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

by Meaghan O'Connell

  “You know,” Dustin said on one endless morning, “you don’t have to do it. You can stop any time.”

  “Ha!” I said. I wasn’t sure whether to laugh out loud or cry.

  “We’d just give him formula. It would be totally fine. I would be fine with it.”

  “You have to say that.”

  “But I mean it!”

  I knew I could quit any time, even though it didn’t feel like that. Not when the Dr. Sears baby manual we had sitting on our coffee table said that breastfeeding on demand was “laying a solid foundation for the person your child would later become.” No, I couldn’t quit. Not when I had come this far, worked this hard. Maybe something will happen, I thought, a secret hope. Maybe something will happen and my milk will disappear.

  I hated being so on the hook, and I hated that I hated it. To think of myself as genuinely limited, actually held back by breastfeeding, made me feel like a meta-failure. Considering that breastfeeding was something only I could do for the baby, something I couldn’t get a break from without suffering the consequences, it stands to reason that I felt overwhelmed and resentful, but I can see that only now, on the other side of it. At the time, I feared that complaining or admitting how I really felt would make me sound like some unmaternal brat who couldn’t submit. Shouldn’t I be grateful my body could do it in the first place? All of the books and websites and doctors and nurses and yoga teachers and childbirth instructors insisted that breastfeeding my child for at least a year if not longer was unquestionably worthwhile, and not just for the baby. It was supposed to be its own reward.

  Breastfeeding was cheap, always available, and totally portable, argued one of the internet lactation consultants. “Don’t give up on one of the most incredible experiences of your life just because you have trouble at first learning a new skill. Give up, and you’ll wonder and regret. Persist, and you’ll know and be rewarded.”

  I should have known to be suspicious of the supposed inherent reward of unpaid labor that can be carried out exclusively by the female body (breastfeeding: an unpaid internship you don’t get to put on your résumé), but I kept hoping it would come true. Natural childbirth was another supposed “incredible experience,” but I had fucked that one up already so there was no way I would give up on breastfeeding (wonder! regret!). I kept waiting for the reward.

  I could feel hints of it occasionally, something ancient and primal, an alchemy in the middle of the night. I felt mammalian, like a cavewoman who’d found her life’s purpose. I love you; you need me; I feed you. It was my shortcut to maternal authority, and for that I was grateful.

  The baby up against your body, tugging at you, both of you quiet and still and looking into each other’s eyes—it was clear that this intimacy was what we were all trying to get back to. The pleasure and the revelation was fleeting, though. It came on in flashes of contentment and then drifted away when the rest of my life rushed in. The whole world expects you to do it but it’s not like it waits for you. People don’t accommodate you. They don’t even know where to look when you do it.

  That whole year I spent as a breastfeeder, I was still myself. I still had ambitions, desires. I was always doing math with the hours, testing the limits of time, trying to see how much living I could get away with. I still had to earn money. I still had to stay sane. Even when it got easier, when the feeds spaced out to every four hours and lasted only five or ten minutes, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was doing something that had been oversold to me, something that was both more difficult and less important than all the books and websites and articles suggested. They had undervalued my time and my sanity. Or was it that they’d overestimated it? I couldn’t figure out whether motherhood was showing me how strong I was or how weak. And which one was preferable.

  In any case, I did my duty, which was sometimes lovely but more often not. Breastfeeding was not the most incredible experience of my life, and my baby is still mortal. He still gets sick. I went to great lengths to do it, for reasons I can no longer relate to. Or none other than this: I so desperately wanted to do the right thing, and I had no idea what that was yet.

  Slacker Parent

  It was when we were in that particularly trying window of the first year of parenthood, when the baby was between, say, three and six months old and we expected to be more or less functional and reintegrated back into polite society but were in fact still completely exhausted and adrift, that I developed a theory: Just like there’s always someone in a relationship who loves the other person more, there is always one person who is the better parent. By better, I mean more enthusiastic, more willing to get down on the rug and play with the blocks, more at home with a baby on his or her hip. I mean that there is one parent who asks the pediatrician questions and argues about sleep training, and there is one who sits there smiling and feeling a little embarrassed.

  Do I even need to say it? Dustin was the natural.

  Nearly every time we were around other people they confirmed this dynamic, the women whispering to me about what a great dad he was in this very conspiratorial, female way. Relatives would pat my knee or bump my shoulder with theirs: “Wow, he’s so good with him.” “He’s so engaged.” They’d beam approvingly at Dustin’s airplane sounds as he zoomed the baby overhead on the way to the changing table.

  I would nod and plaster a smile on my face and say, “I knowwww,” trying to make my voice go higher so I wouldn’t sound bitter. I was grateful, even if he did make me look bad in comparison. And even if no one batted an eye when I changed a diaper or commented on how “engaged” I was with my child.

  Our roles were established in the earliest days. It made sense then, when I was a prisoner to the baby. My body had carried him and birthed him and now sustained him. It stood to reason, I figured, that Dustin would do everything else. And that’s how it was. The baby was drinking from my body more often than not, and I, recovering from a C-section, couldn’t walk very far or move very quickly, so Dustin flitted about the apartment, compensating for his maleness. Bath time, bedtime, dinnertime, diapers.

  It wasn’t just chores either. From the beginning Dustin had seemingly endless enthusiasm for lying down on the floor and making animal noises. He was never self-conscious about talking to someone who didn’t talk back, like I was (and am). He bought records and danced around the house with our son, and when the baby was fussy he would read to him from books of poetry, Greek myths, and Thomas Hardy novels. I’d stomp through the room rolling my eyes.

  Dustin and I used to agree about everything. I used to feel like he saw me and knew me better than anyone. But now that we had a child together, I worried we actually didn’t know each other at all. We felt less like a couple than like co-workers, in service to the same human project.

  Dustin seemed to have something against the stroller, insisting on carrying the baby everywhere himself. “It’s not a big deal,” he would say, “I like it.” When the baby started eating solid foods, Dustin threw himself into steaming apples and carrots and pureeing everything by hand. He fed the baby from a hand-carved wooden bowl that he wanted us to use for every meal and expressed vague disapproval of the baby-food pouches I’d buy at the grocery store. As in “I hate those fucking things.”

  He was gung-ho about cloth-diapering. “I’m not going to stand over the toilet and scrape shit into it with a wooden spoon anymore!” I declared to the house one morning.

  “That’s fine,” he said. “But I think I’m going to keep doing it.”

  I was baffled. Who was this person swimming laps around me while I was treading water, feeling like I might drown? And how could I tell him how I felt—how could I trust he’d understand?

  I couldn’t compete, or didn’t want to. I decided if Dustin was going to be obsessed with fatherhood, I would be obsessed with work. We defined ourselves against each other—or I did—like siblings. The amazing father, the good-enough mother. The one who does everything and the one who sits stewing on the couch and lets the bab
y play with her iPhone (another thing he did not approve of).

  On good days I embraced our dynamic, considering it a sort of generational comeuppance. We were both subverting gendered expectations. Think of all the women before me who did everything themselves. Think of all the women now who do everything themselves. (Think of the fathers who did nothing; think of the fathers who do nothing.) I deserved to slack off on behalf of those women.

  On bad days I wondered what Dustin was trying to prove. On really bad days I took his efforts as criticism, like he was rubbing it in my face: Look at everything you don’t do. Sometimes I was just so tired, and so angry. Doesn’t he see I was just about to vacuum? Doesn’t he see that it doesn’t matter if we vacuum? Doesn’t he think, like I do, that we deserve a reprieve?

  I used It’s okay, we have a baby as an excuse for everything. But then Dustin would come in and start wiping the countertops, not looking at me. A rebuke.

  He became my superego, a stand-in for the critical voice in my head.

  When Anna, an old friend who knew us both well, came to town, she and I hung back on an afternoon walk. She gestured toward Dustin in front of us, carrying the baby on his shoulder, marching and singing.

  “Did you see this coming?”

  “Yeah. Actually, I did,” I told her. Of course I’d seen it coming. Did she think I was a fool? What I hadn’t seen coming was me. I’d thought I’d be the same. I thought we’d be equals. What surprised me was my embrace of disposable diapers, my feeling that ease and convenience was now a feminist issue. Doing things the hard way used to be fun, used to be our thing—bake a cake from scratch, bike instead of taking a cab, grow vegetables in the backyard, make zines for everyone for Christmas. But that was when we had ample leisure time and existential angst. Now we were just trying to get through the day.

  “What is it about Dustin? Is it just his personality?”

  I sighed. I did love him. “I think so. Remember when we had mice in our apartment and he rigged up that elaborate system with the bucket and the two-by-four…”

  “Yes! It’s the Midwestern part of him,” Anna said. Anna was raised in New York.

  “Exactly,” I said, knowing what she meant. Midwestern conveyed something like “He takes out the trash” and “If the sink is leaking, he will get down there with a flashlight.” He always bought toilet paper and milk before we ran out. When we bought a dresser at a stoop sale, he said we should just paint it if we didn’t like the color. He was an Eagle Scout. He rode a bike everywhere and carried it up the stairs to our apartment, and that reassured me in some deep-down, probably sexist, taken-care-of way. That sort of thing.

  I realized as I talked about him that I was the opposite. That I’d never baked cakes before I met him, that in fact I had made it a point not to learn how to cook. Maybe under the stress of new parenthood, whatever adult personality I’d concocted was being stripped for parts, and I would be left with only my teenage core. It was like the opposite of our early courtship, when I was on all the time and vigilantly trying to be my best self, to be charming and laid back, someone worthy of his affection.

  Anna turned to me. “Do you love him even more now?”

  “No!” I said without thinking. Anna didn’t say anything and I worried I was disappointing her. I knew what the answer should have been: Seeing him with our child makes me love him more than I ever thought possible. I knew I was—we were—so lucky, but when I watched them together, I felt more relieved than grateful. It made me want to slip away, go do something I was good at.

  He was the good dad. I was just the default mom. “I mean, equality is great and all in theory,” I told Anna, “but it just means we have to discuss everything. No one’s the authority. He has a temperature. What should we do? Should we give him Tylenol? Call the pediatrician? Who’s gonna call? Then he second-guesses me. As if I don’t do that enough on my own. I think with other people, the mom just pretends to know, and the dad gets to play the idiot in the background.”

  “But you wouldn’t want it that way, would you?”

  I wouldn’t, it was true. But it would be nice to be the one who knew. The expert. The mom.

  I didn’t want to tell Anna about the fantasy I entertained on days when I got really annoyed (when I was convinced, say, that Dustin was sweeping the floor only to make me feel bad): that if he weren’t there, I would rise to the occasion. I’d have to. I’d get a real job and put the baby in day care. Let him cry it out at night. Give him the pouches of baby food Dustin hates without anyone there to judge me.

  I’d do it alone and get all the credit. And not feel like a child, grumbling and tired and weak, needing to be taken care of—parented. Motherhood made me so vulnerable. He had taken care of me and the baby like I knew he would. Of course he had. But part of me felt like I’d never catch up.

  Anna and I climbed the steps back into our house; it was time to feed the baby. Dustin may have been the good parent, but I was still the mother. For better or worse, I had the breasts and the uterus and the mom-smell, and when Anna and I sat down on the couch, my child practically leaped out of Dustin’s arms and into mine. Dustin’s competence made me feel insecure but I knew that no matter what I did, the baby would still be obsessed with me, his food source. As long as I was breastfeeding, we were best friends, joined at the tit, never away from each other for more than a few hours. When the baby looked up at me from the changing table, I could swear he saw into my soul. No judging, no preconceived notions, no assumptions, just seeing, and loving, and there. It was so intimate I could barely stand to stare back.

  We all took off our shoes, and the baby and I settled into the couch. Anna sat on the living-room floor across from us, taking in the scene from below. “You’re a mom!” she said, like it was still surreal.

  I laughed and turned a little red, still unused to the word. Maybe that was part of my problem. Dustin had embraced fatherhood but I couldn’t bring myself to say mama out loud, not until my son did. It was embarrassing; it felt goofy or fake. Who wanted to be a mother, anyway? Mom called to mind a relationship with someone, not an individual. A mom was your servant. A mom picked up the wrong thing at the supermarket. A mom needed to stop and get stamps on the way home from soccer practice and you hated her for it. A mom wore a white, collared shirt and stood at the kitchen island selling cereal in television commercials. Moms clustered on benches in the playground pulling snacks out of their bags. They took up the whole sidewalk with their goddamn strollers. Moms nagged. Moms were stressed out. I knew it was all internalized misogyny and guilt and bad public policy but I still couldn’t really get around it. There was no mother I wanted to be. I wanted to be myself, but better. I wanted to be the type of person who woke up before the baby and went for a run. This was what my mother did with us. To me, this was what a mother was: someone who was one step ahead of everyone, who had her finger on the pulse of the household, who came in with groceries just when you wondered where she was.

  This was exactly what I wasn’t.

  “So, have you met any other moms?” Anna asked me, gently prodding. “Joined some kind of group?”

  “No,” I admitted. “I mean, not really.” I had figured that eventually I’d get over myself and make all kinds of mom friends naturally. They would be real people, not stereotypes. A mom and I would share a look at the playground and I’d compliment her on her tattoo and make a joke and then soon enough we’d be sipping tea in her kitchen. We’d take turns consoling and complimenting each other in equal measure. Our babies, of course, would be napping in the next room.

  But that hadn’t happened yet, and so what? I already had friends. Real friends, ones who got my jokes and who I didn’t have enough time for as it was. Friends like Anna, people who were watching with interest while I lived out this strange experiment.

  “Don’t you think it would be helpful? You know, to have someone to talk to who gets it?”

  “Ugh. Probably,” I conceded just as Dustin rushed in to grab the baby,
who had fallen asleep in my arms mid–nursing session. He carried him on one forearm, swaying a little as he climbed the stairs to lay his little body in the crib. We could hear him humming “Baby Beluga” from upstairs. Anna’s eyes got big and she pointed up at the ceiling like Who is this guy? I shrugged and tucked my legs under me on the couch, trying not to seem impressed.

  The next morning Anna and her boyfriend flew back to San Francisco, and I spotted a woman from prenatal yoga at our neighborhood coffee shop. I was surprised at how happy I was to see her; I felt like I’d just run into a crush at the mall. Somehow, unlike me, she looked just as beautiful as she had the last time I’d seen her, when we stood on a street corner after yoga class and confessed to each other how scared we were about childbirth. I had promised to send her an e-mail once the baby came, but I never did.

  “Are you going to story time at the library today?” she asked me. She was about a foot taller than me and had big brown eyes; she looked formidable but kind as she navigated her stroller around the crowd of people waiting for their drinks.

  “Oh, I dunno,” I said. “Dustin’s taken the baby but I’ve never been. I’ve seen the moms going in when I’m there trying to get work done, but it seemed really intimidating!”

  She laughed at me. “It’s just nice to get out of the house, you know?” she said. “It’s something to do.”

  I texted Dustin my new plan and, surprising myself, went home to grab the baby. Here I am, I thought, turning over a new leaf. I’m open, receptive. Maybe next I’ll start exercising.

  I recognized some of the moms from yoga and my childbirth classes, and the ones I didn’t sized me up, and I them. I mouthed Hi and, flushed, pulled a chair up to a distinct group of women with babies my son’s age. They seemed to know one another well; they must have been coming to story time for weeks. They scooted their chairs closer—begrudgingly, I felt—making room for me. I hated all of them immediately. The singing had already started so I unclipped the carrier and bounced my infant on my lap and wondered if I should do the gestures for “The Wheels on the Bus.” Should I stomp his feet for “If You’re Happy and You Know It” or should I stomp my own?