boyfriends had tried to diminish her, Daniel had stood right by her side, holding a microphone to her mouth.

She’d been a bad mother. And that, it seemed, was the worst thing a woman could possibly be. A prostitute who moonlighted as a contract killer could be redeemed if she was doing it all so that she could tuck her child into a warm bed every night. But a woman could be charming, immensely intelligent, ambitious, strong, and head-turningly gorgeous, and if she screwed up her parenting, the world deemed her a piece of shit.