What I Imagined Motherhood Would Be, and What It Is

When you give birth to a life, you are also giving birth to a death.

Before

I like at first when I am “mother” and it’s secret. I love secrets. I like when I know, hypothetically, abstractly, that I’m pregnant, but no one else can tell. I’m twenty-eight and married and in grad school and I did not purposefully get pregnant. When friends come over, I hide the ultrasound picture in a kitchen drawer, once in the freezer. I hold my hand against my stomach sitting on the subway, on the couch, at work. I whisper to her, read the books I read for school out loud to her. I try hard to pretend these calm internal shifts look anything like what motherhood might be.

After

I keep telling everyone a story of our younger daughter’s missing pacifier. I teach now at the graduate school where I was a student when I had them. We have two girls now, not just one. They are twenty months apart. Our younger daughter lost her pacifier in the middle of the night, and I crawled under her bed at two a.m. but it was gone. Instead, I brought her into bed with us and have not slept. All day, I keep telling this story as if somehow it explains me. My face is puffy. I’m sad and angry. There are other, messier reasons for this, but I don’t know how to say any of them out loud. I teach three classes, attend a meeting, run into a friend from grad school, an old professor; in each of these instances, I find a way to tell the people with me about this crawling around our daughters’ room at two a.m. as if somehow it holds within it everything about me all at once. It’s so physical, both a little nuts and also completely within the realm of reasonable. It makes me, I think, seem caring, doting—mother—instead of the exhausted, bitter person that I also am.

Before

In my graduate school class, about motherhood and writing, which I signed up for before I found out I was accidentally pregnant, we are reading a book about women giving birth at home. The professor, who wears an asymmetrical vest over a long-underwear top with tiny flowers and no bra, gave birth in a cottage upstate, with her partner and a midwife, and she says there is a dialogue of fear happening in the medical community that forces women to hate the things that make them who they are. You cannot subvert the body, she says over and over each class, and each class I think how much I’d love for her to meet my mom. I have not spoken the entire semester, but I raise my hand the second to last class, though this is not the sort of class in which you raise your hand. Fuck them all, though, I say, once everyone is looking. This is not something I would normally say out loud, but I like the sound of it and I keep talking. I sit up straight. They’re all just doing the same thing, I say, telling us what to do, making us even more afraid.

After

I have the week off of work and am trying frantically to write before I have to try not to be a writer again so we can eat; there is an accident three blocks from our house. It is worse than an accident. A woman, who claims to have a medical condition, has plowed her car into a pregnant woman and the two small children she was with, killing both the kids. In the newspaper, there will be descriptions of the woman, pregnant, on the ground and bleeding, screaming, my baby, my baby, again and again. Our super will have watched the video and want to talk to me about it as I come home from running. I can’t, Jorge, I will say, and I will sprint upstairs. I will walk each of our girls to school afraid to overemphasize the need to be cautious. Caution would not have helped this woman or the children with her. The cars were already stopped at the light and the woman had begun inching toward them then accelerated all of a sudden. No level of caution could have protected them. The descriptions that I read in the stead of the video said the driver dragged the stroller underneath her car until she collided with another car and finally stopped. I take the kids to school and then take the train into the city and sit quiet and drink coffee. My babies, I will think all day, as they are separate from me, as I am working while they’re at school. They will be picked up by the babysitter, even though I could come home and go get them. The babysitter is scheduled. I have so little time for work.

Before

My mother’s father is dying and my sister says this is a reason for me to call her. They love you, she says, of our parents. They’re trying, she says. My husband calls this sister the apologist. The girl inside me kicks till two a.m. and I get up and find my phone. It’s the middle of the night, my mom says. I wear only a sports bra to bed and stare down at the beige round bowl of my belly, watching for signs of the girl as I wait for my mom to talk. Your sister keeps reminding me to eat, she says. Because she doesn’t, I say. That’s no reason for her to make me. There are ripples on my belly, left side, just below the ribs, where the girl kicks and then juts and I watch my skin stretch. I spent the day with him today, says my mother. Your father told me I was being a martyr for missing work. Her voice is a straight line that slides up to a point and slips back down. She hates the hospice people, she says over and over, when I call her a day later. They never do anything, she says. Are you going back tomorrow? I ask. I can see her face firming 1000 miles away. Lips thin and hard, and small blue eyes, perfect suit, her favorite Chanel flats. I have to go to work, she says.

After

Our younger daughter hits her head on concrete after summer camp and my husband is traveling for work. I am horrified but also supposed to do a reading that night. I am tired and she is tired. I want to take her home and put her in her bed. You need to take her to the ER, one of the other mothers says. I have called the pediatrician and they have told me there isn’t anything that they can do. They tell me to watch her. They tell me if she vomits or starts seeming to act weird, I should bring her in. I explain this to this other mother. Oh, I know that, she says. We go to the same pediatrician. They say that, she says. But I still just take her in.

Before

I have pregnancy-induced sciatica and cannot run, a thing I’ve done almost every day for fifteen years. I sit up on the exam table in the thin gray office-issued gown, my underpants still off, and stare the OB down. I’m not sure how to stay sane if I can’t run, I say. Yoga, says the doctor. I wince. Acupuncture. At yoga, we sit along the wall and are supposed to talk about our feelings. It’s not said this way, but this is what they want. Why we’re here. What our bodies are up to. How far along in our pregnancies. Twelve sets of eyes stare at me, hands on bulging bellies, earnest, nodding, leaning against stacks of blocks and rolled up rugs. My voice is hollowed out and wary; I say: I can’t run. Do you have a birth plan? Asks the acupuncturist. I have three pins in my forehead and five in my back. She has attached a black dot to the back of my earlobes and one to each wrist. Natural? I say. Are you doing it at home? She asks. They’re worried, I say. My mom had C-sections. The acupuncturist shakes her head and smiles at me. She wears a pendant that hangs nearly to her belly button on a thick silver chain. Doctors, she says. I nod and the needles wag above my eyes.

After

I go to a reading, at which the writer, who is also a mother, says that when you give birth to a life, you are also giving birth to a death. This feels true. It is. But also, somehow, like most pithy things, I want to poke at it, to crack it open, to consider how it is also not nearly enough. A friend, who is pregnant at the time, comes with me to this reading. Her face is flushed, uncertain; she keeps looking over at me as the writer speaks. I hold her elbow as we walk outside.

Before

Those fucking hospice people, says my mother. They’re killing him. They’ve refused to give my grandfather an IV. They’re going to fire us, she says, if we take him to the hospital, they won’t let us come back. It’s Hospice, mom, I say. They’re killing him, she says again. They’ve been to the hospital for the IV and then back to my Grandparent’s house. My mom is back at work.

After

My friend texts me months later, days after her first child is born, from the town she’s moved too far away where I can’t go to her like I want. She says she cannot stop thinking about the death of her baby. It makes me so scared, she says. How do people live with this? We are dealing with things also, problems with our daughter at school, financial troubles, and, I realize, the reason that quote didn’t wholly destabilize me, did not feel wholly accurate, is because, a birth portends not only death, but, if you are very lucky, there is also, in the meantime, a whole new person in the world whom you must help to figure out how they might live.

Lynn is teaching the current iteration of our 12-month novel generator. If you would like to apply for the next iteration, you can find more information here.