Three in the morning A small lamp in the corner made the walls of the lavender nursery glow. The sound machine whistled in the background. My first born had fallen asleep on my nipple and was cranky when I tipped her over to burp. In protest, I felt, she emptied her stomach and all my precious milk, down my breasts, the front of my bra and into my arms, before she screamed in hunger again. She was always crazy. I was always crying. I covered the slime with a blanket so she could feed on the other breast without getting wet, but she got worse when I kept interrupting her to burp. I was cold, wet and my free nipple was bleeding. It’s been like this for months. counting hours of sleep at a time, both of us needy and irritable. Then I tiptoed into the bathroom, took off my wet clothes and not for the first time that night, wiped myself off, and while looking for a clean shirt I passed the mirror and saw it: I was translucent.
I couldn’t tell you when I started disappearing. Despite the extra baby weight, I had shrunk to a shadow of my former self. I couldn’t stand the joy of motherhood or the new person I could become. I could only mourn the loss of who I was. I missed nice clothes and lunches with colleagues and dates and dangling earrings that smelled like perfume instead of spit, but also sleep, oh, I missed sleep and conversations about things other than pregnancy and maternity.
I was fading.
It was so subtle, the shift from me—an interesting person. to me—a body. in me—a host of vessel of flesh. Transparency by: what are you doing How are you feeling? To: How is the baby?
I felt it in my doctor’s office. The lack of interest in my nausea or heartburn, or the nagging thoughts or the terrible carpal tunnel pain I was just waiting to ignore, and the focus on everything baby. how is mom They asked, but didn’t wait for an answer before pushing me onto the scale and putting me on a blood pressure cuff.
Soon they were friends and relatives. Questions about the baby’s shower or health or name or nursery. Occasionally questions about what I thought or planned, but always related to parenting. Never actually for me. That sounds like I’m blaming everyone else – I’m not. I was too.
I quit my job. I felt too fat to leave the house. I was obsessed with the baby too. I was completely lost trying to be good at something that, despite my best efforts, I was clearly terrible at. I didn’t see that with each step towards motherhood, I it was done more and more transparent. And it was about three months after the birth of my first child that I discovered I was invisible, even to myself.
I have never been one to dream of motherhood. I love my children, but they were never what I saw as my purpose in life, and early motherhood was terrible. I was a shell, a hollow husk of a person, existing only to meet the needs of others. My husband and I had recently moved to a new state and I quit my job to stay home with the baby. I was isolated and alone and losing my mind.
I was a ghost.
Fortunately, three years later after my second child, I sought treatment and discovered PPD and had an amazing therapist suggest that part of my treatment should be finding a community and something I could do that was just for me.
I have friends who in a similar situation chose fitness, some chose to go back to school or entrepreneurship. I chose to write because I felt so tired, so interrupted. I felt like I was never allowed to say what I thought or felt about the hardships and pain of motherhood. For loneliness and isolation. How I never got it right and constantly felt like I was messing it all up. I was never good enough.
Fatherhood destroyed me. Motherhood never felt like a blessing, instead it felt a lot like grief and I couldn’t understand why I didn’t know that before. Why hadn’t anyone warned me? I thought I must be the only one who felt this way. Every time I tried to express my unhappiness, I was met with some trite comment about enjoying every minute or how some women couldn’t have children. Apparently, I was not only a bad mother, but also a bad person.
I joined a local writing group and started writing short memoir pieces about how I was struggling, just in case there was anyone out there who felt the same way. About not sleeping and how I didn’t like breastfeeding. About how my body was too big and foreign, and about my frustration with certain people in my life. About how I couldn’t wait for my kids to be old enough to go to preschool so I could have a whole hour to myself occasionally. I found homes for these pieces in online magazines and started building a community. I wasn’t alone. I wasn’t the only one.
As my work became more widely read, writing about my life began to gain exposure, and frankly, I don’t read a lot of nonfiction for fun. I prefer stories. So I started writing them and found that I could explore all the same emotions and hurts through fiction as I could through memoir, except I didn’t feel like I was pulling all the skeletons out of my closet and onto the lawn for them to see. the neighbors.
I spent fewer hours crying in the bathroom and more hours in front of a keyboard.
I published my first short story, Porchlight Salvation, in 2016 in a small, now defunct, literary magazine (although you can read it in my short story collection) and it is, of course, about motherhood. As it is, everything I write, really. my debut novel, Songbirds and stray dogs, it came out in 2019, yes motherhood. A collection of my short work was published last year, it is said Here in the Darkness, and was nominated for the prestigious Anthony Award and two of the stories were named The best of American mystery and suspense Featured list, and you betcha: it’s about motherhood. My work is a mix of crime and literary fiction often called grit lit, and it’s not an easy read because at the heart of it all is motherhood, and motherhood is not easy.
It’s not the publications or the accolades that sharpened my edges or gave me my color back, though. It’s every time in the last almost 10 years that I put myself first. When I held onto my personality with two hands and left my babies with their dad, or the toddler, and went to a coffee shop to work, or went to a class, or met with my writing group. She recognized that to be the person I deserved to be, next to the mother my children needed, I couldn’t be invisible, I had to meet my needs as well as theirs, and that meant I could. Don’t allow others, or myself, to limit me to being a ghost.
Sometimes I mourn the years I lost, but the benefit of being a writer is that I come back again and again. In every story I write, I offer that mother I was, grace. I whisper in her ear that it’s okay, and that trying your best is good enough, and that if she occasionally puts herself first, she’ll come back.
