Forgive me, but I don’t know how to explain this massive mental shift other than to tell you how it went for me (with books along the way):

 

 

 

1.           I didn’t know for eight weeks, because I didn’t want to know. (I kind of knew.) I told my therapist I was tired, hungry. My boobs ached. What was up? She did this. That night, after the third positive test, my boyfriend of 20 months laughed, exhilarated; he couldn’t stop smiling. But after a few minutes he could. He poured three fingers of bourbon and stared. The next day, there it wriggled on the OB’s screen: the sweet speck sent to destroy us. We cried. We chose names, told friends. It was wonderful. It was also very bad. We were in no position. We made good money—where had it all gone? Our apartment was the size of a motel room. I panicked so hard, so bizarrely, I had to invent a new term: “werewolfing.” By day I was elated, whispering sweetly to my innards; at night, motherfucking unhinged. From 6:30pm on, I sobbed, screamed, wailed how screwed we were: “We cannot do this, it’s mathematical fact.” Every daycare was either dank and unaffordable or swanky and super-duper unaffordable. Hiring a nanny was like paying rent twice. Should I quit? Should we move—Yonkers, Weehawken? “Dumber people than us do this every day,” my boyfriend said, half as encouragement, half in disbelief.

We could’ve corrected the error. Except we couldn’t, because we didn’t want to.

Meaghan O’Connell’s razor-sharp, ferociously candid memoir, And Now We Have Everything: On Motherhood Before I Was Ready (2018), does a fine job of explaining this apparent contradiction. All pregnancies are emotional shakeups, bringing giddy apprehension at best. But a (kept) unplanned pregnancy is a particular blow. Your vision of your future? Gone. You have to adjust to the gale-force reality of pending parenthood in fast-forward, while also navigating conflicting pressures: You better be only joyful about this, no nuance allowed, or you’re unfeeling, unfeminine; but how dare you want something as vacuous as a baby at the expense of your career, your dreams?! O’Connell is ambivalent but happy but ashamed of her happiness, which fuels her ambivalence. First trimester, the same stuff was bullhorning in my brain:

 

My truest feelings about the baby began and ended with I want it. It was inside of me and I wanted it…[but] that was shit you were supposed to transcend when you were a smart woman. When you were a woman in New York City. When you were a woman with ambitions that ran as deep as your feelings, you were supposed to trust the ambitions, not the feelings.

 

So, I werewolfed on, catastrophizing the night away. The fetus kept demanding stuff: infinite carbs, incessant sleep, fetal EKGs, horse-pill prenatals. At lunch I’d take the subway one stop to nap at home. And eventually the fear just wandered off. It’d been useless: I could be panicked or peaceful, but either way, the kid was coming.

 

 

2.

            A rule of parent life, or maybe just life: Even when things look grim, they usually work out. My boyfriend got a raise. The crib fit (only just) at the foot of our bed. Loved ones bought out our registry. Our reading loft, sacrificed to storage, held toys, a playpen, diapers, pilled hand-me-downs. We learned it was a boy. We went to Hawaii (shit like that—that’s where our money had gone). Driving to a poké place, I remembered with a peeved flinch: no raw fish. A friend had said that Expecting Better, by Emily Oster (2013) mythbusted several overreaching pregnancy don’ts with ironclad research. I skimmed it in the car, climbing a Kona hillside, and rejoiced. A little wine? Fine. Deli meat? Neat. Cup of coffee? Won’t off ye. Mahalo, Dr. Oster.

            Upon our return we visited my oldest, wisest friend, then a father of one. (Now three.) It was billed as a social visit but was transparently needy: “Tell us how to do this,” I pleaded. He said, “It’s easier than you think, because you love them so much.” I pondered this. So lovely, simple. Then he gestured toward the room where his son was napping and said, “I mean, he can be a real shitbrick, too.” Post-birth, he said, “the dad is just a butler-janitor.” His wife, the calmest and most adept mom I know, said the sleeplessness is like losing your mind. I believed her, but did I understand? No. “Why does no one tell you what it’s really like?” new parents often say. They do—it’s just that what they describe is unfathomable until you live it.

 

 

3.

            We went to Italy for my thirty-fifth birthday—pre-pregnancy, we’d booked a walking tour of Tuscany. On a train to Siena, my fiancé mulled that butler-janitor comment as he read Home Game: An Accidental Guide to Fatherhood, by Michael Lewis (2009). (More on that shortly.) Though we couldn’t bear to cancel it, the tour now seemed unwise, shaping up to be a costly, scenic death march. I was twenty weeks. Temperatures were hitting triple digits. Each hike was a hilly 8-12 miles. It was indeed hard, but it was the best week of my life. After that lycanthropic terror, we needed something wondrous, something ecstatic that was only ours. And I think we needed, without knowing it, a team-building exercise, a shortcut to the bone-deep bond we hadn’t had time to forge before this plot twist. We’d spent two years in love, amazed by our luck, but on the geologic timescale of true devotion, and when facing the howling tumult of the newborn phase, two years ain’t shit. Before Italy we were still cautious, on our best behavior, avoiding pooping if the other was home. That Tuscan week—so demonically hot I feared the fetus was boiling alive—was like an extra year of dating, a crash course in each other. He was the steady navigator with an eye on the big picture, the route entire. I was the indomitable workhorse who kept going even when I couldn’t stand to.

 

 

4.

            Though I bought many, the only parenting books I ever liked were those by Louise Bates Ames, each exploring one year of childhood. I ordered Your One-Year-Old while pregnant (it seemed silly but wasn’t—by the time I finally finished it we were planning his birthday party). The prose was quiet, compassionate, a gentle hand inviting you along. I’ve found successive installments just as soothing and illuminating. (Others agree.) You can’t speed your kid’s development, Ames writes. You can’t do much to change their nature. (And they do have an essential nature—something I disbelieved pre-kid and absolutely believe now.) And just by being with your child, Ames writes, “you are teaching him…that he is a valuable and loved individual, that grown-ups are supportive and helpful, that the world is good.” Once again, it all felt so simple. (FYI: Simple is the not the same as easy.)

 

 

 

 

5.

            Give or take a harrowing moment or two, it went down as usual: Broken water, predawn cab, epidural, 12 hours of Food Network, legs pushed up, boy pushed out. He was chill, a peaceful dude. He nursed and slept almost exclusively. We both changed diapers, held him, blathered at him, but because I was on the hook for milk, I was the main attraction. My husband, relegated to the sidelines, felt rather beside the point, disconnected from whatever it was a dad should feel about his kid. Back to Michael Lewis, who writes in Home Game:

 

The thing that most surprised me about fatherhood the first time around was how long it took before I felt about my child what I was expected to feel…I was able to generate tenderness and a bit of theoretical affection, but after that, for a good six weeks, the best I could manage was detached amusement.

 

For my husband, this paragraph was a tremendous relief. Here you are making the hardest sacrifice of your life, all for the poop machine who’s actively ruining it—the one who doesn’t care that you exist. It’s a tough pill to swallow, but it goes down easier if you know it’s okay to feel disappointed, lonely, and not yet smitten with the inert lump now at the center of your universe. Lewis says that early on, he “would have felt only an obligatory sadness if [the baby] had been rolled over by a truck. Six months or so later, I’d have thrown myself in front of the truck to save her.” Future fathers, take note: your love may come on the slow train.

            Me, I felt love instantly. What I didn’t feel was sane.

For five months I slept in spurts, none longer than two hours, and always upright: the baby would only sleep if held, so we spent nights unconscious on the couch, backs screaming, with the kid balanced on our laps. (Don’t do this. It’s the least safe way for a newborn to sleep, save for letting them nap with a pack of dingoes.) The fatigue hurt, like a hot wire in the eyeball, but it wasn’t the worst part—it was how it warped everything. It ate time: I’d realize I hadn’t eaten in a day, that I’d had to pee for hours. It obliterated perspective: I lost the ability to understand this dark period as temporary. One night the baby cried for two hours, and in our slippers, we fruitlessly walked him up and down Central Park West to calm him. I sobbed. He was broken. In the funhouse mirror of exhaustion, this wasn’t merely a rough night. It was the new order. He’d cry forever, I knew it. I sent an SOS to a mom friend who replied, “It’s gas. Have hubs bicycle his legs while you get some sleep.” I couldn’t bear to; being apart from the baby felt dangerous, like if I looked away, he’d die.

The kid ripped a few farts, was fine. I learned nothing; the fatigue also repelled logic.

It was also lighter fluid on my anxieties, which were that I’d never be alone with my husband, never write another book. And I felt certain someone was going to hurt my child, had constant visions of a madman plunging a knife into the stroller; of an ill-defined apocalypse that would loose marauders upon a lawless city, roving gangs who’d kill my kid for sport. Ludicrous now, monstrously real to me then. I’d see headlines about infants dying of neglect, atrocities against Rohingya children, and bawl for hours. During my husband’s paternity leave, we’d gone for walks to remind ourselves of the world, and when we passed childless folk I’d think, You’re so lucky you still get to be a person. Once I was on my own, I was too afraid to go outside other than to drag myself and the baby to therapy, holding blissfully still with my eyes closed while my son and therapist cooed at each other.

Time passed. People visited. I watched infinite TV. My dosage was upped. At four weeks, the baby grinned. Christmas came. And by week six, we were all mostly okay. I mean, I was still not myself for a while—I vaguely recall, at about the five-month mark, frothing about the evils of sleep training in the direction of my sister and brother-in-law’s blank faces—but once I could string six hours of sleep together, I was human again. That’s parenting: It sucks it sucks it sucks it will never stop sucking, then it’s over and you’re on to the next impossible task.

Another book I wish I’d had then is Little Labors, by Rivka Galchen (2018), a memoir in tiny vignettes (each the perfect length for bleary postpartum reading). It meditates on the newborn ordeal, the things you can’t know until you’re hip-deep in it, wondering how it came to this—but enumerates all the wonderful stuff, too. Galchen writes of the early days after the birth of her daughter, aka “the puma”:

 

…The paradox was that as my life had become a day of unprecedented length, a day that I was calculating to now be almost three thousand hours long (in doing the math I realized that since the puma’s arrival I had not slept more than 2 ½ hours in a row), my thoughts had become unprecedentedly interrupted, as if every three minutes I had fallen asleep, curtailing any thought, morphing it into dream, which, when I woke, was lost altogether.

 

That about sums it up.

And yet! Kids are just so…wondrous. On the toddler puma:

 

She has not yet encountered a quantity of olives that is sufficient. When she makes a scribble on paper, the result makes her giggle. When she finds herself trapped in her crib and wants out, she calls out to me; when I enter the room, she says, “Eyes?” …When she sees a bottle of milk being poured out for her, she laughs. Little holds more interest than a set of stairs, or a handicap-access ramp. Always she is the first to notice the moon.

 

            In one of those early therapy sessions (tit out, baby asleep), Dr. S said, “a parent’s job is to discover their child.” For a moment, I mentally zoomed out from these agonies that felt huge but wouldn’t last—the fatigue, fog, fear. What had I learned of my boy? He was a happy thing. Stubborn. Friendly. Curious, always reaching to touch. Loved and loving. Same guy he is now.

            A friend once said of parenthood, “It’s all a phase, even the good stuff.” Happily, and then later sadly, it’s true. I’m often alone with my husband. I did write another novel. Nobody hurt my son. (Well, once, as he slept on my lap, I conked out and my forehead dipped and I headbutted him. He didn’t seem to mind.) We shared a nanny with a lovely family that still sends us Christmas cards. Now he’s in daycare, which we call Cool School. He’s nearly four. The days are long—last night he raged for twenty minutes after being denied a fourth cookie—but life is just life, with a dear, miniature companion.

For all I’ve said here, I haven’t come within a mile of describing how hallucinatory pregnancy and early parenthood really are. (Nor have I broached the actual raising of a child, for which we’ll need like eight more syllabi.) But even if I captured it perfectly, you wouldn’t believe me. When your time comes, I hope these books ease and aid your journey through that strange land. Eventually, you do leave it, heading off to be a person once again.