When I became a mother, I did not tell my own.
Cocooned in pandemic isolation, I did not have to tell anyone at all that I was pregnant for a good while. Only my husband and I knew when nausea propelled me to the bathroom or watched my belly swell. Before conceiving, I worried that I would feel like I was hosting a parasite; I feared dissociating from my body once new life took root within it. Instead, after my first ultrasound, I enjoyed the sensation of carrying a secret deep within me. The baby inside me wasn’t a stranger, she was mine, at least as much as a tiny human could belong to anyone. I knew her better than anyone else, would know her better than anyone else, for a long time.
My brother reacted to the news with a mixture of shock and betrayal. I had spent most of my life adamant that I didn’t think I would have kids. “I’ve lost a lot of friends to children,” he told me. He had not thought he would lose me to parenthood, too.
I sympathized. For years, I was not sure it was possible to become a mother without becoming, in at least some ways, monstrous. It seemed inevitable that resentment, bitterness, and erratic tendencies would grow apace with each child. In college and after, as I collected examples of apparently stable, reasonably content mothers with good relationships with their daughters, I worried that these were the exception, not the rule—and that regardless, my own destiny must lie along my family lines: my mother. Her mother, whose permanently childlike state was gentle and comforting in a grandmother, but undoubtedly insufficient for a parent. My great-aunt, whose postpartum depression triggered a breakdown that led to decades in an institution. My great-grandmother, whose postpartum psychosis once drove her to chase her children around with a butcher’s knife, possibly convinced they were chickens. The less dramatic but much closer warning of my father’s mother, who told me during a family history interview that she had never particularly wanted children, though she had five of them.
But I knew that I wanted my husband to be a father. And partway into the first year of COVID-19, after months of therapy weighing future regrets—and ascertaining that Trump would not be re-elected—I decided it was worth trying to become a mother. I decided that giving birth during a pandemic, in an age of terrifyingly rapid climate change, could be an act of radical hope. That I was willing to remake myself.
My doula talked with me at length about what to expect from a labor with minimal medical interventions. She told me that she viewed pain as natural, not something to automatically try to prevent or banish, but said she didn’t want me to suffer. When I asked her what the difference was, she answered, “Pain is productive. Suffering is just suffering, with no gain.”
In the eleven days right after giving birth to my daughter, I slept only a handful of hours—an average of perhaps two per night, sometimes none at all. During the precious little time I had between breastfeeding the miraculous but demanding new creature, I lay wide awake, hating each minute as it slid out of my grasp.