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

by Meaghan O'Connell

  “What about Arthur? I kinda like that. I don’t know any Arthurs.”

  “Oh, actually, a friend of mine was going to name her baby that.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yes. But she didn’t because her husband pointed out that everyone would call him Farty Artie.”

  31.

  A woman at the farmers’ market says, “Are you…pregnant?” with hesitation and it upsets me.

  “What else would I be?” I say to her. Her uncertainty is confirmation: I am fat everywhere, not just in my sacred belly. To console myself I eat a pint of fancy gelato every single night. Pregnancy makes me feel trapped sometimes, but other times I think, You’ll never be this free again.

  32.

  I want to write something meaningful before the baby comes. A novel, preferably. Though I have no ideas and have so far made no moves toward the goal, I’m convinced that if I can just get in deep with a big, ambitious project now, I’ll be able to relax and enjoy myself later, when the baby is here. I try explaining this to friends on the train home from dinner, though it’s clear I’m making the case more to myself than to them. “Something I can pick up later, in short bursts, you know? So that I won’t feel so lost.”

  “That makes sense!” Lindsay says, nodding with encouragement.

  “Though who knows what I’ll have time for—”

  Lindsay looks down at me from her grip on the subway pole. “Babies sleep all the time anyway, don’t they?” she says. “I’m sure it will be easy enough to get writing done.”

  I turn away from her, full of dread but not wanting to explain myself. The time after the baby feels like an oblivion, like anything could happen. I don’t even know who I will be after him. Then the creeping revelation: If I let him, my son will be the reason I don’t do all sorts of things. I’m starting it already.

  33.

  On a weekday afternoon I walk down the block to the library to work and see a boy who must be ten or eleven dancing alone on the sidewalk outside an apartment building. His pants are pulled up high, his ankles showing. He can’t see me coming but I’m not sure he’d care if he did. He twists his body in jerky, strange, wondrous movements. He looks incredibly free, incredibly happy, in his own world. I stop short and then start crying, surprising myself.

  I know I will love my son, that somehow I already do, but I haven’t been able to imagine what it will be like, how I will love him. I haven’t pictured him yet, my funny boy.

  34.

  My friend Meredith and I haven’t seen each other in a long time; for years we’ve been swearing we’ll hang out soon but never do. She has a new baby, and now that we have something in common I find myself on the PATH train to visit her in Hoboken so she can give me advice while she breastfeeds.

  I sit on the carpet and listen eagerly to every detail of her victoriously unmedicated labor. She seems happy and open and makes me take a box of her leftover raspberry leaf tea, which she says will strengthen my uterus. She instructs me to buy an exercise ball and sit on it for a few hours every day to help relax my pelvic floor and hands me a copy of something called Hypnobabies, a series of guided meditations on CD. They are meant to hypnotize you into thinking that labor doesn’t hurt. Contractions are “surges” and laboring women are strong, capable, relaxed. She tells me it all went out the window once labor started but it was helpful beforehand. Empowering.

  I leave her apartment feeling grateful and equipped. It feels so good to have a to-do list.

  35.

  When I get home I open up my laptop to work but instead search natural childbirth on YouTube. I hide my face and muffle screams while I watch perineum after perineum stretch to its limits, tiny squashed skulls pushing through and then receding, the husbands just out of frame. The women are moaning and groaning on birthing stools or down on all fours. As the camera zooms in on a slime-covered head coming out of what no longer looks like a vagina, you can hear the midwife lovingly direct the laboring woman: “Catch your baby! Reach down and catch your baby!” Can’t someone else catch the damn baby for her? I think, but the woman looks down and pulls it, slimy and wet, up to her chest, laughing in disbelief. I cry every time. I laugh too. It’s incredible. I wish it weren’t going to happen to me, but still. How can you argue with it?

  When I stand up from our bed to go to the bathroom that night, Dustin’s eyes get wide and he points to my right tit.

  I look down to find my white maternity tank top glued to my nipple, a yellow stain where some kind of liquid—colostrum—has oozed out.

  “It must have happened when the babies were crying in the videos!” Dustin says, excited. I flee to the bathroom, feeling like a boy who has been caught masturbating.

  In the solitary kingdom of our tiny bathroom, I feel queasy but powerful. I hunch over my own body and squint into a mirror the same way I did twenty years ago, on the edge of puberty. Now here I am again. The orchestra of my body has been warming up and I didn’t even know it.

  36.

  Our first childbirth class starts when I am thirty-six weeks pregnant. The teacher opens class by asking us to go around the room and share what we are most afraid of. I make a joke about my mother coming to stay with us but what I’m really thinking about are the bones of the baby’s head being squeezed together, the way I’d seen it in the YouTube videos, the plates of his skull overlapping, forming a sickening cone. I’m thinking about my body tearing open to accommodate his in ways I wouldn’t be able to see or stop from happening.

  I know that to be afraid of birth, to doubt your body’s ability to do this “most natural thing in the world,” is, according to all of the media I am consuming, a sort of sin. I know this and yet I am still unspeakably afraid. I feel like a small animal. A woman. A failure already.

  37.

  Dustin has a chart about pain medication he found in his Birth Partner book and he tries to go over it with me, but I shut down without meaning to. “Not right now!” I say, and then I start crying. My self-doubt is a failure in and of itself, I know. I try to shake it off. I try listening to the Hypnobabies but find myself unable to turn off the critical part of my brain and really get into it. “Your energy and thoughts about childbirth are now positive and healthy at all times,” the woman says in a throaty monotone.

  A willing suspension of disbelief seems to be required. As much as I want to believe, as much as I would rather be foolish than scared, I find I can’t quite summon it. Every time someone says, “Your body is meant to do this,” I think of all the women who used to die in childbirth. All the women who still do.

  38.

  For childbirth class number two (of four), we do an experiment. Our teacher, a chipper blond woman who has never had a baby, passes around little cups of ice to all of us and then takes her place in front of the room. She announces that we’ll be practicing pain management today by holding a piece of ice in our hands—squeezing it—for sixty seconds, about the length of a contraction. We’re all joking and a little excited to do the activity. Finally something practical, something to help us feel accomplished, prepared.

  Oh, shit, I think as soon as it starts. I want to drop the ice or throw it. Cheating, I move it to different parts of my hand. We have to keep our eyes closed, which only makes it worse. Who knew ice could hurt so much? We are alone with our pain.

  After sixty seconds are up, the teacher asks us how it went. Awful, I think. “Did it feel longer than sixty seconds?” she asks.

  “Yes!” I shout to what seems like a leading question, but the people around me, liars all, shake their heads. The teacher asks for more feedback, and one of the dads raises his hand.

  “Well, it was like I was aware of the pain but it didn’t bother me. I acknowledged it and just sat with it. Time went by quickly.”

  Fuck you, I think.

  Another guy takes the floor. “I did this thing where I listened to the ticking of the clock without counting the seconds. I just embraced the passage of time. It felt really fast.”


  I laugh out loud at this; I can’t help it.

  “Wow,” our teacher says, “very nice.” She’s clearly impressed.

  I search the room in vain for someone to make eye contact with, someone to share a knowing eye-roll with. The women, of course, stay quiet. We are already moving inward, already slipping. This is only a peek at the task that lies ahead of us.

  I’ve spent the past eight months trying to think about pain, searching my memory for something to compare it to and coming up short. Menstrual cramps are a popular analog, but to me they seem defined by their dullness. I’ve never had surgery, can’t remember the last time I skinned my knee. When was the last time something really, really hurt, anyway? In all my grasping, I haven’t been able to imagine it.

  The ice, though—it does the job.

  39.

  A week after class ends we get an e-mail from our childbirth instructor that’s full of exercises and visualizations to try at home: Our pelvic bones opening. The vagina as a flower, also opening. Waves rising and falling as we breathe. She sends us an illustrated pdf of birthing positions and a link to cesarean rates at New York hospitals. These statistics are treated like a warning, a disturbing trend that is up to us to resist. Getting a C-section has become a sort of moral failure in my eyes. I haven’t read much of anything about preparing for or recovering from one, convinced that I don’t need to know. Ignoring the possibility entirely feels like a way to keep it from happening.

  The instructor encourages us to keep practicing with the ice, adding a numbered list of exercises to try.

  8: Instead of actively trying to push away the sensation, we make friends with our pain. We get to know it better, get less tense and thus feel less pain. Be utterly curious about it…notice how it changes from moment to moment, notice exactly where it’s located, where it begins and ends, try to look into the pain and see what it looks like…imagine you’re seeing the feeling under a magnifying glass and slowly studying the edges of the pain…does the feeling have any colors or textures?

  40.

  When I go for my final prenatal appointment, a week overdue, my doctor writes Sex on a prescription pad and hands it to me with a smile. My cervix is “high and tight,” she says. Not good right now.

  Before I leave, she asks me what we’re going to name our son, and I confess to her that we still don’t know.

  “Waiting to see his face, huh?”

  “Yes!” That seems as good a line as any. We’ll see the baby’s face and be changed by him; we’ll feel the conviction we’ve been waiting for all along. We’ll be transformed into people who have convictions. Parents.

  41.

  I don’t do the unthinkable (sex) but I do consider asking Dustin to jerk off into my vagina. This is scientifically sound.

  41.5.

  When the baby is nine days overdue, and I am forty-one and a half weeks pregnant, it occurs to me that my fear is what is holding him in. Ina May Gaskin, the legendary midwife and author and subject of documentaries I’ve hungrily consumed, would say that the fear is a “block.” If she were here, she’d give me a stern talking-to and send me off to walk in the woods, so Dustin and I go for a hike around the neighborhood. Dustin takes a million pictures. Things feel big. We are two people in love about to have a baby, and we’re shuffling down the street arm in arm. I feel tired, sore, claustrophobic. I’m uncomfortable in my own skin, afraid of what’s to come. To the untrained eye, though, I am glowing.

  A Birth Story

  It was Monday, June 2, and I was wide awake at six a.m. Maybe to most people—certainly to most parents—this hour doesn’t sound remarkable, but for me it was. It was the first day in a lifetime of six-in-the-mornings.

  By this point, I was ten days past my due date and I had a very specific and recurring fantasy of being moved around town in a hammock flown by a helicopter. I wanted to be airlifted between boroughs.

  When I told Dustin this wish, he was quiet for a second. He had learned to reply with caution, but I imagine in this case he just couldn’t help himself.

  “Like a whale?” he asked.

  I had been waking up “still pregnant” for quite some time—289 days, to be exact. My mom was in town, staying at an Airbnb rental a block away. I was chugging raspberry leaf tea, bouncing on a purple exercise ball whenever I could, shoving evening primrose oil pills up my vagina, paying forty dollars a pop for community acupuncture sessions I didn’t believe in, and doing something called “the Labor Dance.” The Dance (preferred shorthand) involves rubbing one’s belly vigorously in a clockwise direction and then getting as close to twerking as one can at forty-one weeks pregnant.

  Now I was wide awake and staring at the wall. Then ow. It was like the crest of a period cramp if you have forgotten to take Tylenol. I lay there with my mind racing for a while, then got up and ate Frosted Mini-Wheats, the way I had done for much of my pregnancy. Dustin was sleeping. I felt another one. Another “thing.” Ow. I got in the shower, jittery with this new development. Ow-ow-ow. I grabbed the towel rack and wondered how many more showers I’d take that day. In all of my natural childbirth classes, everyone raved about the magic of hot showers. I suspected, or feared, that their analgesic powers were not as advertised. Ow.

  I got back into bed and lay there, naked and huge, staring at Dustin sleeping, waiting for him to wake up. I didn’t want to look at the clock, but I looked at the clock, and the ows were fifteen minutes or so apart. “Ow, ow, ow,” I whispered into my arm. So far the pain was about as bad as a stubbed toe. It was a Damn! pain, but it was still amusing. I was proud of it, too, of my body. It had finally kicked itself into gear.

  I was also a little excited because I didn’t feel like working that day or going to another doctor appointment at the hospital, forty minutes away. The appointments were for overdue women. You sat in a roomful of armchairs upholstered in cornflower-blue material that could be wiped down with a washcloth and you pulled up your shirt to reveal your belly, and the nurse lubed you up and strapped a monitor to you and you sat with the other women whose bodies were stalling and a chorus of fetal heart tones sang out in the room like horses galloping.

  Today, though, I was done with all of it.

  When Dustin finally woke up, I lay there for a while without saying anything, waiting for the next ow-ow-ow.

  “Is this it?” he asked me.

  My mom came over. “Stuff’s…happening,” I told her. She got excited; I told her not to. She ignored me. I covered my face with my hands. I flashed back to me walking in on her in the bathroom in 1995 and asking her for a maxi-pad. She had tried to give me a tampon. I shook my head and ran out.

  The three of us went for a walk to get things moving. I should be walking was all I could think. I drank half an iced coffee and stopped and bent all the way over on street corners. We made it to a park that was just filling up with small children and their mothers, who eyed me suspiciously; I was about to be one of them. I side-eyed them back and then muffled my shouts into Dustin’s shirtsleeve. I was improvising escapes from this new pain. I kneaded the flesh of his arms, pulled on his belt loops, yanked at all of his pockets, grabbed him by the hips, then sipped iced coffee and trudged forward in the sun. The pain was now a much sharper, sustained toe-stubbing, like your body being twisted and wrung out from the inside. But temporary! You just had to ride it out. It was almost fun at this point—a personal challenge. “You’re going to stub your toe very, very hard every ten minutes for the next few hours, but then you’ll have a baby!” That seemed okay—doable.

  “Annnnd here we go!” I’d say, then shove my iced coffee into my mom’s hands and slam my head into Dustin. I did my breathing, dutifully, skillfully, and I moved around rhythmically, like a belly dancer or a mentally disturbed person. Then the contraction would end and I’d float out above my body and marvel that this was really happening. I’d take back my iced coffee, laugh a little embarrassed laugh, like, Whew, how ’bout that? Then as soon as I caught my breath and shook off the
pain, I would get yanked back in, like a gust of wind through a subway tunnel, and reconvene with the bodily me, who was having her organs tightened with a belt made of barbed wire.

  Knowing this was “normal” was the only thing keeping me from screaming, from calling an ambulance, from preparing for death. I was doing battle, or having battle be done unto me, every seven minutes now.

  Back at the apartment, we moved from room to room. I ate piece after piece of watermelon, buried my face in pillows, leaned over tables and countertops, carried my big purple yoga ball around the house and rolled all over it. I thought about how this was almost pornographic, my ass in the air, me moaning.

  I wore my blue-and-white-striped maternity dress, crew socks, and purple Crocs.

  I labored in a dress? I labored in a dress.

  At some point, the contractions were three minutes apart. Then five. Then three. It was now six p.m. Dustin phoned the on-call OB and then hung up and said he’d call a car. That’s when the contractions stopped.

  I stood up from being bent over the butcher block and looked at the timer on my phone, bereft. Ten minutes. Then seven. Then ten. Then twelve. Then fifteen. I panicked. We walked. Ten minutes. Twelve minutes. Twenty minutes! Soon it was late. I argued with Dustin over how long a normal labor was, listing friends whose labors were six hours or eight hours. “That’s not normal!” he said. “Yes, it is!” I snapped back. I searched frantically for a worksheet from my yoga teacher about average early-labor durations and couldn’t find it. I grabbed my phone and Googled it, which was the way I always tried to win an argument. I spent whole hours wishing my mom would go home and go to sleep, but I was unable to communicate this. She did, finally, and I felt such gratitude. Like maybe now it would work. Maybe she was a psychic block.