My son was delivered last October at a hospital in New York’s Chinatown, screaming and ruddy, the umbilical cord wrapped around his neck. It was the afternoon, though I didn’t discover that until later, because time had been warped since my admission—my mind had tunneled into a single, obsessive thought: I wanted this baby to survive. I whispered that to him repeatedly as my other intentions dissolved. I had resisted a fetal monitor, an IV, an epidural. Above all, I had been determined to avoid a C-section.
Time had actually been acting oddly for weeks. That autumn offered a string of endlessly gorgeous days that drifted past like a slow, unstoppable river. I sailed past my due date, then the full moon, and began to wonder if I’d be pregnant forever—stuck inside a body housing a baby who kicked so vigorously that, in a moment of absurd panic, I Googled whether it could be an early epilepsy symptom (it isn’t, and please don’t try this)—yet he felt unreal. We didn’t even know his sex. He was Schrödinger’s baby, a total mystery. My maternity leave had started, so my husband and I roamed Brooklyn. We ate spicy dishes and had sex. But each morning I woke up still pregnant, wordlessly sad. The melancholy was a heavy weight, not a thought, and it echoed how I’d felt during my two miscarriages: as if my body couldn’t perform the most natural task it was meant to do, and if I failed at that, what did it mean for everything that followed?
Of course, I understood that childbirth can’t be planned. But what else can you do except plan? I had a midwifery practice and a doula. I had a printed birth plan detailing my wishes: no pain medication, minimal interventions, a 'natural' delivery. I had coconut water; an unattractive blue birth ball that roamed the house for weeks, scaring the dog; and a copy of Ina May’s Guide to Childbirth by midwife Ina May Gaskin, where countless women portrayed labor as empowering, even orgasmic.
But at two weeks overdue, even my easygoing midwives recommended not waiting any longer. That evening, as my husband and I strolled to the hospital, we passed a mural of a snarling tiger; he photographed me standing before it, hugely pregnant, my mouth forced into a tight grin. Woven through Gaskin’s book was the notion that emotional obstacles could stall labor, so a few days earlier I’d finally done something I’d been postponing for weeks: I wrote the baby a letter. Yet all I could articulate was my fear of harming him, and I realized that this fear was exactly why I’d been avoiding the letter. Maybe that was why I couldn’t go into labor—because I felt so inadequate. I didn’t truly believe birth was a vision quest. But perhaps it was. What did I know? I’d never done it. Without even starting, I already felt like a failure.
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The medical staff attempted several interventions to progress labor, but every time I had a powerful contraction, the baby’s heart rate plummeted sharply, sending a team of doctors rushing in with tense expressions. That’s when I lost all sense of time—not from pain, but from sheer terror. Sixteen hours later, my midwife softly recommended a C-section.
After that, events grew chaotic. Under the operating room’s fluorescent lights, nurses shaved me while chatting about their children’s schools. I trembled so intensely that they had to pin down my arms, which had slipped out of the restraints. The doctor pulled and tugged; when it didn’t work on the first attempt, he tried again, which was terrifying. But a moment later, all of that was overshadowed by his arrival—screaming and alive, my son.
My ignorance was boundless. I had never changed a diaper. I had no idea how to calm a newborn, how frequently they needed to eat, or how to create a swaddle. I didn’t even understand the purpose of swaddling. I hadn’t been sure I wanted children until my late twenties, and even then I planned to wait until life felt more stable—which didn’t occur until I was 36, medically classified as geriatric.
We conceived immediately, and I miscarried. 'What did you do?' the gynecologist asked when she couldn’t locate the heartbeat. That’s when I decided I wanted a midwife. I became pregnant again and lost that baby too, which devastated me. By the time I got pregnant a third time, I was 37. I peed on a stick in one of my office’s sterile bathroom stalls and went downstairs to phone my husband, stunned by the news but also because it was Donald Trump’s inauguration day, and the world already felt off-balance. The next day, I attended the Women’s March in Washington, D.C., the baby a secret, not even a seed, but I was already talking to him. 'This is anger,' I told him. 'This is fear.' As he grew, his presence became a background hum. Once I started showing, people would remark—'It’s a boy?' they’d ask, because I was carrying high and forward—and I’d tell the baby, 'See? Everyone is so excited for you to arrive.' Near the end, the woman from my burrito shop leaned down to my belly and yelled at full volume, 'Baby! It’s time to come out!' Sometimes I’d say, 'This is anxiety,' because I was often anxious. 'This is hope.'
“Motherhood is obviously something every woman must figure out for herself, yet I couldn’t hear about others’ journeys without scrutinizing them to see how they mirrored my own.”
Because regardless of political events, something that had been brewing for years was gaining force. Long-dormant stories were erupting into the open—about racism, harassment, pregnancy, childbirth, and motherhood. By the time I returned to work in January, New Zealand’s prime minister was pregnant, as was Illinois senator Tammy Duckworth, who publicly strategized about how she would cast votes while breastfeeding. Meanwhile, a wave of new books was appearing, almost all focused not on the joys or significance of parenthood but on overturning our expectations, on how your mind can become unmoored, on the ugly aspects, the grind. In Nurture, L.A.-based doula Erica Chidi Cohen argues that we should abandon the term 'natural birth' altogether. 'The concept establishes a rigid rubric for achievement, and with that an implicit hierarchy and competitiveness,' she writes. 'All birth is natural. It’s as simple as that.'
Initially, I raced through these books. I devoured Meaghan O’Connell’s And Now We Have Everything in a single day—she describes resenting breastfeeding and feeling guilty for not wanting to have sex with her husband, 'but not bad enough to fuck him.' (The section culminates in a fight at a sex shop where her husband, baby strapped to his chest, has taken her on Valentine’s Day.) There was also Things That Helped by Jessica Friedmann, which opens with a depiction of postpartum depression–induced suicidal thoughts that feels almost illicitly beautiful. And Amateur Hour by Kimberly Harrington, where she admits telling her children, after they interrupt an important work call because one got hurt, 'I think you guys should be bleeding more than that. Like maybe a level of bleeding you can’t control on your own.'
The frankness in these books was incredibly generous, yet I suddenly stopped reading. I realized I couldn’t do it without forming opinions, and I was weary of opinions. It made no sense. Motherhood is obviously something each person must navigate alone, yet I couldn’t hear others’ stories without measuring them against my own. My favorite turned out to be Motherhood by Sheila Heti, a fiction-like meditation on the narrator’s ambivalence about becoming a mother, and I liked it partly because there was nothing parental to compare myself to.
The openness of these books was so generous, but then I abruptly stopped reading. I found I couldn’t engage without having opinions, and I was so tired of having opinions.
This was the delicate territory I feared entering when sharing my birth story with other women, especially those who were pregnant. On one hand, I wanted them to know that a birth can veer far from what you hoped for and still be okay. On the other, I didn’t want them to think that if that happened and they weren’t okay with it, that was a problem. 'You don’t seem like the kind of person who’d have a C-section,' someone recently told me. But the gift of having had one was that I came to understand that the type of birth you have doesn’t necessarily reflect the type of person you are, just as my feelings about my birth didn’t reflect my priorities as a mother. They were, like so much of this journey, beyond my control.
Shortly after returning to work, I watched Diablo Cody’s motherhood-themed film Tully. Early on, the mother played by Charlize Theron is shown dealing with a cycle—diaper change, feeding, pumping, crying—that repeats faster and faster until it becomes a manic frenzy. Afterwards, the younger coworker who saw it with me looked at me nervously. 'Is it really like that?' she asked, and I couldn’t bring myself to say, 'Yes, it is.' Because I didn’t know how to explain that it was, but not only that. It was so many things simultaneously. As O’Connell writes in And Now We Have Everything, 'With stuff this big almost any way of looking at it could be true.'
This tiny baby with a tuft of hair standing straight up on his head—fierce and frantic for my breasts when hungry, his body limp when tired, his fists clenched when not—I would feel buoyant with love for him one moment and utterly exhausted, almost indifferent, the next. I was disgusted with my own body, misshapen in all the wrong ways and places, yet I had never cared less about my appearance. I felt betrayed by my mind, which could barely form a complex thought. At times, I pictured myself as a dull family cow, only good for milking. At night, as my son wailed, I would walk, pat, and rock him, singing lullabies with invented words, until sometimes I started crying too. Once, I became so frustrated that I placed him on the bed next to my husband and said I was too angry to touch the baby at all. But that wasn’t the whole story either. Another night, the baby made a funny noise; I laughed and then looked down to find him smiling back at me, and the joy I felt was so pure and raw it was almost painful. Now he is five months old, and my inadequacies remain infinite, but it has become easier. I know that he sometimes falls asleep immediately after eating, and that sometimes I’ll look down to find his eyes wide as tiny saucers, like a little lemur. I have learned some of his preferences and habits. He cries less and smiles more. I sleep for more than two hours at a stretch. Breastfeeding no longer hurts. I have remembered I have other interests. I’ve been using my phone too much again. I manage to reply to my friends’ texts.
Last summer feels impossibly distant, but there’s one moment I’ve revisited often. Some friends and I had gone to Cape Cod for a weekend in a ramshackle house, and one day we packed a picnic, strapped an even more dilapidated boat to the roof of an old van, and set off—motor rattling—to a marshy lake that, on its far side, bordered a narrow beach. I was nine months pregnant, and leaving town had already seemed risky. Then, in the middle of the lake, crammed into the boat with a yelping dog, one of the oars broke. We managed the rest of the way, aided by a fierce wind that had picked up, but once we reached the beach, it was freezing—too cold to swim, too cold even to stay. I briefly panicked about going into labor on that inaccessible strip of sand, but then I forgot about it. I was with people I loved, and we were laughing, giddy at how the day had turned out—all these events conspiring to make what should have been pleasant into the opposite. This, I remember telling the baby, still suspended in the galaxy of my belly, is happiness. Standing in the midst of the mess—sand in the sandwiches, goose bumps on our skin, unsure how we’d get home. It wasn’t that the moment was perfect. It was that it wasn’t, and that was okay. It was enough.
This article originally appeared in the May 2018 issue of ELLE.
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