“He’s nine months old now,” I volunteer before she asks me, shaving off a few months the way you shave ten pounds off your weight on your driver’s license. “I had a C-section, though. But I should be fine.”
She nods, making deep eye contact, and puts her hand on my knee. “Just take it slow and make any adjustments you need. You know your body best.”
Do I?
14.
Our unspoken deal is I do the dishes most nights while Dustin gives the baby a bath. This means I get to be left alone to listen to podcasts. Most of what I listen to are interviews with people whose careers I am jealous of, writers mainly, people who are in the world. People who still live in New York. I am still in the world, sure, and still writing. In fact, I am writing more and earning more money than I did pre-baby, but I still feel left behind. I am always thinking, too much, about what I could do if I had the kind of time some of my friends have. My friends without children. I harbor fantasies of ordering in sushi and staying up all night working as I did in the old days. And yet, I know I never got shit done then either. It is refreshing, I suppose, to have something outside of myself to blame.
Tonight I take a break from careerism to listen to a parenting podcast called The Longest Shortest Time. The host is interviewing Ina May Gaskin, “the mother of modern midwifery” who wrote the books responsible for all my romantic ideas about natural childbirth.
The host confronts Ina May, telling her that the books made her feel like a failure when her birth didn’t go the way she’d envisioned. “I was under this impression,” she says to Ina, “and maybe it was the wrong impression, that you believed that all women could have, if not a pain-free labor, then at least, like, a relaxed labor?”
“No,” Ina May says. “No! Not everybody has a great time. Sometimes it’s really rugged, it’s really hard. You’re not alone if you felt like you experienced a lot of pain and you felt like you failed.” When I hear this I put down the bowl I am scrubbing and brace myself on the sink and sob. I’m a little horrified by how much her words affect me and how much I needed to be forgiven by this woman I’ve never met for what I think of as my poor performance.
Then Ina tries to explain. “What if we just told people that it always really, really, really hurts?” she asks, and then she answers herself: “Well, that wouldn’t be very good, because you’d get everybody so frightened.”
15.
What if, instead of worrying about scaring pregnant women, people told them the truth? What if pregnant women were treated like thinking adults? What if everyone worried less about giving women a bad impression of motherhood?
16.
We learn that it’s better if Dustin does day-care drop-off in the morning—the baby is more even-keeled around him, more willing to separate from him, the person without breasts. I do pickup. Every afternoon the baby and I leave day care with a “report card,” a little half-sheet of paper that says when he pooped and how long he slept. For reasons I’m not totally conscious of, I always shove it into my pocket when they hand it to me, like it’s a love letter I should read in private. At the first red light I usually dig the paper out of my coat and spread it over the steering wheel.
The best part is always the fill-in-the-blank. I had fun: ____ [reading books, playing outside, going to the park, playing with blocks]. I can’t help but hang on every word, as if this little report promises to restore whatever his absence has temporarily displaced in me. (Authority? Intimacy? Control?) By the time we’re home and walking in the door, I’m his mother again.
I know there is more to his day than what is on the slip of paper, but I have the whole thing memorized anyway. I dole out the details of it to Dustin over the course of the evening, as if I am omniscient when it comes to the baby. Until so recently, it felt like I was.
17.
Today I was playing on the couch with the baby, who is less and less of one every day. He was giggling and flinging his body around in a way that kept making my breath catch. Half joking, I patted the couch cushion, like Lie down, and he immediately did it. He fell flat on his stomach and, laughing, looked up at me. I laughed too, in awe and a little heartbroken that he’d learned some new trick that I hadn’t taught him.
When Dustin passed through the room I interrogated him: “Did you teach him to lie down?” I demonstrated the gesture. The baby did it again.
“I didn’t teach him that!”
It is the smallest thing but it made undeniable what just a few months before had seemed impossible: Our son has a life outside of us. Separate from us. He is his own person. On some days, this serves as the giant relief I’ve been waiting for, and other days, other hours, I feel an unforeseen pang of sadness in my solar plexus.
One day he will grow up and move away from us and we will miss him constantly. I’m still mad when he wakes me up with his screaming each morning. I still need time and space away from him, to think and read and work and feel like a person, even though I know that one day I will long for nothing but to hold him again.
18.
“We just can’t do it; we can’t bear to hear him cry.” That’s what we’ve been saying to other parents for months when the subject of sleep training comes up. As if we’re just really big softies. As if some parents are unmoved by their babies’ crying.
I am to sleep downstairs in the guest room, per Dustin’s orders. “Oh! Okay,” I say, trying to mask my delight. I haven’t had an uninterrupted night’s sleep in almost a year, and part of me can’t believe my good fortune. I feel like we are taking control of our lives. I also feel somber, oddly parental.
After taking a warm bath, I spend a few hours watching Friends with noise-canceling headphones on, trying to pretend the whole thing isn’t happening. I think I hear crying a few times but it seems far off, someone else’s baby. But when I get up to pee, there it is: Wailing. Sustained screaming. My nipples immediately harden and my milk comes in. I try pacing around the house, getting a drink of water, checking the locks on the door. I feel like a caged animal, unable to do her animal job. I sit up in bed staring at the wall, trying to be still but fighting the urge to rush upstairs and scoop up the baby. Eventually I can’t stand it anymore, and I kick off the blankets and run upstairs to Dustin, who shoos me away without speaking.
“Let’s just stop,” I beg in a stage whisper.
“No!” he says. “Go back downstairs before he hears you.” I can hear the baby, my baby, whimpering to himself.
“Let’s just try it again in a few weeks. When he’s older.” I start crying. “I feel so bad. I don’t want to do this.” Hearing the baby cry and not comforting him feels like torture, like being starving with a meal in front of you that you’re not allowed to eat.
“We’re doing it,” Dustin says with finality. He goes in to pat the baby on his butt and tell him everything will be okay. “We’re right here.” Are we? I crawl back downstairs and, blessedly, fall asleep. After two more nights of hell, it is done and everything is better and we are left wondering why we didn’t do it sooner. The feeling that we have taken things into our own hands is intoxicating. What else can we do? What else haven’t we done?
19.
I am not sure what to do with my newfound free time in the evenings. I hide out, paint my toenails, watch TV, think about how maybe there are just some people who are baby people and some people who aren’t, and I’m not.
20.
I pick up a writer friend from her hotel downtown. Edan is here to give a reading. She published a bestselling novel last year and now it is out in paperback, and she is pregnant with her second child. While we’re in the car on the way to lunch, I fiddle with Google Maps and ask about her flight, her new book, her pregnancy.
“I mostly can’t wait to breastfeed again,” she tells me.
“What?” I say.
“Oh, yeah,” she says, “I loved it. That’s basically why I’m having another kid.”
“Wow,” I say. “Huh.” Wait, did I like it too?
21.
I want the hormones out of me. I want to be my old self again, as if that were possible, and I fantasize that once my boobs dry up, everything will be back to normal. The all-consuming project of early motherhood will be completed. I’ll be out on parole.
I spend a week not really sitting down around the baby. Not holding him in my lap for too long. I disappear at bedtime and feel like I’ve forgotten something essential. Like I’ve left the house without locking the front door.
In a matter of weeks, breastfeeding becomes some faraway thing I did for a while. He seems to have forgotten it ever happened. It was once so important to me to make it to a year of breastfeeding, and now that I’ve done it, it feels like having really good SAT scores—no one cares once you get into college.
In any case, the baby has started to give more hugs and kiss me on the mouth. He says words. Something has shifted in me too. When he walks into the room, I slide onto the floor without thinking, reaching my arms out. I feel real joy at the sight of him, less fear. I laugh with him more easily. I dread leaving the house to go do work.
22.
When the baby is fourteen months old, Dustin’s sister comes to visit. It is September, the two-year anniversary of our engagement. The idea of a wedding is still on the back burner but we decide to take advantage of having family in town to spend the night in a hotel.
I am nervous to spend the night with Dustin alone, uninterrupted. No excuses. But also giddy. On a friend’s advice, we fuck as soon as we check in to the hotel room. I am laughing at myself in my head but it’s fine; good, even. I feel we have overcome some mental trap, some pressure, as we glide into the hotel restaurant with tousled hair, easy smiles.
We spend too much money, buy a pack of cigarettes just because we can, get cocktails in a dark basement bar and then smoke under an awning, in the rain. The air is cool and we are a little drunk. I have never felt so free, so happy. It occurs to me I had a baby just to feel this free when I’m away from him.
23.
Wait, I text to Danielle after telling her how much better things have been lately, how great the baby is, how I feel like I’m experiencing real joy for the first time in as long as I can remember. I think maybe I have been depressed this whole time? Like, postpartum depression?
It never occurred to me that you didn’t have PPD, she writes back. Danielle, my dearest godsend of a friend, who never knew me before I was a mother, never knew me not-depressed, and spent time with me anyway, for some reason.
I hate Dustin, I text her.
Why?
For not seeing it! I write. For not knowing!!! I think of all the times I felt like he was judging me for sleeping in, for snapping at him, for lying on the couch miserable instead of playing with the baby. It doesn’t occur to me to be mad at myself. Or sad. Or to simply be grateful that whatever it was is now lifting. Has lifted. Danielle tells me not to make it about him, not to make it about the blame. That we’ve both been overwhelmed. He has his own shit; we should just keep moving forward. I don’t quite agree with her. I’m not there yet, but I can see her point.
Just focus on the joy, she writes.
Ugh, fine.
24.
When the women at day care tell me that he gives his pacifiers to the younger babies when they cry and kisses them on the nose, I know what they’re about to say.
“Yeah, he loves babies,” I say, chuckling as I put on his winter boots.
“You should give him a baby brother or sister!” There it is. Everyone knows you’re not supposed to say this sort of thing, but people can’t help themselves. Part of me wants to give in and play along, to submit to the natural way of things, to loosen my newfound grip and go flying off the side of the cliff again. Okay, fine, I’ll have another baby. Because you want me to. Because it would be really cute. To give up on the land of the living—the land of deadlines, of yoga classes, of happy hours—and dwell, again, in even more tenderness.
I just shake my head as I button up my son’s fleece coat, then stand up with the baby on my hip and smile at them. “We’ll see!” I always feel like such a mom at day-care pickup, waving good-bye to the women I pay to watch my kid so that I can write. These women who know nothing about me, have no idea how I feel about any of this. They want me to go back to the beginning. They want me to do it all again.
25.
How to explain the strange arc of parenthood to new mothers? How to tell it so that they believe you? The way things start out hard and then ease up. It is like finding more hours in the day. It is like the end of the school year, that first day of summer. It’s like you moved to a new country, and it’s beautiful but there’s a war going on. But then the war ends and you begin reconstructing yourself.
My therapist calls it expansiveness. She makes a fist, then splays her fingers out into an open palm. You expand and retract. You are on defense, and then not. You are under siege and then not. You begin to open all on your own, to seek out other people. Seek out complexity of your own. You will lie on the couch during nap time and think about opening an old cookbook and making something complicated for dinner, just because. You will consider planting a vegetable garden this year. Or taking up running again. You will go to Target alone and leave with sunglasses, a new necklace. A set of cotton pajamas. Nothing for the baby at all.
26.
The baby and I walk home from day care together as the sun is setting. “Crow!” he says to each crow. “Airpane!” to each airplane. We stop every few blocks so I can look at him and kiss him in the crease where his nose meets his cheek. His dad, I know, is home making dinner, and will gasp and then yell from the kitchen, “You’re home” as soon as we walk through the door. We will all stand there together in a hug. We are a family. Somehow it happened. Somehow I let it. Or else it happened despite me. In the end I find it doesn’t matter.
Acknowledgments
I am so grateful for all of the women (and, okay, a few men) whose faith in this project kept me going as I stumbled through it.
For Sarah Smith, who met me when I still had a tiny baby at home and who assured me that I was onto something. I knew immediately that I could trust her to help bring whatever this was into the world. And for Jean Garnett’s editorial genius, which has both saved me from and delivered me to myself time and again. These two women made it possible to write and publish this book without compromising vision or sanity, and I know how rare that is, and how lucky I am.
For everyone at Little, Brown, especially Lena Little, Jenny Shaffer, and Lauren Velasquez, who have been such good, smart company as we hustled this book into the world.
For Molly Fischer, Jen Gann, and Stella Bugbee at the Cut, who have made a space for complicated, intelligent writing about parenting (and everything else), and whose support made it possible to be a working writer.
Also for Mike Dang, who gave me my very first writing gig, and who later published my crazy birth story on Longreads. I wouldn’t have trusted it anywhere else or with anyone else, and it led, quite directly, to this book.
For my writer friends, who read drafts, indulged my panic, inspired me with their own writing, and distracted me with good gossip. Thank God for brilliant women like Emily Gould, Charlotte Shane, Jessica Stanley, Anna Wiener, Lydia Kiesling, Edan Lepucki. And also Rumaan Alam, the rare man I allow into my DMs.
For my friend-friends, who make me feel so lucky. Halle, Lindsay, Miriam, Ashley, Will, and Jen have kept me myself and kep
t me laughing (while also, obviously, welcoming my crying). For Danielle, my first and dearest mom friend, who sat with me in the thick of it and poured me wine and listened to my dark thoughts and then celebrated with me when things got better. (What would I have done if we hadn’t met?) And for Kathryn and Alexis, my Caymums who I miss and feel fated to have met.
For women like Rachel Fershleiser, Kathryn Ratcliffe-Lee, Christine Onorati, and Amanda Bullock, who have coached me through and advocated for my work and this book in ways I will always be grateful for.
For my therapist, Ann Marie, who I met just in time. This book would be seriously lacking in a level of self-awareness if not for her guidance. Yikes.
For all the moms on Twitter for showing me the way, and for knowing the difference between needing advice and needing to make a bad joke from a place of desperation. Same goes for all the writers.
To my actual mom, for always knowing I was a writer, even when I forgot.
For the coffee shops in Brooklyn, Portland, and the Cayman Islands that I have haunted while avoiding my family to finish this book: Variety, Blue Stove, Caffe Vita, Random Order, Paperman’s, Cafe-del-Sol, Grand Central Bakery, and Heart.
Speaking of family: to Dustin, for telling me early on I could write whatever I needed to, and that I didn’t need permission. Perhaps you didn’t know what you were getting into? Thank you for sticking with me while I figured all this shit out (the book and the life in the book), while I learned it all the hard way, like I do.
And Now We Have Everything: On Motherhood Before I Was Ready Page 16