And Now We Have Everything_On Motherhood Before I Was Ready

by Meaghan O'Connell

  I tried to watch TV while I fed the baby, thinking I could treat this time like a snow day, a sick day gone on forever. I would catch up on every prestige television show I’d always meant to watch. In reality I spent most of my time staring at the wall or down at the baby, chasing away forbidden thoughts (What have we done?), and counting the hours until I could take another Percocet.

  I recorded all of the baby’s and my bodily functions in my iPhone, something concrete to stand against the great unknown: 9 a.m. breastfed, left side, 45 minutes / Diaper pee 10 a.m. / Percocet 10:15 / slept 10:20–11. My record-keeping never cohered into anything meaningful the way I must have wanted it to, but I referred to it constantly anyway. So this is what we are doing. This is how we are going to survive. When the baby cried and Dustin brought him over to me with an expectant look, I would wave my phone in his face. “I just fed him twenty minutes ago!” “Well, he seems hungry now. I don’t know what you want me to do.” The rage I felt at that moment was like nothing I’d ever experienced. I was strung out, under siege, depleted.

  Imagine, this was how everyone came into the world. It seemed so extreme. I tried not to think about what life was like just a week ago. Thinking too much, generally, felt like self-harm. Hold the baby, bounce the baby, feed the baby, blot out the fantasies of boarding an airplane, flying to Paris, sleeping in the bookstore Shakespeare and Company, and never coming back. The biggest problem of all was that I loved the baby so immediately and desperately, I knew I could never actually escape. I was not just trapped in our apartment with my tits out, I was also trapped in love with him. I could never go back to before.

  Before, before. How had I coped with difficulty before? I would go for a walk with earphones in, disappear into the city, and come back in a few hours when I felt better. Or I would meet up with my friends and talk about whatever was upsetting me until we had it figured out. A walk was physically impossible now, but my friends were coming over in an hour. I knew this “receiving visitors” was a thing that was supposed to happen during our fun-house sick leave—people come, they bring food, you sit back with your feet up and bask in everyone’s baby adoration, not worrying for once that the house is a mess. But the thought of ritual, of social nicety, of looking them in the eyes and trying to hold a conversation at a time like this felt ridiculous, impossible.

  “These are your friends,” Dustin reminded me. Come over whenever! I’d finally written, despite my misgivings. We’re just…here.

  Our little apartment had always been a gathering place for my friends. Dustin and I hosted a standing Sunday dinner party for whoever could make it. Our friends carved pumpkins in our kitchen, dyed Easter eggs, made goofy Christmas ornaments and Valentines, and caught up with one another’s lives around our tiny yellow table. Now that Dustin and I were home from the hospital, I was waiting for some of that warmth to rush back in. I’d imagined that I would throw open our door with some new maternal confidence—the matriarch welcoming everyone in with French-press coffee and banana bread that I had somehow baked during early labor—and tell them the riveting story of my son’s birth.

  Now it was clear this had all been magical thinking, but I figured I should at least take a shower.

  I winced as I peeled off my maternity leggings and stepped out of the disposable underwear they’d given me at the hospital. I didn’t even know where in my body the blood was coming from anymore, but I wore two giant maxi-pads at once and still sat on a towel on our couch, just in case. It seemed like the doctors could have sucked it all out when they were in my uterus, but I bled for weeks. I tried not to look down as I stepped over the ledge of the bathtub, gripping the towel rack with one hand and the shower curtain with the other. The warm water felt weird on my nipples, which stung from being gnawed on twenty hours a day. The peeling paint and plaster on the ceiling of our shower would occasionally rain down. I could see black specks of mold. All of this disgusted me with a new urgency. I felt unsafe and like a bad mother already.

  I knew I was supposed to wash my incision but I was afraid to touch it. I definitely didn’t want to look at it. Just thinking about it made me queasy—in fact, my entire torso was a blur in my mind and I was hoping to keep it that way for a while. Everything felt stacked inside of me haphazardly, my body weak and vulnerable when I was supposed to be nourishing and protecting something even weaker, even more vulnerable. I wanted to be present and strong—I wanted to take it all in stride. I wanted to be worthy of my son.

  Instead, I felt like something essential in me was threatening to slip. Maybe it already had. I’d spent four days recovering in the hospital, in a shared room. For reasons of privacy, visitors weren’t allowed after ten p.m., so Dustin had to leave me alone every night. The nurses insisted on taking the baby to the nursery the first night so that I could sleep for a few hours, which felt bad and wrong but also like the only option, given that my body was still numb from the waist down and I couldn’t keep my eyes open. The next three nights they left him with me, and I stayed up all night sweating with the baby slippery on my naked torso (my neighbor was an Albanian woman who had also had a C-section, and when I heard her tell someone that air-conditioning would make her baby sick, I didn’t dare press the issue). I sat up in bed crying quietly to myself while the baby screamed, trying to think of ways I could physically slide out of bed with him in my arms without ripping my stitches open and injuring us both. I watched the clock on the wall and counted down the hours until eight a.m., when Dustin would come back to rescue me.

  It was better to be home. I turned off the shower and waddled in slow motion over to our bed to get dressed. I’d never felt so physically limited before and was mentally unprepared for it. Our freezer was full of what the internet called “padsicles”—pads Dustin and I had spent one pregnant afternoon soaking in aloe and witch hazel, ready for me to perch on victoriously after my natural-childbirth experience. I had planned to be in pain for a day or two and then ready to go for long walks in the sun with my baby, enjoying time away from work. I had planned for this part to be “hell,” but when I’d imagined it, I imagined us overwhelmed but happy, having maintained our sense of humor. I thought the hell would be logistical, not emotional.

  Before I dropped my towel, I looked over my shoulder to make sure Dustin couldn’t see me from wherever he was sitting. I grabbed one of his big undershirts and my grubbiest pair of underwear and let the towel fall to the ground.

  “Oh, hey, I should look at your incision!” Dustin called from the kitchen. “Make sure it’s healing okay.” Before he could put down the baby and make it over to me, I quickly turned to look at myself in the mirror. It felt important that I see it first. As soon as I did, I broke into the sobs I had been trying to keep at bay all week. I fell apart.

  I’d known it would look bad. I’d expected that, and accepted it. All the websites warned you that you’d look pregnant for weeks. Plus I’d always been frustrated with my body, always wanted to lose ten or twenty pounds, always wore a cardigan over a sleeveless dress to hide my chubby arms, dreaded trying on new jeans, blah-blah. I hate my body already, I’d figured. I’ll be fine.

  But this was something else. This was undeniable. Undeniably bad. My entire middle section was covered in purplish-red gashes and looked like it was hanging off my body. It looked like a balloon that had been deflated but was also, somehow, full of wet dough. It looked like a beige balloon full of dough that someone had cut purple gashes in. It bore no resemblance to any version of myself I’d ever seen.

  Dustin hugged me to his chest and told me he loved me and this was hard but we would be okay, but instead of relaxing into him like I usually did, I stiffened. “It’s probably just the hormones,” I said, sniffing. “You know, crashing.”

  He nodded and knelt under me to survey the damage. The lower part of my stomach, the part between my belly button and my crotch, was like a stuffed envelope or a rounded shingle half hanging off the edge of the roof. I stared at the ceiling, willing the tears to
stop coming, as I felt Dustin trying to lift this new appendage out of the way so he could examine my scar. I could see him hunching down, craning his neck to see. I felt sick with shame.

  “It looks good!” he said, bounding back up. “It’s just a little red. It’s healing perfectly.”

  I nodded, humiliated, and pulled up my sweatpants. The baby started to fuss in his little chair so Dustin ran over to him. I pulled a pillow to my face and screamed into it like a teenager, then bit it while I cried. My body, disappointing though it was, had always at least been familiar. Now I was me, but not. Me, but worse. It seemed so unfair, this on top of everything else.

  Not long after, the buzzer went off and soon I heard excited voices coming down the hallway, like a threat. I tried to sit up straight, make sure my shirt was buttoned. “Hi,” I called over to them from my place on the couch. Halle and Lindsay and Lindsay’s husband, Brian, were all half bent over, taking off their shoes and setting their cute bags down by the door. Lindsay proudly held out a lasagna she’d made us. Halle had brought chips and guac. Everyone seemed so lighthearted and congratulatory, ambassadors from some other planet. “We Googled what you’re supposed to bring when you come to visit someone’s baby,” Halle admitted, and we laughed. “Oh. My. Godddddd. Let me see him.”

  Everyone settled down around the baby and me in the living room and I sat there fighting the urge to snatch him back as my friends passed him around. They looked so natural holding him, so relaxed. So well rested, in pants that buttoned, underwire bras. Their summer wardrobes. Their summers. I thought of summer weeks I’d spent grounded as a kid, how I would sit at my bedroom window and wait for the neighbors to come over and talk to me through the screen. They held up toys, entertained me for a while, asked me what I’d done to get in trouble, but eventually they always left to go play baseball or something and I was stuck there, watching them from behind the screen. That’s how it felt sitting on the couch across from people I loved, people who knew me better than almost anyone else. Or had until this week.

  “So,” somebody said, “how are you?”

  I tried to move the muscles of my face into a smile. “Oh, um…I’m okay, I think?” I searched their eyes for some kind of feedback. Did they think we had made a huge mistake?

  “What’s it like being a mom?” Lindsay asked me. The word mom stung.

  “God, I have no fucking idea,” I said. Her eyes were full of affection and genuine interest, but I felt like she was mocking me, trying to pin me down or reduce me to something. I felt self-conscious, suddenly, in my sweatpants and milk-stained T-shirt. Lindsay’s arms were thin and muscular, her hair dyed recently, perfect blond highlights. She looked at me expectantly, smiling, in her expensive white blouse.

  “No, I mean, it’s good,” I said. “It’s crazy. I mean, he’s amazing. I don’t know. We’re tired.”

  Halle looked at me, searching. “So how’s he sleeping?”

  “Ha!” I said. “Not good.” I shifted on the couch, trying to quickly assess whether she really wanted to know or whether this was another question she figured she was supposed to ask. Would there forever be a gulf between us? Did she worry that from now on, all I would have to talk about was banal shit like how the baby was sleeping or how many diapers he went through in a day? (Like twenty, for the record.) We used to stay up late on Gchat crying with each other over things like whether love really existed and, if it did, whether we were lovable or not. We talked about ambition, about the fear of failure, about our endless self-loathing. We rehashed our childhoods, analyzed our parents’ relationships, swore we would want more, try harder, be better. Now here I was, sitting on the couch like a sucker, in hell and unable to be honest with myself or my friends.

  They asked me to tell them about the birth and I didn’t know where to begin. I normally would have been bursting with the news, ready to make jokes and replay each moment, like we did with everything. For the first time in my life I found I couldn’t do it. The whole thing was too fresh and too much; it just came to me in flashes. So instead of a story, I recounted the facts. “It was forty hours, I think, start to finish,” and “The first epidural failed, which sucked, then I had to get another one. Then the C.” They nodded and said it sounded horrible. I felt hollow when I just said, “Yeahhhhh.” I hadn’t figured out how to tell it so that it made any sense. I was afraid it would just sound sad, needlessly hard. I was afraid I would tell it and then realize something that I wasn’t ready to know yet. I didn’t feel safe enough to poke at the wound.

  “Well, you seem like you are doing great, considering,” Lindsay said to me and I felt something in me rise up.

  “Oh, I dunno,” I said, but I was grinning. This was all I wanted to hear. I wanted us to seem happy to them, as ridiculous as it was, like we were coping well. I didn’t want my friends to walk out of our house and back onto the sidewalk and cringe at each other. I didn’t want them to lie in bed that night feeling grateful it was me and not them.

  When the baby started to fuss, I figured it was my way out. “I think I need to feed him,” I said, hoping they would take this as a cue to leave. No such luck. Brian and Dustin stood up, clearing their throats, and went scurrying into the kitchen, asking if anybody wanted some water, as I reluctantly unbuttoned my shirt. One indignity after another, it felt like.

  “So,” I said, pivoting to gossip, now that it was just us. “What’s the latest with Jamie—is she gonna have a baby or what?” Here I was, already wishing my fate on someone else.

  “Oh, I don’t think so,” said Halle. “Not yet, anyway.”

  “Huh,” I said, visibly annoyed. I resented anyone still on the other side, anyone who could still choose not to do it. “I wonder why,” I said without a hint of irony.

  “Oh,” Halle said, “I think she just doesn’t want to ruin her body.”

  “Ha!” I said and then Halle realized what she’d said.

  “I mean, not that you did!”

  “No, I did.” I felt relieved in a way. The elephant in the room. If I’d ruined my body, I should at least get some credit for it. That was part of what was so absurd about our sitting there, my friends acting cheerful and celebratory while I was sinking further and further into despair.

  “I’m sure you didn’t ruin your body,” Lindsay said in a tone that struck me as egregiously knowing.

  “Well…” I said, like, I wouldn’t be so sure about that. Suddenly I had the urge to affront them with my body the way I’d been affronted by it that morning. “Actually,” I said, feeling perverse pleasure, “do you guys wanna see my stretch marks? They are fucking insane.” My hopes of making a good impression disappeared as they nodded eagerly, leaning forward in their chairs.

  “Oh my, yes,” Halle said. It was the same thing she’d said when I used to ask her if she wanted to hear some of the lurid details of bad sex I’d had or if she wanted me to forward her an overly emotional e-mail I’d sent to somebody who had screwed me over. Of course she wanted to see. My friends always wanted to see. I had lost sight of that amid all of this. I unlatched the baby and put him down on the couch and then inched my way toward standing upright.

  “Okayyyyy,” I said, yanking down my sweatpants and pulling up Dustin’s undershirt, leaving my horrible midsection exposed.

  “Whew!” Halle said with a sharp intake of breath.

  “I know,” I said. I fought the urge to apologize. I felt like a woman in one of those postpartum-body-acceptance campaigns. I wasn’t sure what reaction I was going for. It was somewhere between asking them to tell me that my ass didn’t look fat and showing off a war wound.

  “Well…” She trailed off, unable to come up with anything.

  “Exactly,” I said. All three of us laughed uneasily.

  “Okay,” Lindsay said, all business as always. “It’s not that bad. I mean, the stretch marks will fade, right?”

  “Yes…” I said. “That’s what everyone says, but I’ll believe it when I see it.”

  I pull
ed up my pants and pulled down my shirt, feeling embarrassed but relieved to have someone else look. I needed witnesses. I needed my reality confirmed. I sat back down and held the baby to me and felt lighter somehow. My body was shorthand, living proof. It stood for everything I couldn’t say.

  We all sat there, looking at one another, unsure what came next. “Oh, well!” I said and threw up one hand in a fuck-it gesture.

  “Yep,” Halle said. “What can you do?”

  “Not a damn thing,” I said, feeling, for the first time, resigned to my fate. My body would never be the same. My life would never be the same. My relationship with these women would never be the same. I couldn’t make sense of it yet, even to myself, but I felt like there was a glimmer of understanding between us. We all sank back into the couch cushions and, looking at one another, we shook our heads as if we were shaking them at the universe. At female biology. At love. At everything that came with it. I held the baby to me, happy to be laughing with my friends, even if it was through a screen.

  A Certain Kind of Mammal

  When I was pregnant, every time someone asked me if I planned to breastfeed, I stammered and avoided eye contact. Of fucking course, what do you think I am, some kind of monster? I felt like the person had just asked me if I wanted to be a real writer someday. Obviously I thought about it all the time but I didn’t want to jinx it by talking about it. Declaring my intentions felt too vulnerable, too potentially humiliating. The question was not whether I planned to breastfeed the future baby but whether I would physically be able to. What if the time came and the baby didn’t latch on or my body didn’t produce enough milk? What if my boobs couldn’t get it up?