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

by Meaghan O'Connell

  “I saved my baby’s life,” she wrote. “I’m sure of it.” She was clearly still shaken, as was everyone else reading about it on the forum, up all night with their own inscrutable infants. “I don’t even want to think what would have happened if I hadn’t run over to him,” she said. People wrote, Thank God, and said they’d hug their babies closer that night. (But not too close.) The image of the baby, shaken awake, taking in a huge gasp of air, played on a loop in my head, though even at the time I didn’t really believe she’d saved her baby’s life. Sleep apnea, I argued, trying to reassure myself, or maybe he was simply between breaths. What really plagued me was the decisive, intuitive action of the mother, who’d put down her paper plate of potato salad or corn on the cob or whatever it was to go running over to her son.

  It was that gut feeling, the same one that would send me, a little quicker than necessary, over to peer into the baby’s bassinet. What if, when it came down to it, I didn’t get the feeling? Or what if I had to stop listening to the feeling because it kept overfiring, and then, as soon as I stopped, as soon as I relaxed, the bad thing happened? What if my gut feelings—Something bad has happened!—were simply anxiety, simply hormones, simply the result of too many tragic stories I had tried to hold in my brain and live through, as if an act of radical empathy could spare me, render me immortal? What if I couldn’t be trusted? What’s neurosis and what’s maternal instinct?

  I knew, though, that if I listened to every bad feeling, it would take over my mind. I’d never do anything else. I would be pulling the car over every time I called out to him and he, an infant who couldn’t say words yet, didn’t answer. You’re being ridiculous, I would tell myself. He’s fine. I’d keep driving, then think, But what if he is dead? And then for the rest of my life I’d think about how I sat there with my gut feeling and ignored it.

  And so I would try to watch myself as if from a distance. I would observe the panic rising up in me when, say, the light shifted and the baby’s face looked a disturbing shade of gray. Was he smiling at me but secretly suffocating? Would I know it if I saw it? I can still feel it in my neck, adrenaline shooting out from wherever, tension rising up my neck, a jolt of dread in my solar plexus, and a ringing in my ears before I snatched him up in my arms and held him under a different light and then caught my breath, happy to know it was just me, just my awful brain.

  When the baby started crawling, I was afraid he’d fall down the stairs. When he started walking, that he’d wander into traffic. For a while I was convinced he would fall off the porch, go rolling down the cement front steps and onto the sidewalk and then into the road just as a car came flying down the street. I imagined boiling pasta water spilling onto his face, a knife falling from the counter and landing in some unspeakably unlucky area of his tiny body. I saw neck-breaking falls from playground equipment, even when Dustin had taken him and I was at home unloading the dishwasher. I saw all these scenarios in vivid flashes, as if they were in a movie. I’d try to shake them out of my head. I’d squeeze my eyes shut sometimes. My breath would catch.

  Dustin maintained that I was crazy, but on the rare nights we went on dates that first year, I’d see he was a little crazy too. We only ever went out when a family member was in town, when we had no real excuse not to. We knew it was a good idea to go. To “reconnect.” Then we’d both sit there at the restaurant, checking our phones throughout dinner.

  “He’s probably not dead, right?” he’d ask.

  “Nah,” I’d say, happy to play the chill parent for once. “She would have called if he died.” Dustin would nod and try to change the subject but I’d stare off into space, panic growing. I imagined the baby dying at that very moment and us thinking about the irony of our conversation for the rest of our lives.

  “Well, I’ll just text and check in,” I’d say, hiding my phone under the table, blushing from the wine.

  After we came home from dinner one such night—the restaurant was just around the corner, within running distance, just in case—I chatted with Dustin’s sister, Piper, while Dustin walked into our living room, where the baby was asleep in the crib. I wanted desperately to rush over to him, just to look at him, to visually confirm he had survived the hour without us. But like so many other times, in the interest of appearing sane, I fought my urge. I rinsed out a bottle of breast milk, asked Piper how she’d been, trying to act cool. Dustin came back into the kitchen. “How is he?” I asked.

  “He’s alive,” Dustin said, putting his arm around me, knowing that was my real question. I couldn’t take it anymore and slipped out from under his arm and rushed to go check on the baby, fearing the word alive was tempting fate. “You’re not going to like what you see!” Dustin called after me.

  I leaned over the crib and gasped. The baby was lying facedown, his arms by his sides, looking like a corpse. He was breathing, not to mention sound asleep, but I grabbed him out of the crib anyway, adrenaline rushing through me. “Mama’s here,” I said to him, using that word out loud for the first time and feeling it, too, as if my vulnerability were what called the name, the role, into being.

  I didn’t know before that when parents talked about “checking on” their children, they meant checking to make sure they weren’t dead. And when they talked about their love for their children, maybe that was what they meant too. It was love but keener, with sharper edges, softer undersides. It was love wrapped up with desperate terror, inextricable.

  That spring, when the baby was nine months old, my sister visited us from Chicago. At that point, the baby was sitting and clapping and doing a funny crawl, one where he pushed his body forward with one foot—like lizard pose in yoga, his foot flat on the ground—the other leg trailing behind. He was joyful. He was bald, strangely attentive and perceptive, and starting to talk. He sat in my sister’s lap and grinned at her, reaching for her hair. We decided that first morning she was there that we were going to go out to breakfast, where our son would bounce on our laps and eat small fistfuls of biscuit.

  On the way out the door, I started to buckle the baby carrier around my waist and then stopped myself. “Do you want to carry him?” I asked my sister. Younger sisters usually love this sort of thing; anything for a photo they can post on Facebook.

  She said no, she didn’t want to wear the carrier. I was taken aback. “Why not?”

  She started walking ahead of us and then spun around, shrugging. “I’ve always been afraid of falling over wearing one of those things—like, what if you fell forward on top of the baby?” She laughed like she knew she was being ridiculous but also like she wanted to make sure we’d considered this possibility.

  I waved the thought away. Dustin had been over the same thing with me before. “You’re extra-aware when you have it on,” I said. “Plus, when have you ever fallen forward, onto your face? That doesn’t happen.” Anyway, Dustin was the one who usually carried the baby. He was the man, after all, and therefore stronger. It made sense in my head, in a subconscious way, like how I always slid into the passenger seat before a long trip without offering to drive.

  After breakfast, though, I started putting on the carrier. “You’re taking him?” Dustin said.

  “Yeah,” I said with a slight attitude, “clearly.” He had been off bussing our tray and I’d figured I might as well take the opportunity to display some maternal authority for my sister.

  On the short walk home from breakfast, the sun came out and we sang “The Ants Go Marching” out loud. Couples walked past us on the sidewalk holding hands, probably headed down the main drag to the same place for biscuits. I was thinking about what a beautiful day it was when my Dansko clog caught on an edge of the sidewalk. My body resisted gravity at first, and I started waving my arms in the air like a tightrope walker trying to balance herself. I think I took another galloping step.

  I have a clear memory of time slowing down. I remember thinking, No, no, no, as I flew forward in the air, and then I realized that if I pretended it wasn’t happening, the fall
would be worse, but if I accepted the fact that I was going to fall, I could try to fall well. I could see my sister and Dustin standing there, not quite getting what was happening. I willed my whole body to turn in midair and flung my left shoulder back, twisting thirty degrees to the right, so that instead of falling flat on my face, I would land on my side.

  I did it somehow; I spun in the air, and my right hip and shoulder hit the ground first. I had hugged the baby to me in the carrier on the way down but he was wailing. I started crying too. He had a giant scrape on his head, but I insisted he hadn’t hit the ground. Dustin ran the few steps over to us and quickly unbuckled the carrier. “Give him to me,” he said.

  “How did you do that?” my sister said in awe. I slowly staggered to my feet and pulled pebbles and dirt out of my hand.

  “I don’t even know!” I was flabbergasted, terrified. I tried to get a closer look at the baby. “Is he okay?” I said, desperate.

  “He’s fine,” Dustin said, pulling him out of my sight. “You have to promise never to wear those shoes again, okay? Not around the baby.”

  “Okay,” I said, stung. Of course it had been me. But my heroism! I wanted to say. The twist! I bent our fate! I intervened! Then again, it was still my fault. I fell. The baby was hurt and I was responsible. But wasn’t I, who had given him life, responsible for everything?

  Dustin held the baby and we resumed singing “The Ants Go Marching,” not stopping until we were home, and at some point he stopped crying and all of us calmed down. Maybe all it takes is distraction. For you and the baby, for everyone. Think about other things. Stop thinking about all the bad things that could happen. Not because they can’t happen but because it’s the only way to calm down.

  I looked at the baby and at the scrape on his head that Dustin let me believe was a sort of rug burn from the baby carrier. I felt sick to my stomach but hugely relieved. Something lifted then, if temporarily. The bad thing had happened and the baby had survived. He could be hurt without dying. He could endure my mistakes. He was vulnerable but resilient. Human. Wasn’t that the problem, in the end? He was going to walk around in the world where there were a million different ways to die. One day something would kill him. And I loved him too much for that. And yet. What else is there to say?

  Dry Spell

  It was lunchtime on February 13, and Dustin and I were about to do our midday baby handoff. I had been working in a coffee shop and he’d spent the morning at the park with the baby; now it was my turn to take over. I tried to blot out all the opinions and ambition and worldly attachment I’d spent the past three or four hours trying to get back in touch with as I climbed the stairs to our front porch.

  The next day would be our first Valentine’s Day together as parents, a fact to which I’d been assigning increasing, and arbitrary, meaning. For weeks I’d been writing valentine’s day???? on a to-do list in my phone but had yet to make any real plans or take any action. Would I get it together and write a love letter, bake a cake, make a print of the baby’s feet inside a heart, and prove to myself and whoever followed me on Instagram that Dustin and I were still as in love as ever?

  For Valentine’s Days past, there’d been pipe-cleaner hearts, love notes written with shower crayons bought special for the occasion, junk-store postcards tucked into the perfect book (Eileen Myles, Mavis Gallant, Colette). There was the year he hid each individual chocolate from a box in a different place around our small apartment; months later, I’d be looking for a cough drop or a cigarette and laugh out loud when I found one. If I could only pull something like that off, then I’d know things were still the same between us, or would be eventually.

  I opened the door and found the two of them at the kitchen table, the baby kicking in the high chair, smearing applesauce everywhere, Dustin reading aloud to him from Paradise Lost. I rolled my eyes but felt a piercing affection for them. My family. I got a washcloth to wipe down the table, then grabbed the baby and slumped down on the couch with him, breathing him in.

  If you’d asked me the day before, I would have said that the baby and I were going to spend the afternoon doing some kind of last-minute romance craft, but now that the occasion was upon us, that seemed a little too ambitious. God. What was it like, to do a nice thing for someone that wasn’t obligatory? I could remember the gestures, even remember how nice they felt, but I could no longer relate to the impulse. As I nursed the baby, I whittled down the plan. Okay, I thought, I’ll get up early with the baby tomorrow and then we’ll…make a cute breakfast. I’ll have him draw on a card.

  Dustin’s plan, I was sure of it, started and ended with him having sex with me. Or so I was dreading.

  Maybe that’s what I was hoping to compensate for: I love you, I think. Sorry for all the sexual rejection. I felt bad about it. Sort of. I knew it was hurting him. And yet. That February and for the entire year or so postpartum—when do you stop being postpartum? Or are you that way forever?—I not only didn’t want to have sex, I would have preferred it not exist.

  I knew our whole dynamic was threatening to move from sitcom territory into an actual problem, a problem that could be fixed, or at least de-escalated, by my just getting on with it. Lie back without thinking too much, fake it till you make it, you know the drill. And I did do it every month or so, after endless internal debate. Sometimes it felt good, too, in the end, but it was preceded by so much anxious hand-wringing it never felt quite worth it. Couldn’t we put sex on the back burner for a while? Revisit when the mood strikes?

  The mood was always striking him, never me, and that was the problem. We were going on nine months since the birth and I still felt like punching him when he poked me in the butt with his erection before we fell asleep. It seemed like we were doomed sex-wise, or I was, which meant we were doomed relationship-wise, which meant we were painstakingly building a life together that wasn’t going to go anywhere ultimately. And how would that even work? It wouldn’t. We’d have to figure it out. Or I would.

  “How was the park?” I said out loud to the house, sensing Dustin in my peripheral vision. I wanted to know every detail of what our son had done while I was gone, everything I missed.

  “Oh, good. We chased crows. Stared at the grass. He went down the big slide.” I felt a pang of jealousy as I pulled up my shirt to breastfeed the baby. I wondered if maybe I should try taking him in the mornings. Maybe Dustin had the better deal.

  When Dustin started putting on his boots to go out instead of going upstairs to work like he usually did, I looked at him like he was suiting up for a trip to the moon. “Where are you going?” I tried to keep my voice neutral but could hear myself veering into the accusatory.

  “Oh, I thought I’d do some shopping.” He threw a paperback into his tote bag and paced around the house, getting a drink of water, grabbing his coat.

  “I just went to the grocery store yesterday!” I called to him in the kitchen, meaning Hello? What is wrong with you?

  “No, not that kind of shopping.”

  I looked at him funny. “Where, then? For what?”

  “So curious,” he said in his infuriating way.

  I made a face at him from my perch on the couch, the baby still feeding. “Speaking of, have you, uh, gotten me anything for Valentine’s Day yet?”

  I wondered whether he’d give me the Speech tonight, the one he tended to whisper at me, gently, when I turned my back to him and stared at the wall, wishing I could disappear into the bedcovers. “Eventually,” he’d say, stroking my hair while the rest of me tensed up, “you’re going to remember that you like sex.”

  The baby finished nursing and Dustin was still looking for the perfect book to carry around in his tote bag and not read while he was out.

  “So, did you?” I asked again. “Get me anything yet?”

  “Well—” he said.

  Suddenly my uneasiness shifted into relief. “Me either!” I shouted after him, jubilant. “Hey!” I felt so close to him then, in some sort of sad state of grace. I sto
od up and carried the baby over to where he was. “Maybe we should come with you? We could all go together, pick out what we want?”

  I sat in the back of the car, next to the car seat in case of emergency (aka the baby crying), while Dustin drove. I tried to get comfortable in my raincoat and too-tight jeans, avoiding my reflection in the rearview mirror. I felt disgusting. But it was nice out, at least, and the baby was wearing this very cute yellow hat that made him look like an elf. I played with his toes. “What do you want for Valentine’s Day anyway?” I shouted over the music. This question was an act of aggression, I knew. Thinking of something to want, summoning enough desire to be able to say it out loud—that was the hardest part.

  “You know what I want,” he said predictably in his suggestive ’80s rom-com voice, an answer that by now had become routine.

  “Ha!” I said, and let my head fall back onto the seat.

  “It’s not a joke,” he said, trying to make eye contact in the rearview mirror, both hands on the steering wheel.

  “Oh, I know.” I tensed up thinking of him coming over to me to kiss my shoulder as soon as I put the baby down to sleep that night, his face in my face as soon as I had the chance to pull up Twitter on my phone. “Hi,” I would say, trying to acknowledge him but still staring at my screen. I’d kiss him a little and then go back to whatever I was reading and he would come at me again. “Come on,” he would probably say, at which point I would have to do a quick internal review. The question was not Do I want it? so much as Do I have it in me to endure it? If I waved him away, he’d pout or, worse, get shitty and sulk, pass by me on the couch the next day without acknowledging my existence. I’d feel terrible but not bad enough to fuck him.