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

by Meaghan O'Connell

  I told myself that I was willing to get an abortion for him. Of course I was. Right? That’s what a reasonable person would say. I don’t want to have a baby with you if you don’t want one. Wasn’t that what people said on TV? Didn’t I feel that way? I wanted to have a baby with him, and I wanted him to want the same. If he didn’t want it, I wanted him to convince me that I didn’t either. I wanted to be swayed. I didn’t want to have to argue on behalf of my desire.

  “We know we want a kid eventually,” he said. “In a couple of years we can have one.”

  “But isn’t that kind of dumb? To be like, Well, we want you but not yet. Sorry, the timing is off. I mean, isn’t this bigger than that?”

  “Come on. We can have this baby again in a couple of years.”

  “This baby?” My voice broke. He was a stranger to me now, my mortal enemy with pesticide-free produce slung over his shoulder. How had I ever loved him at all?

  “Yes. This baby. Our baby. In a couple of years. After we travel. When we have more money. Once we are married. We can do it again! It will be the same baby.”

  I laughed out loud. “Dustin,” I said. “That’s literally what it won’t be, this particular baby.” This was weirdly unlike him; he was normally correcting my magical thinking.

  “I’m just thinking about the money,” he said.

  I knew he didn’t feel like he was in the place in his life he’d imagined he’d be when he had a baby (I didn’t either, but wasn’t that part of the allure?). He told me later that he’d spent his lunch break crying because he might never get to climb Mount Everest or something like that.

  “We can have the baby again in a couple of years,” he said again. “When we’re ready.”

  “Stop saying that!” I yelled. I felt like he was being deliberately stupid when he needed to be exactly the opposite. Life was calling for a degree of seriousness we’d never had to summon before. We walked the rest of the way home without talking. I hung back just behind him, not wanting to fall apart on the street.

  We had just that week hung up a map that he’d drawn of the entire world, outlined in charcoal, and we were sticking pins in all the places we wanted to go. The plan, our plan, was to get married in early spring, buy two around-the-world plane tickets, and use my Yahoo money to travel for four months before I started grad school. I’d get my MFA, we’d live on my stipend with low overhead, and, eventually, I’d write books and help Dustin manage our family bookstore. Which is to say that over the next three years, we’d be getting married, then traveling, then I’d be writing.

  Anyway, the truth was I’d constructed all of those aggressively lovely, dreamy plans as a distraction from what I really wanted, what it seemed like it wasn’t time for yet.

  When we finally got home, I unlocked the door, slumped into the kitchen, dropped my sackful of produce, and sobbed, standing in the middle of the room on the peeling linoleum. Dustin was trying to take away my baby, the one I’d tried to be so cool about. The one I’d been afraid to say I wanted. The one we could decidedly not have “again” in a couple of years. He came up behind me and tried to hold me, I think.

  I managed to flee the two feet over to the bedroom section of our apartment and crumpled onto the bed. “I don’t want to get an abortion,” I said. The statement sounded pleading in my head but came out as a snarl.

  There was a growing ferocity inside of me as my body, at that very moment, was turning a lump of cells into a slightly more human lump of cells. You did this! I roared at him in some corner of my being. It’s happening. But then I turned to face him and tried to be laid back. I tried to see the big picture. It was as if we were at a board meeting about our lives, like if I could get the hand gestures right, I could communicate with some sort of authority.

  “I mean, of course you don’t want to do it, no one wants to do it. It isn’t fair. It sucks,” he said.

  “Easy for you to say.” Another wave of rage washed over me. There was nowhere to go in our shitty, tiny apartment. Dustin was following me around, reasoning with me, or trying to.

  “We have enough money,” I said. “The stock money. We have enough money to get by for a couple of years, no matter what. I can get a job. It would be fine. So don’t say money. Money isn’t the reason.”

  “I guess to me,” he said, “an abortion is like getting a root canal or something—but I know it’s your body, and there’s the Catholic thing…” He trailed off. I went to cry in the bathroom. It was true, I went to Catholic school until I was thirteen. They gave us little plastic babies when we were in third grade. “This is the size of an aborted child at eleven weeks,” they said, or some shit like that. They said the babies could feel pain. Weren’t they cute? We all went around school in our plaid uniforms with our plastic children tucked into our breast pockets. At this time, 1993 or so, these tiny fetuses were a lot like the tiny plastic animals we were all obsessed with, the Littlest Pet Shop toys. My friends and I tended to both animals and babies like they were small treasures. My mom was furious when I brought my doll home. “What are you, pro-choice?” I shouted at her, then slammed the door of our white minivan. I was eight, maybe nine. A woman came to our class to talk about how her aborted fetuses appeared to her as angels. A lifetime of regret. A mortal sin.

  No, it wasn’t the Catholic thing. Fuck the Catholic thing. This had nothing to do with any of that, which I not only didn’t relate to or agree with anymore but found genuinely damaging. Or was Dustin right? Maybe it was the Catholic thing that gave me pause, conferred this sense of fate, wonder, awe. Maybe it was what kept me from taking better charge of my life. Maybe it was what made me a romantic, made me call the cell-lump a baby in the first place. Maybe it was what made me walk around the world feeling like I was a bad person who didn’t know what she wanted. Or didn’t until now.

  Now I wanted too much: I wanted keeping it to feel inevitable, like fate, but also, somehow, for it to be a choice. I wanted to feel trapped and free. I was desperate for there to be a best course of action, some objective truth. I wanted to know what the right thing was; it felt so important to know the right decision, anything to avoid having to make it myself. Was that the most childish part? I couldn’t have all of those things and also the baby. I would have to be vulnerable, to recognize my desire and say it out loud.

  My truest feelings about the baby began and ended with I want it. It was inside of me and I wanted it, and I knew I could take care of it, but for some reason that counted for only so much. I tried to shut out that part of me. That was the hysterical woman in me. That was the baby fever. That was purely hormonal; ridiculous. That was shit you were supposed to transcend when you were a smart woman. When you were a woman in New York City. When you were a woman with ambitions that ran as deep as your feelings, you were supposed to trust the ambitions, not the feelings. You were supposed to plot it out beforehand, talk it over with your other smart friends, follow influential people on Twitter, ask the right ones out for drinks, make daring moves—ascend, ascend, ascend.

  A baby is never a particularly good idea, practically speaking, and a baby was an especially bad idea for us. That could have—should have, maybe—been the end of it, the objective truth I was after, but did I have it in me to undo something that was already there, something I yearned for, bad idea or no?

  I came out of the bathroom and gripped the door of the refrigerator, staring straight ahead. I didn’t know what I was doing there, just that it gave me a reason not to look at him.

  Our baby was currently the size of a poppy seed.

  The off-white refrigerator was at least fifty years old, another reason we were ill equipped to be parents. I stood in front of it pretending I was deeply engaged in doing something other than trying to gather the strength and self-knowledge to get through this conversation. If I fucked it up, if I got it wrong, I wasn’t sure what would happen.

  I wanted something I didn’t want to want, and I wanted Dustin to lend me the courage, the language, the conviction
to go through with it despite my fear. I wanted him to hold my hand and tell me what a good mother I’d be, how beautiful I’d be when I blew up like a balloon, how he couldn’t wait.

  “If we don’t have this baby,” I said, through snotty tears, “and I won’t do it if you don’t want to, but if we don’t, then I can’t…guarantee anything.”

  “What do you mean, guarantee?” Dustin said, scared.

  “I just, I don’t know what that would do to us,” I managed. “I don’t know if I would be able to forgive you. I can’t promise you I would.”

  “Well, that’s it, then,” he said. “Then we’re going to do it.” He was breathless. “I need a minute,” he said and went to the other side of the apartment. He sat on the couch in the dark. We were silent. I took a shower just to be able to close a door.

  Holding Patterns (1 to 41.5)

  1.

  Recurring pregnancy dream: I am somewhere all day and suddenly it hits me—I forgot I had a baby. I run to wherever he is (in a car, in a hotel room, at home, on a log flume at an amusement park), but it’s always too late.

  As I’m on the way to him, my milk dries up. By the time I get there, he’s dried up too. He disappears in my arms. In my dreams, the baby’s hunger works like this. It’s life or death.

  I leave him in a minifridge. Lock it closed and go to a conference. By the time I get back, he has turned into a doll. The baby, refrigerated, has turned plastic. (The baby is always a boy in my dreams, though I’m not sure how I know it.)

  Sometimes the baby shrinks and slips under my thigh in the passenger seat of a pickup truck. I get carried away in conversation and lean back in my seat, smashing him. He disappears, absorbed into the seams of the seat cushion.

  In the shrinking dreams, he’s a balloon with the air let out. I try to feed him anyway but soon he’s smaller than my nipple. Soon he is too small to be held with my fingers. I drop him in the grass and he’s lost.

  I drop him in a big pot of soup. I confuse him with a hot dog and eat him.

  Sometimes he morphs into a worm, a snake, the monster in Dune. All teeth, all suck. These dreams, where it’s me who is consumed by him, me who is destroyed and not vice versa, are a nice respite.

  2.

  The sickness hits me with impeccable timing—as soon as we decide to keep the baby. It is the worst hangover of my life. I can only lie perfectly still and moan. I don’t throw up. That would be too much of a relief.

  A few hours in, I feel like jumping ship. I look up at Dustin with tears in my eyes and say, “Maybe this was a mistake.” He thinks I am faking my misery, or at least exaggerating it. I can tell. When I confront him he says, “No, I don’t think you’re faking it. I just think it’s psychosomatic.” As if there’s a difference.

  3.

  I spend my days now half working and half reading about fetal development. Even when I don’t have questions I search pregnancy [x] weeks and read every piece of branded content I can find.

  “The patterning of his scalp has begun, though his locks aren’t recognizable yet. He’s even started growing toenails!”

  “His eyes are finally working too, making small side-to-side movements and perceiving light (although the eyelids are still sealed). Peekaboo!”

  “Amazingly, your baby’s toes and fingers will form their own unique patterns this week as they develop the fingerprints that will stay with them for the rest of their lives.”

  Each website compares the baby to produce that is suspiciously different. On one website, the baby is a pea pod. On another, at the same number of weeks, a peach. Later there are leeks, radishes, pumpkins, watermelons. I choose to “believe” whichever site makes him sound bigger, more real. I click ahead to the future weeks, feeling a small rebellious thrill.

  There are only so many ways I can trace my finger over this strange in-between period. To revel in my new world. One day I’d have a baby, but for now I was in a holding pattern. Something was about to happen. Pregnancy eight weeks. Nine. Ten. Twelve. I knew everything there was to know except none of it was particularly useful, none of it an answer to the bigger questions: What will it be like? How will it change me?

  4.

  Dustin has a publishing conference in Chicago, where my mom lives, so I tag along. Our first morning in town, my mom teaches me to keep a packet of saltines on the bedside table and not get up without eating a few. “The key is to never, ever let your stomach get empty,” she says and I nod, feeling like a child. Hunger feels risky now, even dangerous. The second it strikes, I imagine the embryo halting its growth, whirling around with a panicked look in its eyes. I imagine it like a plant, wilting and turning brown.

  I feel elderly, half buckled over all day, shuffling down the street with a ginger tea. My mom, however, is glowing.

  “Maybe I’ll have a miscarriage,” I say to my mom offhandedly in the car on our way to an overpriced baby-clothing store that she’s insisted on taking me to. She bursts out laughing.

  “What?” I say. “I’m only seven weeks. You never know.”

  “No, honey,” she says, shaking her head, giving me a look.

  “People have miscarriages all the time,” I say. “It’s a thing that happens.” At this point, the pregnancy ending was more comprehensible than it continuing. We’d be heartbroken, then maybe relieved. I’d apply to grad school.

  “I know it happens. And you should pray to God that it doesn’t because it would be horrible. Horrible.”

  “Did you ever?”

  “Nope,” she says, staring over the steering wheel. I sink back into the passenger seat and sigh.

  5.

  The day that we get home from Chicago we decide, or re-decide, once and for all, to keep the pregnancy. “It’s real.” “We’re doing it.” “Okay!” We have urgent, tearful sex and when I go to the bathroom after, I’m bleeding. Ever since I took the pregnancy test, I’ve been religiously checking the toilet paper for blood, surprised every time it wasn’t there. When I see it now, it’s almost like my checking made it happen.

  I come out of the bathroom and collapse onto Dustin’s chest. I’m bleeding, I tell him. He starts crying too.

  I read articles on my phone and report back that some bleeding after sex is normal, that it’s just that my cervix is newly sensitive. We’re relieved but harrowed. At the mercy of something now.

  6.

  We meet Dustin’s sister at the bar down the block from us—called, appropriately, Mother’s—to tell her we’re having a baby. After hugging us and gasping and saying congratulations, she’s quiet for a minute.

  “Well, I’m excited!” she says, declaring it.

  We laugh and perform exaggerated gestures of relief—Dustin loosens an imaginary necktie.

  “Oh, stop,” she says, waving at us. Then she gets serious. “I don’t feel sorry for you,” she says in her definitive, careful, sincere way. “This is a good thing.”

  “Huh,” we say, taking it in like a verdict. So we aren’t teenagers after all. We aren’t confessing to something.

  7.

  Lindsay’s wedding is in Charleston, South Carolina, and I am eight weeks pregnant. The night before the wedding, my friends stay up late drinking and catching up, and I sit on the couch, sober, answering their questions. Am I excited? Scared? Do I want to get the epidural or try to have a natural birth? “Modern medicine exists for a reason,” Sara says. I shrug. I’ve been reading a book called Spiritual Midwifery and want a hippie childbirth, one where no scary needles come near your spine and you can brag to all your friends about it later. I don’t say this, though. “We’ll see how it goes,” I say. “I’ve never given birth before.”

  The conversation soon turns to horror stories. Episiotomies gone wrong. Someone’s aunt had a dozen corrective surgeries on her perineum. She just had another procedure last year.

  “How old are her kids?” I say, trying to sound casual.

  “Oh, her youngest is twenty-three.”

  I blink, trying to get rid
of the images flashing in my brain: red, slippery vagina skin ripping in two like a torn bedsheet.

  8.

  My prenatal yoga teacher has never had a baby herself but somehow this only lends her more authority—it’s as if her perspective is unsullied by her own experience. She paces around the studio holding a skeletal model of a woman’s pelvis.

  “When you’re pregnant,” she explains to us with a perfect balance of sympathy and matter-of-factness, “sometimes your body changes faster than your awareness of your body.”

  “Yes!” I say without thinking as I thrust out my hips in a lunge.

  I love her, this reassuring woman who never wears a bra and who sways around the studio like a cat—a cat with her nipples out.

  9.

  Before bed I read Dustin statistics in an official-sounding voice as a way to broach the subject. “Postpartum Progress estimates that fifteen percent of new moms get postpartum depression, or one in seven.” I break character and look over at him meaningfully.

  “Wow,” he says, then puts down whatever novel he’s reading and gives me a meaningful look, like, Is there something you want to talk about? “That’s a lot of people.”

  “Yeah,” I say. Then I continue: “Women who are prone to mood swings or are affected by birth control or premenstrual syndrome are more likely to suffer from postpartum depression.”

  “Welp.”

  “I know. I’m basically guaranteed to get it.”

  “Okay. So we know to look out for it.”

  I nod and then go to sleep that night feeling proud, mature, prepared.