Tag: marriage

Something weird happened after I had my first child.

After years of considering myself to be an independent, intelligent, ambitious young woman who—as the 80s girl power mantra went, could do “anything a boy can, but better”—my world imploded. I was not “the woman who has it all,” but a frazzled shell of a human whose domestic life suddenly felt like a scene out of Leave it to Beaver.

I took a year of mat leave, while my husband stayed at work. This left me in charge of keeping a tiny human alive, solo, for approximately 9 hours a day—in addition to prepping meals, attending the requisite baby classes, and attempting to keep the home in some state of order. It wasn’t anything that was discussed; I was the one in the home, and he was the one out of the home. We fell into it, obliviously, and before I realized it I was reliving my childhood, but from my mother’s perspective.

Despite her telling me over, and over again that that I could be anything, anything, in the world—a celebrated neurosurgeon, renowned artist, or even leader of the free world—I was, in fact, not much of anything at all. I was a mom. (Yes, I was blissfully in love with my baby. But I was also really, really, fucking tired.) And my mom, for all her ’80s-brand feminism, was in fact a woman who had put her own career plans on hold to raise three kids.

It didn’t take me long to realize that:

1. The work of caring for the baby wasn’t necessarily hard—but it wasn’t exactly mentally fulfilling. And what mental faculties I’d had were rapidly dwindling, along with my sleep.
2. The work was thankless. There were no colleagues sharing my work space, offering congratulations when I accomplished the feat of unloading the dishwasher, or vacuuming the house. No one called me out for praise when I successfully navigated a diaper blowout, or made it out the door without forgetting any of the infant’s accoutrements (the Sophie giraffe, the diaper cream, the burp cloths, etc).
3. My husband didn’t get it. Apart from the fact that there was now a baby in the mix, the rhythm of his day-to-day life was pretty much the same: wake up, go to work, come home, eat dinner. While mine consisted of nursing, burping, cleaning shit, and soothing—on an endless, merciless loop.
4. The love for your child is a cruel master. You will literally do everything for that tiny human: wake up every 90 minutes to nurse if that’s what is demanded; pace around the hallway for hours on end, jostling them, if it stops the crying; give up the foods that bring you joy because it seeps into your breastmilk and upsets their delicate stomach; sing the same stupid song over and over and over because it makes them gurgle.
5. My brain, and my soul, were slowly decompensating.

Here’s the dirty secret about motherhood that doesn’t get talked about nearly enough: You lose a part of yourself—at least for a few years. And you miss yourself. A whole hell of a lot.

And despite what they say, you truly, truly cannot have it all. You can be an awesome mom, you can have an awesome career, and you can be an awesome wife. But NOT AT THE SAME TIME. If you’re superhuman, you maybe hit two out of three.

As for me? There are many, many days when it’s a complete strike out.