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

by Meaghan O'Connell

  In a week or a month from this February 13, we’ll find ourselves in bed in the middle of the day, and after another botched attempt at sex, I’ll confess to him about the birth flashbacks I get sometimes when I’m on my back, pinned down. We’ll cry together in bed and it’ll be the beginning of the end of my avoiding him and avoiding difficult conversations. I’ll know, soon, that just because something is hard and takes work and doesn’t come naturally doesn’t mean it isn’t worthwhile. It doesn’t mean anything. I’ll know that as long as we can talk to each other, we aren’t doomed. But we have to do it on purpose. We have to try now. Ugh.

  The next morning, our first Valentine’s Day as parents, I dragged myself out of bed as soon as I heard crying and carried the baby downstairs. I put boots and coats and hats on both of us and set him on the front porch—“Stay there, okay?”—while I struggled to unfold the stroller and carry it down the steps to the sidewalk. Soon we were off into the gray morning. Doughnuts. Coffee. That would have to do. When we got back, I fried Dustin an egg in the shape of a heart and wrote We love you in hot sauce around the edge of the plate. When Dustin came down the stairs a few minutes later, I looked at him and felt, if not love, then an echo of it. Enough to know it was still there somewhere and would eventually find its way back up to the surface.

  Extra Room (1 to 26)

  1.

  When the baby is still small and waking up at all hours of the night, we take a trip to Portland, Oregon. It rains every single day we’re there and I spend most of the trip in the back of the rental car with our wailing baby, dangling my tit over his car seat. We meet people we know from the internet at food trucks and they swear the weather isn’t always so bad. “I think, if I was able to enjoy things right now,” I say to Dustin, “I’d really like it here.”

  We want milder weather, a real backyard, a change of scenery, a washer and dryer. I’m tired of carrying the stroller up the steps from the subway and waiting forever at restaurants. It’s the typical story: the hard parts of living in New York have eclipsed the magic, and once you lose sight of the magic, the whole project of living there becomes absurd.

  I find a Craftsman house in Portland for rent on Craigslist. We tell our friends, who are excited but also a little betrayed. “It just seems so sudden,” Halle says, but I remind her we’ve been talking about leaving for years. It’s just that now, time moves differently. I can see it passing. I can see that we have to act.

  We reserve one of those hellish pods that always seem bigger than they are, and I entertain the baby while Dustin and his dad pack half our stuff into it. We leave the other half on the street outside of our apartment. There’s no time for a farewell tour. We have a good-bye party at a bar on our last Sunday afternoon, but I feel gone already. We leave New York just before Christmas.

  2.

  Our new house has all these extra rooms. A finished basement. I use the washer and dryer almost every day, just because I can. I’ve never been anything but a mom here, and maybe because of that, I feel less self-conscious bringing the baby to restaurants or pushing his stroller down eerily quiet blocks. All the friends of friends we’ve been introduced to here are married and own their houses. Everyone cooks. Has a car. The trappings of adulthood are more conventional, more attainable here. We’ve attained them. In another life I might see this as a sort of bourgeois death but to me right now, it feels like coming up for air.

  3.

  One of my New York friends introduces me over e-mail to Danielle, who lives in Portland and has a baby a few months older than mine. “You can be mom friends. No pressure.” My impulse is to put her off, to reach out some afternoon when I’m feeling more myself. It’s hard to see why anyone would want to be friends with me when none of my clothes fit and I am too tired to have a sense of humor.

  On our first weekend in Portland, Danielle follows up with me and I invite her over. I buy a cake from a bakery down the street and remind myself to offer her tea. It feels like we are going on a date.

  She knocks on our door and I swing it open to find her on the porch; she’s wearing clogs, a drapey white sweater, and no makeup. She has long wavy blond hair and a baby slightly larger than mine on her hip. She comes in and takes off her shoes and the baby’s coat and then sits down on the rug. We ask each other questions and move from nervousness to tentative ease. Our babies flop and crawl over the rug and each other like puppies while we eat cake. Neither of us is getting much sleep and we are both still breastfeeding around the clock. “It’s so fucking hard,” Danielle says, popping out a boob when her baby cries.

  “Yes!” I say, and some part of me relaxes. Have I just been waiting for someone to come along and say it out loud?

  “What was your birth like?” she asks me, and I narrow my eyes and shove a piece of cake in my mouth. “Fucking awful.”

  “Mine too,” she says, and we laugh the kind of laugh that changes midway through into something darker. We make eye contact and nod, shake our heads, and then laugh more, full of resignation, laughing at the absurdity, saying more with a look than we had the energy to explain.

  We take turns telling our birth stories and cuddling each other’s babies and I feel myself getting manic with the thrill of finally being understood. The ability to be casually despondent, to complain to someone in shorthand and not feel like you have to insert disclaimers about how much you love your baby—I feel like if I could just be around her forever, I would be okay.

  Danielle was also in labor for close to forty hours, she tells me. She also had the dream of the perfect birth, but she didn’t give up and get the epidural like I did. Her baby, when he finally came, came barreling out of her so quickly and so traumatically, she got an extremely debilitating fourth-degree tear. She’d been seeing a pelvic-floor therapist, a godsend, and was healing and progressing, but sex was still something she couldn’t quite contemplate. She couldn’t ride her bike or go running. For the first few weeks, she couldn’t even sit down. Despite all that, she went back to work when the baby was six weeks old. She didn’t have a choice.

  “It was really dark,” she says.

  “No kidding.”

  “I imagined all these things I’d do on my maternity leave.”

  “Ha.”

  “Exactly.”

  Talking to her, I realize that when I replay my own labor in my head, a sort of compulsive Monday-morning quarterbacking I can’t stop doing, I imagine that if I had only “stuck it out” and had the vaginal birth I aspired to, everything would have gone perfectly. But there are all kinds of ways for things to go badly.

  4.

  We’ve been putting off looking into day care even though we both desperately need more time to work. Something about the task of Googling, scheduling tours, and filling out applications feels insurmountable. Maybe we just don’t want to admit to ourselves what is becoming obvious: our little arrangement is not working.

  “What if we just wait till he crawls?” I suggest. It seems as reasonable as anything else. Something about the fact that the baby would be mobile, able to move from one corner of the room to another at least, makes it easier to imagine abandoning him.

  We need more money, which means we will spend $850 a month on day care and hope that, with the additional time to work, we will earn at least $851 more a month. The ridiculousness of this math is partly why we’ve spent so long splitting the time ourselves.

  “Our baby will be a baby only once, and I don’t want to miss out” was the sort of thing I said when I was pregnant, imagining days full of nothing but wonder. It was the sort of message that was ambient on Facebook and parenting blogs. You’ll never get this time back. It’s a threat. What was work compared to being face to face with a life unfolding before you? Now I am increasingly convinced that I do want to miss out, at least a little bit. “Your baby will only be a baby once” sounds less like a threat than a small mercy.

  5.

  “If I could spend ten good minutes with him every two hours, that’d b
e ideal,” I say to Danielle over drinks one night. “You know, when they’re really small. And you just…look at them. And there’s nothing to do. And you know you’re supposed to talk to them but it feels insane. And you just, like, boop them with toys on the nose, like they’re dogs…boop.” I feel a wave of longing when I say this stupid word: boop. It was part of my baby language, always would be. I remember his laughter, his stillness, staring back up at me, how his eyes would flash at me a certain way and I’d be convinced we were communicating on some deeper plane, beyond words, and I want to take back all my wild urges to be elsewhere. Wasn’t this life at its most elemental? Wasn’t this what I was working toward with writing?

  If only I had the sort of spiritual stamina to stay in profundity longer, to not find it oppressive after ten minutes.

  6.

  “Taking care of a baby is sort of like driving down the highway,” an old co-worker’s wife told me when I was pregnant as we sat at a picnic table in their upstate backyard. “It’s incredibly boring but you can’t look away.”

  I remember thinking, Oh, but it won’t be like that for me.

  7.

  It was hard to see this time with our son for what it was: an investment in another person, the sacrifice at the start of a long, rewarding project. It was like a hazing ritual, with all the hardest parts at the beginning.

  Did it have to be like that? Did you have to get remade? Did you have to hide in the bathroom on your phone, go for long walks and cry? Did you have to hate everybody, yourself most of all?

  I didn’t want to simply endure, I wanted to enjoy the experience, to come out the other side of the gauntlet stronger, wiser, and—defying reason—more beautiful. I saw my ability to be present as a test of my character or of my bona fides as a mother: Was I going to be happy, or was I going to flail? Was motherhood going to make everything in my life better, make me better, or was it going to ruin everything?

  I operated as if there’d be a verdict. An easy answer. A story. I operated as if we were setting the tone for the rest of our lives.

  It did not occur to me that we could simply muddle through. Learn as we go. Change things later. Forgive ourselves.

  8.

  We go on a few day-care tours with the baby in tow. It’s hard to imagine leaving him anywhere and feeling okay about it, but the last place we visit is impossible to criticize. The day-care director opens the door and welcomes us into a baby paradise, filled with soft mats and mirrors and reassuring women cuddling children and reading them stories. A herd of babies crawls toward us, some of them waving, some saying, “Hiiiii,” in tiny voices as we gingerly make our way across the big room.

  Dustin and I look at each other and shrug. “That was easy,” he says as we get back into the car and go home, both of us feeling like we checked off a box.

  “What are you going to do on your first day with child care?” Danielle says over dinner that night, her voice giddy. “You should do something fun, just for yourselves. Go out to lunch somewhere nice. Go to the fancy new sauna!” On the way home from her house, I get a follow-up text from her: Have sex in the middle of the day, with the sun streaming in through the windows!

  9.

  On the baby’s first morning in day care, I sit with him on the rug for a while, then move him off my lap and try to interest him in some toys so I can slip away. I hand the day-care director a bag of frozen breast milk. “I’ll come back at one to nurse him,” I say, and she is chipper, happy to accommodate me. When I finally move toward the door, the baby chases me, crawling full speed toward where I’m throwing on my jacket and rushing to step into my clogs. He’s red-faced and screaming. He can’t believe what’s happening. I feel nauseated as I fight the urge to run over to him and pull him to me, inhale his smell, pull up my shirt and feed him standing up in the entryway. I can feel some part of me close off, out of necessity. “I’ll be back!” I promise him, pleading with him as if he can understand, then I slip out the door. I chant, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, in my head as I walk home.

  Leaving him feels wrong. I can’t believe the power of it, the power he has over me, how it overwhelms all rational thinking. When I get home I pace around, nervously tidy the living room. I don’t go upstairs to find Dustin. I know if I see him, I’ll cry. I unload the dishwasher and text Danielle, who tells me to drink a glass of wine, even though it’s ten a.m. I look around. The house is empty. There is no baby in the next room, flinging toys around, no baby underfoot, banging on a pot with a spoon. I feel like I am getting away with something. Like the dream where you find a new room in your house.

  Dustin comes downstairs and over to me. “How was it?” he asks.

  “He screamed,” I say and I watch Dustin’s face fall. Something about how he’s sad too is what makes me cry into his chest.

  “It will get better. And we have to do this. You keep saying you need more time to work. Plus it’s good for him,” Dustin tries. “You know, to be around other kids, to socialize.”

  “I think that’s just something people tell themselves,” I say, laughing as I wipe tears away.

  “Well, fine. Tell it to yourself!”

  10.

  I get to the day care at one o’clock that first day having achieved very little in the way of work and even less in the way of having sex with my husband. I peer around the front door, and I can see that my baby is in someone’s lap with a pacifier in his mouth. His face is red and splotchy; he looks defeated. I hurry over to him, and when I grab him to me, he lays his head on my shoulder and whimpers.

  “He wouldn’t take the bottle,” one of the caregivers tells me, wincing a little.

  “Did he cry all day?” I ask, even though I’m afraid to know the answer.

  “Not all day. Just on and off.” I try not to cry myself. This was exactly what I dreaded. This for writing? This for time alone, to work? I nurse him and hand him off, then go back home for a few hours, more on principle than anything else.

  On the way home, past daffodils and tulips and people walking their dogs, I give myself a pep talk: You have to do this or you will go insane. It’s for the well-being of the whole family. He will get used to it. You will get used to it. It will be hard and then it will be okay.

  Knowing what I am capable of, what I need in order to be a good parent, a good person—it occurs to me that I had to have a baby to figure all of this out. I had to get more than desperate; I had to get low down before I could learn to see and then say out loud what it was I needed. I had to move away from New York. Get a therapist. Meet Danielle.

  How I wish it had come easier, sooner. I wish these two things had happened in the other order: me learning what I needed and then becoming someone’s mother. But it’s better than nothing. When I return home, I go right back into my little studio in the backyard, a renovated garage I’ve wordlessly claimed. I put a bulletin board up, light incense, hang pictures, and line up my books. Books by other women. Some of them mothers.

  11.

  What if having a hard time adjusting to motherhood wasn’t some moral failure or a failure of imagination? What if we thought of the whole endeavor like we do work? Like how a career starts out with a lot of dues-paying, a lot of indignity, a lot of feeling unappreciated and complaining to your friends but then incrementally gets easier or more fulfilling. You get better at it. It becomes part of you. And you start to think, Well, what else would I do all day?

  Of course, it’s not the same at all. But you can understand why someone wouldn’t want to have a job. And you can understand why someone would.

  12.

  Dustin goes to pick up the baby an hour or so later, and once they’re home we sit on the couch together—a trio again. I feel an unfamiliar lightness. It’s five p.m. and I don’t feel like a husk of a human being. I’m not wallowing in misery and resentment or full of rage over the endless question of what to have for dinner. When I nurse the baby, I hug him to me, savoring the feeling of his body pressed into mine.


  13.

  I take myself to yoga—the regular, grown-up kind, which I haven’t done in years. There are no babies, but there are actual men, which is always weird. Creeping into a new studio, not knowing where to sign in or when to take off my shoes, makes me want to turn back, but before I can, a woman spots me. Perhaps sensing my unease, she leads me into the room and gestures to where I can put down my mat. Feeling a hundred eyes on my lumpen body, I sit there doing and redoing my ponytail, trying not to make eye contact with anyone. The teacher comes by and introduces herself.

  “Do you have any injuries I should know about?”

  “Well, I just had a baby,” I blurt out, despite it not being quite true anymore. I went through the same thing at the hair salon a week ago. “Oh, how old is your baby?” the stylist asked, and I debated lying to her. I wanted to say the baby was brand-new. I wanted her to understand that I was not quite myself yet. I wanted her to be impressed that I was sitting there, in the salon chair, wearing eyeliner. I want to be granted a special dispensation. I want to extend the grace period indefinitely. To be graded on a curve, have people think, She’s not doing too bad, considering.

  I want the yoga teacher to understand why my arms will shake in downward dog, why I will spend most of the class in child’s pose, hiding my face. Why I might cry in pigeon pose, with my leg pulled up under me and my new stomach brushing against my calf. I want her to know that I used to be able to do everything, that I used to be in better shape. I want her to know this isn’t me.