Now this is amazing
There weren’t a lot of upsides to the pandemic but one of its small mercies in my small life was that it gave me a perfect excuse not to throw a baby shower. Over my thirty-five years, I’d frequently attended them, sat around sipping tepid tea making small talk with strangers before gathering in a circle to watch a pregnant friend or relative unwrap a mountain of gifts. I had cooed obediently at the smallness of a Babygro. Glazed over as women went on about breastfeeding. Said ad infinitum in response to the horror stories of motherhood: ‘Gosh.’
If the purpose of a party is to enjoy oneself, a baby shower to me is an anti-party. And so, imagine my feelings when, sometime in my third trimester I received an invitation to a baby shower on Zoom, my baby shower on Zoom. Suddenly I had to look forward to the combination of not just one discomfiting modern-day invention, but two.
When the time came, family and friends from around the world bubbled onto my screen in comic-book rows to awkwardly grin at one another between checking our corners to see how we looked. Following the hellos, I moved my cursor from one spot of my screen to another to introduce my mother to my mother-in-law – my mom on one side of the world, my husband’s mum on the other, weeks away from becoming a mother myself. It was not how I imagined this moment would take place: introducing these two women who I frequently used to explain the outcomes of my life. In this way I was somewhat aware that motherhood was nothing if not consequential. But even with my baby fully grown inside me, amongst the mums in the various rooms, I remained oblivious, an outsider. Motherhood was a members-only club, and I was outside in the queue.
What was this mystery that only experience gave you access to? Mothers I knew were constantly giving each other knowing looks, saying things that sounded significant but weren’t significant to me. As I became more visibly pregnant, I was getting more and more of these knowing looks from mothers I passed in the street. Due in mid-summer, I got used to elderly women smiling at the sight of me, their heads tilting on reflex, and asking how I was coping with the heat. I’d pass mums in the street pushing overloaded buggies, holding their children’s slippery hands, and feel their eyes flit over to my belly, a look in their eyes: what was it? Pity? Excitement? Anticipation? Terror? It was as if the baby in my belly was a package which they had individually wrapped and they were now watching, waiting for me to open it.
It wouldn’t really be a baby shower, they said. It would, in the spirit of a ‘Blessing Way Ceremony’, be a chance for the women in my life to share thoughts and well wishes for the baby to be. In the weeks leading up to the Zoom call, my sister drove around delivering bits of red thread to some of those who would be attending. As the call proceeded my best friend explained that the red thread should be wrapped around everyone’s wrist as a reminder to hold me in their thoughts until the birth of the baby when it should be taken off while thinking of a well wish for my baby. The red thread, she explained, symbolized our matriarchal lineage extending beyond and in front of us. Had the world allowed us, she joked, she would have placed a flower crown on my head.
My other sister read a poem. ‘Your children are not your children,’ she read, ‘They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.’ The rest of the guests on screen were then invited to offer a message or word of advice to me as I sat – fattened up and fidgety – on the precipice of this life-changing event.
One after another, mothers raised their hands to speak while those childless sat silently, appearing as though they dare not speak of what they know nothing about. Having been one of these women for a lifetime, I’d often felt annoyed at the awe-like reverence for motherhood at the expense of other acts of creation and service. It seemed old-fashioned, conservative, narrow-minded, boring. The secret club of motherhood felt exclusionary, weirdly elitist, condescending. Inquiries into the experience of online dating does not do the experience of childlessness justice. On becoming a mother, I knew I would miss my former life, the life of the person who’d sat peacefully on a flight, immersed in a book, on her way to meet a friend in an unknown city, so they could plunge naked into lakes and leave lipstick stains on beer bottles and dance and laugh and natter into the night and then to fall soundly asleep, to sleep, until enough sleep has passed through her. I’d felt so much pity from mothers for not having children and yet these mothers were constantly complaining about how terrible it all was, and then going on to have more children. They did not make sense. Would I soon not make sense?
Though I’d had some exposure to the reality of having kids, having watched what my sisters and friends went through, a lot about maternity looked pretty great to me – escaping the rat race of ambition, tea parties in the park with friends, having a little friend to dress up on Halloween – but the express purpose of my baby shower, I realised, was to assure me that motherhood was no tea party. I was bombarded with warnings. Warned about losing my identity, losing sleep, losing any ability to sneeze without a little bit of wee coming out. I was told to relax, to follow my instinct, to leave the room when it gets too much, simply to breath. Several friends rocked back and forth with babies in their arms, occasionally unmuting themselves to share a message drowned out by the screams of a child. Speaking to a cousin months later she told me she’d felt sorry for me, felt the need to call me after the Zoom call and say it’s not all bad.
There were some positive voices – my mother kept saying what a miracle it all was, and my aunt said that everything my baby would do would be amazing, that he would do one thing and I’d be like ‘I can’t believe how amazing this is’, and then he’d do another thing and I’d be like ‘I can’t believe THIS, now THIS is amazing’. She said it just gets better and better and better. But I didn’t trust optimism. In the clamour to share the bad news, such rosiness I attributed to a combination of personal temperament and faulty memory. They didn’t remember the pain, the exhaustion, the trauma – the words I was more frequently hearing around the experience of motherhood. The mothering era of my adult life has been one of baring it all – not pretending it’s all cuddles and rose-filled Anne Geddes pictures. Since I’d been old enough to bear children, writers such as Rachel Cusk, Jacqueline Rose and Sheila Heti have grappled with the difficult truth of motherhood’s downsides, and I believe a world of good comes from managing the expectations of mothers to be. It’s an innately scary thing: becoming the person on whom all responsibility will fall, being the beginning of blame, sacrificing a good chunk of your life for someone who will frequently hate you. As someone who had gone through adolescence, I knew that much at least. And so, at the end of the baby shower Zoom call I read the poem The Lanyard, in which Billy Collins laughs at himself, thinking back to his little boy self, giving his mother a crappy little lanyard he’d made at summer camp to thank her for everything she’d ever done – for giving him life, and sacrificing her own.
It looked hard. Being a handmaid to a tiny dictator for the foreseeable future. And yet, I wanted a child, wanted to start a bigger family, and having a baby seemed like the purgatory I’d have to pass through to make one. The Zoom call ended, and I waited for our baby’s arrival.
The pessimism, I’d hoped, would prepare me. But nothing could have prepared me for the labour, which felt like a scream of the nerves from the bottom of the back, each contraction an electrocution, a small call for an early death. After months of hypnobirthing, writing and rewriting a birth plan that explicitly stated my desire to give birth without pain relief, very early into those 52 hours of labour, I begged the midwives to ply me with drugs and cut the baby out of me.
People went on and on about sleep deprivation. Being a terrible sleeper for much of my life, I thought I was well-practiced. And when the baby came, the constant night wakings seemed manageable at first, but sleep deprivation is a slow torture. Like love, it is cumulative, gathering over time into something overwhelming, that at any moment could tip you over into doing something stupid. I’d been warned about the pain of breastfeeding, which one friend described, in her Spanish accent, like the feel of angry piranhas. There is a hell happening in dark rooms all over, and that is the hell of being sick with a sick baby. There is a particular indignity to throwing up while your moaning baby suckles at your breast.
Motherhood can feel prison-like, it’s the feeling of being trapped, punished, lonely, bored, of the body slowly breaking through slow movements in a small room. It’s the pain of a bad back, sore wrists, of being bitten, being pinched, having your hair pulled, of trying to control a creature’s mad lion energy. An infant is a small animal who knows no empathy. And looking after this infant makes you so tired you grow short and snappy with everyone around you; so angry with your baby for not sleeping you start to sympathise with parents who’ve shaken their babies and begged them to sleep. There’s no soothing the soul of one who can’t soothe the constant cries of a colicky baby. For many months my baby screamed. It didn’t sound like the sound of life’s longing for itself.
But all this, they’d told me. There was much more they couldn’t have said. Or maybe they did say it but I didn’t hear it, or get it. Even now as I type, I suspect the words will fall short of saying what I mean. They will sound maudlin, cliché, will rely on platitudes. Nevertheless, I’d like to say a little bit about love. Knowing that falling in love and being told about falling in love are not the same thing. But I never knew that’s what having a child would be: a dizzying all-consuming ride of fandom. When our baby was born to the cheers of midwives, those remarkable women who with their sure hands and warm words make the excruciation of childbirth possible, and the boy we called Izaak was placed on my chest and he looked up at me, my heart flowed over, with a rush of relief and happy hormones which if bottled would be pricier than property. And over the months my feelings shaped up to fit into the vessel that could contain all the cliches. I would die for him, would do anything for him, do everything for him and when I’m not doing something for him, I’m looking at photos of him.
Obviously, I’d been a child, so knew a little about the love for a mother, but like The Lanyard expresses, the activity behind the feeling of love from a child and the feeling of love from a mother is lopsided. The latter requires sacrifice beyond what I imagined. It’s one thing to sacrifice a fit and healthy body, sleep-induced well-being, a career, all your time, your freedom, but I didn’t realise I’d have to give up all I thought I knew. It’s a humiliation. My past-self is ashamed of me.
Before Izaak, I’d formed an image in my mind of how a child would appear in my life. Like a prop. An addition who, if I parented a certain way, I could pliably fit into life as I wanted. I could sleep train my baby, wean him off milk, teach him to feed himself at just a few months old, as if, before I knew it, he would be a playful lodger in the corner of our house. How wrong I was. My friend jokes about writing a book called Parenting advice from people who don’t have children. There would be entries encouraging enjoying all the drugs in labour, on what to listen to on your noise-cancelling headphones while sleep training your baby, on letting the baby screen-time all the time so you take some much needed me-time. It would be a bestseller, we agree. And perhaps that practical approach would work wonders. But the thing I failed to remember while making all my parenting plans before having a baby is that the thing that gets in the way is love.
It didn’t take long for Izaak to have me wrapped around his finger. I developed great sympathy for the devouring mother. Like I promised I would never: I let him sleep in our bed, I helicopter parent, I use parent as a verb. I hit the inanimate objects he bumps into and tell these objects they’re naughty purely for his amusement, knowing the psychological hoo-ha about teaching a child to take responsibilities for his actions rather than hitting something when he falls. When I learned I would be having a baby boy I saw it as an opportunity to raise a man who is humble, gentle, knows how to respect women. And then I had a baby boy and I lay on the ground and perched him up on my knees, swinging him side to side as I sang: ‘Izaak’s the king of the castle, mummy’s the dirty rascal’ before I kissed his feet. When I’d dated arrogant men in my young life, I’d often think to myself who made this man think he owns the earth, and now I believe my prior suspicion: it was the mother.
Of all the things I was told about becoming a parent, the most sufficient is this: it is the worst and the best thing you’ll ever do. I have newfound empathy for that maddening habit of people complaining about the horrors of parenthood while continuing to breed. How can something so bad be so good? Perhaps its power is in the paradox of it. The dizzying effect of holding two positions at the same time – swinging back and forth between them, learning quickly through raising a child that nothing lasts long and so knowing that the good like the bad will be back soon enough.
There is so much emotion in having a child, it is so much work, it often feels like everything all at once. While I remain a firm believer in there being a silver strain of wisdom in choosing not to have children, the depth of the experience has made me understand why friends wanted it for me. To know the time, the torture, the primal responses, the timeless everyone-ness of it. I thought motherhood would change me, but what it’s really done is has change my perspective on the world. Walking down the street now blows my mind, because for every person to exist, some mother somewhere had to go through all this – the enormity of the love, the endlessness of the work, the fucking labour. How valuable every life has become, valuable because I now know that no one gets grown with ease. Every person alive is alive because someone gave birth to them, fed them, nursed them when they were sick, and in the words of Maggie Nelson ‘once adequately policed [their] mouth exploring.’
I can’t read the news like before. A murder, a war, a flood, a refugee – I keep imagining the mother behind the person’s plight. What felt wrong before, only feels more so now, because I can’t help imagining the pain of two people: the tragedy of the victim, and the heartache of their mother.
When I walk down the street and teenagers on skateboards knock into the pram I’m pushing or someone fails to offer their seat as I breastfeed my baby on a busy train or when young and beautiful people are drinking their spritz side-eyeing me as I ferry my screaming child past their sidewalk café, I try to remember I was once an oblivious young person and I inwardly tell these fellow mortals to enjoy their oblivion.
Because amongst all of those who are yet to know the fraying reality of having a child, I now see mothers and fathers everywhere. There was the granny eating cake with her daughter at a coffeeshop who, as I sat trying to soothe my howling newborn, kept looking my way and whispering ‘you’re OK, you’re OK’. There was the neighbour who I bumped into, some months after Izaak arrived, who made me cry with relief when she said, ‘it’s hard, isn’t it?’. There was the security guard at the supermarket who escorted me around the store when I was pregnant enough to pop, as though I were something valuable or contained something valuable, and I did. Of all I was told at that baby shower on Zoom, amongst the deluge of warnings – as I watch Izaak grow, see him twist the curls on the side of his head as he falls asleep, when he tries to squeeze into a box half his size or put his small foot in his dad’s shoe, when he bobs his knees to the music, or he sucks on a peach and goes ‘mmmh’ – most often I think of my aunt’s words: ‘now this is amazing, now this is amazing, now this is amazing.’
