If you weren't deeply transformed by motherhood,
I don't want to talk to you (or do I?).
Last weekend my husband and I met with one of his former co-workers and her young family for lunch. They weren’t very close or anything—my husband and this co-worker—but she had reached out and genuinely urged us all to get together. She had left the previous year to have a baby. Last time I saw her she was bright-eyed and pregnant.
Ooohhhh, I thought, I know what’s going on: they’re having a hard time in new parenthood and they want to connect with another couple to commiserate! I bet they’re just looking for some support and reassurance.
I’ve seen many new moms (and all varieties of parents) in therapy and have led postpartum support groups. I selfishly love new moms that are like, what the actual fuck just happened? because it resonates with my own experience and feels validating. But it definitely doesn’t always go like that. Some women just seem…okay. Good even.
And it is deeply disturbing to me.
Okay, okay, I’ll try to be less dramatic.
Here’s what actually happened. On the car ride home, I didn’t feel quite right. My husband kept saying, “Wasn’t that nice?” And, “We should do that again!” I just kept gulping down a pit in my stomach and saying, “Yeah… sure….” When we got home I sat down and quietly ate some food (because the lunch that turned into dinner didn’t actually end up including a meal for me as I was the one chasing our daughter around outside much of the time).
My husband looked at me suddenly and said, “You look like you’re going to cry.” I said, “I think I am. I’m going to go for a walk.” “Okay, yeah, good,” he replied, “Go for a walk and cry.” And he meant it in a kind and supportive way. He knows I’d rather cry it out by myself wandering around the neighborhood than cooped up in the house where I have to explain myself to everyone.
So I walked. And I let myself drop. And the feelings started flooding in. And the tears started flooding out. In the kindest way possible I kept asking myself, what is your deal?! Because I still wasn’t really sure. It was still all feeling. No thought. No sense.
This new mom with a baby under one-year-old was younger than me, thinner than me, dressed in a tiny red sundress with little white flowers, no bra, showing off tattoos, as bright-fucking-eyed as the last time I saw her. So was that it? Was I just jealous?
“How is breastfeeding?” I asked.
“Oh great. I’m lucky, it was really easy.”
“The birth?”
“Yep! No problems!”
Sleep?! Kid’s sleeping through the night. Fussy?! Kid’s an angel. Going back to work? Oh no, we think we’ll pop out a couple more. Babies, that is. Probably while getting another master’s degree or volunteering to help English Language Learners because, as she kept repeating, “I just have so much time!”
At the end of the night they asked my husband and I what we like to do on the weekends for fun, innocently attempting to brainstorm another get together. My mouth went dry. Ehr… fun? I mean, what am I still in my twenties? Ha ha. It’s, like, nice to get some laundry done…
So yeah, I’m jealous.
I’m jealous of the woman who doesn’t seem* changed by motherhood. Who doesn’t seem* to have experienced a complete and total shedding of the skin. At which time some cosmic hand reaches into her naked body and rearranges her soul. Then stitches her skin back together and dresses her in it, but it feels and looks different than it did before, and she wears it awkwardly for years to come.
I’m jealous of the woman, who on the other side of birth, a baby removed from her body and seated heavily in her arms, seems to have maintained her connection to society. Who didn’t journey so far into the dark and starry eather to retrieve her child’s soul that the tether holding her place in the social order snaps, and she floats aimlessly into the void, alone with her child, waiting to be called back.
But she lands on a completely different shore. Gently touching her altered skin, she looks back over the vast sea she washed up from, squinting to see the land of her past, now infinitesimal in the distance. She looks down at the child in her arms and feels a crashing wave of love and fear. She is irrevocably changed and she must learn to navigate this new and disparate land.
The good news? Others have landed on this shore before. It is not as lonely as it seems.
I will meet her there.
—
*I fully acknowledge that how someone seems is not indicative of how they actually are. Many moms seem okay, when they absolutely are not. There is also no reason this new mom should have been vulnerable with me– someone she did not know. She owes me absolutely nothing. This piece is about my own experience—my reaction to my perception—most certainly a flawed one.
Resources for the mom (or any parent) who is asking themselves, What the fuck just happened?
Postpartum Support International
Find a Perinatal Mental Health Provider Here!
Books:
This Isn’t What I Expected: Overcoming Postpartum Depression
Body Full of Stars: Female Rage and my Passage Into Motherhood (a personal favorite!)
And, don’t be afraid to talk to someone about how things are really going. You are not crazy, you are not a bad parent, and you are not alone. Find a local mom’s group if at all possible! Don’t be shy! Because in the words of Ali Wong, “…when you’re a new mom on maternity leave it’s like ’The Walking Dead,’ you’ve just gotta hook up with a crew to survive.”
So beautiful and well said. Thank you for putting into words what I have also felt deeply and often been unable to articulate.