My father said life without children is not complete. And I internalized
that, but I also at the same time knew I wanted to be a writer and an
artist and I was never one of those kids or girls who played marriage who
wanted babies. I didn't play with dolls that was just not part of my dream.
So having an actual child is a much richer and more complicated
experience, I think, than what. I thought it was when I was a little girl.
Looking back, I realized just just how isolated I was because I think it
must be really nice to go through a pregnancy with your friends and your
family around you to support you. I didn't have that village around me of
, you know, friends who'd had babies or aunts or. None of that. The day we
found out we were pregnant, I think was also the day, if I remember
correctly, that he passed his dissertation. They were like really sort of
close to each other and then within months he had a job in Arizona and we
left Charlottesville and all of our friends. And landed in Arizona in July
, I think, and I was pregnant. And it was a little. Jarring People would
say that I looked, I was very skinny and, you know, I kind of looked like
I swallowed a basketball like that was sort of the only place where the
weight. Showed Like a lot of women, I think, you know, I, I didn't like my
body and I thought it needed to be different and. After I gave birth, I
was like, no, my body's good, my body's a machine that can do an
incredible thing and I felt much more connected to my body. I think that's
what it was. I don't think I'd ever felt particularly connected to my body.
I wasn't really in it a lot of the time. And having Anna change that
being pregnant, I think changed that. It was like a project. It was like
my body had this really interesting project and I was kind of following
along and I kind of I kind of couldn't believe that my body was doing that.
The whole pregnancy was very smooth. I'd had some depression before the
pregnancy and somehow. When I was pregnant, it's like my moods stabilized
. I was even keeled really no sort of complications whatsoever. I'm kind
of effortless, you know, up until the end you just want the baby out. It's
like, OK, it's that your home is too small, you need to come out into the
world and it was 2 weeks late. I had about. 24 hours of, I don't know if
it was false labor or Braxton Hicks, but I had a friend who was a midwife
, interestingly enough, and she checked me and she's like, yeah, you're
you're dilating, you know, but you're not at the point where you should go
to the hospital. So I did a lot of, you know, sitting in the bath and
walking around and we went to the hospital like 4 a.m. something like that
eventually.
They informed me that I was stuck. I was 10 centimeters dilated on one
side and 8 centimeters dilated on the other one and I wasn't progressing.
And so they wanted to give me an epidural and then Pitocin to get things
going again. I didn't want an epidural, but at that point I think I was
ready to have Anna and ready to be done with it. So I said, OK, and Anna's
father said that that was the part where it became sort of scary for him
because. There were needles and I was, you know, on the bed like a patient.
About 20 minutes later I gave but they didn't even have to do the Pitocin.
They gave me the epidural and I guess my body relaxed. I feel like I've
just been working so hard to get this baby out and I had been anticipating
a small dark haired child because I was a small pale baby with dark hair.
My brothers were small, pale babies with dark hair. My mother and father
in different countries had been small pale children with dark hair, and
she had copper hair. She had like flame. Colored copper. Hair and I just
realized this is. A whole other person. This is an individual who's going
to turn into her own person so no longer just somebody who's part of your
little projected fantasy about motherhood, the reality of I am fully. And
almost solely responsible. For this small person who will become a grown
up, that's. That's big and I think for a woman especially that's. You have
to go through a readjustment. I had given birth to Anna, but Anna in a way
had given birth to to me as a mother, in other words, not literally, but
She, she made me a mother. I mean, this was like a whole different self.
And without Anna, that never would have happened. I don't think it's
better or worse, you know, it's. Very, very different, and that was
exhilarating and. Then I would say within the next 24 hours kind of
terrifying.
Cuz in your fantasy, right, you're still you, you just have a kid and. I,
I wanted to stay me and I wasn't sure how I could. Become a stereotypical
you know mother of what I saw as a stereotypical mother and still be me. I
think it was a kind of identity crisis and I, I realized having children,
right, having a baby, you gained something critical but not in the short
term you lost something, right? And so you had to sort of cope with that
loss. I had a child like a mother gives birth you give something away in a
sense and you get it back tenfold, but initially. It's losing something,
literally the baby out of your body and then also a sense of kind of. Who
you were I mean, I remember, you know, looking at women's magazines, those
were a guilty pleasure of mine. And after I had Anna, like in the weeks
after I had Anna, I just looked at those like, I can't make heads or tails.
I don't, who are these for? They make no sense. It was like they were
written in a foreign language. Because what I was looking for was
information that was so much more kind of primal and. Just about how to
survive. I did have postpartum anxiety and I was told postpartum anxiety
wasn't a thing, and Anna was an easy baby. Anna was not colicky, but I get
this rising panic. I don't know what it was. It was this sense of being
trapped. That was really frightening. I joined a writing group called
Mothers who Write. Pretty early on and I tried to write. About how I felt
that, you know, feeling like. When are we ever going to be able to get
back to our own creative selves, you know, all of this stuff that There's
not a lot of room for, I think, in the traditional. Notions of motherhood.
And so to find a place where there were women who were mothers but who
also wrote who saw the world through that writer's perspective and saw
motherhood through that writer's perspective, that was really reassuring
because it's like, oh we can talk about the crappy stuff we can talk about
postpartum depression, postpartum anxiety, you know, there's no Mother's
Day card for that mother it's. The selfless Mother who, you know, that
that giving tree, we love our children fiercely, but I don't think we're
any of us that tree stump.
About a week and a half after I gave birth, she started pooping blood just
like straight blood. They couldn't really figure out what was going on.
They thought that either she'd contracted some sort of stomach virus or
she was allergic to my breast milk. And I had been going to Leeche Lake
religiously before giving birth, so I was like, there's no way she's
allergic to my breast milk. That's not possible. They told me not to
breastfeed, that I should put her on Alimentum, which was this very
expensive formula that came in a can. And of course all the Leleche league
ladies said, oh no, you can't do that. You can't do that. You must
breastfeed her. So I started with the elementum, but I was pumping breast
milk too, right? Because, you know, she was going to need my breast milk
like that. And the Laleche league ladies, they said, Oh, well, you, you
need to pump, you need to mimic the baby's feeding cycle, so you need to
be pumping every 2 hours. So I'm trying to feed the baby. The bottle and
pump every 2 hours, and then my mother was the one who said you're making
yourself crazy. You Need to just give her the bottle and she's OK. And and
she was, but I continued. Pumping breast milk and occasionally trying to
put her back on the breast milk. And every time I did the blood returned,
saying to the pediatric gastroenterologist, I really want. Anna to have
breast milk. And she said You're being ridiculous, she said, if this were
a third world country where the water was compromised, you know, of course
, breast milk, but. The the the differences are sort of. Minimal, and you
should feel fortunate because there are other children who've come in with
very, very similar. Symptoms who may not leave here. You know, my kid was
in for 2 or 3 days and then was able to go home and yeah she was on crazy
expensive formula that came in a can that we had to pack in our luggage
anytime we went anywhere because we weren't sure they would sell it where
we were going but she was fundamentally healthy. And I've been so
brainwashed by the Leeche league that I had the temerity to say to my
mother, who had delivered, by the way, me and then twins, right, and
raised us, you know, pretty capably. Yeah, should you really be giving
them a bottle? Like, what about nipple confusion? Like really shouldn't
breast milk, it shouldn't they? I, I look back and I realize that first
baby you're just grasping. You have no. Clue really and you're looking for
gospel, right? And so you kind of take it where you find it and then I
think if you parent well you sort of realize no baby should be parented by
one approach. You need to tailor your approach to the. To the child, so
the very early like I'm going to pump every 2 hours and give my child
formula was kind of crazy. I remember having this revelation when Anna was
little and we were on an airplane, and now people talk about it quite a
bit. When the oxygen mask comes down and you're with a child, what do you
do? You put it on the kid first. No, no, you don't. You put it on yourself
first because if you put it on the kid first and you pass out, you're
useless. So you have to put your own oxygen mask on first. You have to
take care of yourself. I really had to value myself more and I really had
to take care of myself if I was going to be able to take care of Anna. So
that in a way gave me permission to take care of myself, to value myself.
Cause I, I kind of hadn't. Before then. When you become a mother. It's,
it's really altering, profoundly altering. I don't think I ever felt
Quite as close to death as I did when when Anna was born, it's because
you're at that. Door, it's the same door I was at when my father died.
3 years before she was born, right? It's the door where you say hello and
goodbye. And you can't be at that door and not think about. Passing
through it.
So Anna connected me. Back to my father. Who was the center of my world.
She connected me to myself. In a funny way, that's where my father was.
And
She connected me.
Forward in a funny way. I feel like in the same way that my father is
around, I will be around. Not literally, right, but. My father shaped me,
I've shaped Anna, even if Anna doesn't choose to have children. Every life
she touches, every person that she has a relationship with, or, you know,
the ripple, that's the ripple out, that's connected.