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The first few months of motherhood are all about adorable cooing and magical parent-child bonding. Right?
I have just put my 6-week-old baby's car seat into the shopping cart at Target. I think we'll be able to make it without incident. Pampers and out. This is my first baby and this is our first trip solo. We have no choice. There are no Pampers left. And there is poop. I fantasize that someone will peer into the cart and say, "Oh, what a beautiful baby. So quiet. So content." And she will think, what a good mom that woman must be. But no. Blair starts to scream. Sounds that should be reserved to warn of the arrival of an ax murderer. Cries that I've grown accustomed to over the past 6 weeks since I listen to them 5 to 6 hours a day. Shrieks that, nonetheless, turn the disapproving heads of everyone in Target. They don't care that I have slept 10 hours in the past month, haven't showered in 3 days, and have sore nipples. They don't care that I can't figure out what I'm doing wrong breast-feeding, which is keeping Blair from gaining weight, or what I'm doing wrong generally that's making her cry so much. They don't care that I call my husband at work hourly, bawling that I'm the most horrible, terrible mother on the face of the earth.
I bounce the cart up and down while inching toward the Pampers, because we need the Pampers and I can't just leave, because this is my life now. I need to be able to go to the store with this child who has yet to acknowledge my existence as anything other than a milk truck. We grab the Pampers — four packs, because hell knows we aren't going to be trying this again any time soon. The wails have become so high-pitched that I think I hear glass breaking in housewares. The woman in the checkout line in front of me also has a child, maybe 4 years old. She is so well-behaved, so still, that I wonder if she's cardboard. And I want to just walk out of Target and leave my daughter there, screaming, the V-shaped blue vein popping out of her scalp. The mom turns around. "You know, I can't even remember when my Caitlyn was that age."
And, at that moment, I realize it is true: I am the most horrible, terrible mother on the face of the earth. In the years ahead, I will not be able to tell a young mother, "I can't remember when my Blair was that age." Because these past 6 weeks have been the most horrible, terrible weeks of my entire life. I have never cried so much or felt more out of control. I have never wanted so badly to kill my husband, my mother, myself, the postman, the dog, and the woman I just passed in the cosmetics department whom I swore I heard say, "Why doesn't she just give that child a binkie?"
This is not how it is supposed to be. People warned me I would be exhausted. But that's it. So I imagined spending my maternity leave a little sleepy, but walking leisurely through the neighborhood — not only back to my prepregnancy weight but also wearing makeup — and contentedly breast-feeding on the bench in the park, next to the blooming azaleas.
I was mistaken. And I'm not shy about saying it. When I run into a young coworker on the street 5 weeks in and she asks, "Are you having so much fun?" I answer matter-of-factly, "No," and then watch her eyebrows crumple together, as if I'd just told her I was really a man. When friends stop by to meet Blair and she starts to cry so forcefully that snot shoots out of her nose, I say, "Good thing she's cute." They laugh. They think I'm kidding. To avoid the looks of horror I see when I refer to Blair as "The Devil Child," I decide to stop broadcasting what a bad and unhappy mother I am. Instead, I smile and say what people told me I'd be feeling: "I'm in heaven."
Blair is 8 weeks along, and I try to go public again, this time meeting another new mom for lunch in the park. My daughter is actually content, letting me eat my panini in peace, while Rebecca's daughter — 7 weeks older and, reportedly, a disgustingly pleasant child — is screaming. I feel more satisfied by this than I should. And when I glance at Rebecca, I see the same look I've seen staring back at me in the mirror for the past 2 months. If the look could talk, it would say, "What is wrong with me?"
"Sometimes ..." Rebecca pauses, her voice soft. "Sometimes ... I just want to tell her to shut up." Rebecca looks down at the sidewalk, as if waiting for me to pull the tube of Desitin out of my diaper bag and flog her with it. I'm shocked. In fact, I'm so shocked, so relieved, so overjoyed that I stand up and throw my arms out as if to hug her.
"Sometimes I do tell her to shut up!" I say. Rebecca stares at me.
Then she says, "Sometimes I tell her to shut up, too!"
And it suddenly all makes sense.
Nobody told us. In the 57 books I read while I was pregnant, the 22 childbirth classes I took, the 318 discussions I had with mommy-friends about labor and strangely abundant flatulence, no one warned about the anguish of the first 6 weeks after the baby was born. But the truth was, I wasn't alone. I wasn't a horrible, terrible mother. I was normal. Blair was normal. This all was normal. It sucked, yes. But it sucked for everyone.
Trouble is, mothers forget. They say that if a woman didn't completely forget the pain of childbirth, she would never have another child. Childbirth? That's a walk in the park with Matthew McConaughey compared with the real threat to the survival of the human race: those first 6 weeks. The next day, when I call a college friend, a mother who just had her third, I confess that I'd gladly have relived the 23 hours of labor and the epidural wearing off 10 minutes before Blair came flying out if I could have skipped the first month.
"I told you it would be heaven," she sarcastically says. "That's what I call the haze of sleep deprivation and blinding nipple pain."
Another friend of mine, Meghan, is lucky. She's pregnant. And I'm going to prepare her. Blair is now 12 weeks and doesn't cry as much. She giggles. And just the other day, when she woke up from a nap and saw me, she smiled as if she thought I was the most fabulous, wonderful mother on the face of the earth. No wonder mothers forget. Fortunately for Meghan, I have yet to sleep for more than a 3-hour stretch. So I still have at least one foot in the trenches. And I'll tell her: You will break into heaving sobs. You will feel like a failure. You will want to tell your crying baby to shut up. You will walk to the door of your house with your shirt hanging open and both boobs hanging out with the baby sucking on one and yell at the person who has just rung your doorbell, "What the hell do you want from me?!" Okay. Maybe I'm the only person who did that. And, although you will feel like you are, you're not alone.
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