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The most narcissistic rock star on the planet was no match for the average six-month-old.
(But she did love him, despite it all, with a steady ache. She’d journeyed through the terrifying, alien wonders of pregnancy and discovered a new sun, even if sometimes she wished she could leave Charlie on a church doorstep and take off for South America.)
She was thirty-two and married, for Christ’s sake, to a wonderful guy who’d been aching to be a father since, probably, the moment he’d popped out of his own mother. (He even told dad jokes and wore flannel pajama pants and developed strange, passionate interests in hobbies like watercolors and woodworking that flamed out after six months or so. Prime dad material.)
She was never alone. She was so lonely.
You could plan to go to a coffee shop because you wanted to spend one measly half hour sitting someplace outside your apartment, you could take a whole morning getting your baby ready and talking to him in soothing tones, and you could navigate the stroller down the streets, spend your money, find your table, and unload, your aching body collapsing onto the chair. But if, right as the first bite of flaky pastry began to melt in your mouth, your baby decided to start crying, suddenly you were an inconsiderate asshole and a terrible mother to boot, and you’d better leave right away.
Was there any worse sound than your child wailing your name?
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
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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.
As she listened to it beat, she became aware too of her own mortality in a way that she’d never been before. There was so much danger in the outside world, within her own body. An accidental overdose, a car crash, a sudden malfunction of her cells could whisk her away from Charlie in a flash, leaving him wounded for the rest of his life, one of those motherless children who was always searching for something he’d never be able to have.
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.
Maybe, over the course of even the best marriages, you acquired a collection of secrets that you walled off in a little section of your heart where your partner would never be allowed to go. And you did everything you could to keep the walled-off section small, to keep the secrets from slipping out of it and pervading all that was good and open and free in the rest of your heart, and you just made it work.
