The Stacked Deck of Motherhood

I have long believed that the whole game of pregnancy, childbirth and parenting holds at least one bad card for all women. For some, getting pregnant is the hard part. Other women have traumatic childbirth experiences that require years of recovery. And there are those for who pregnancy is a breeze, birth is nothing complicated, but parenting doesn’t come so easily. I have yet to meet even one woman who hasn’t struggled somewhere along the way.

When you struggle in the early stages—with getting pregnant, with staying pregnant, with a difficult pregnancy or a difficult childbirth or with breastfeeding or a difficult newborn—it’s hard not to see it as a sign of something. That you shouldn’t be a mom. That you’re a bad mom. That motherhood doesn’t come easy to you.

I’ve held my fair share of bad cards.

I have two kids, but have been pregnant four times. My first was at 19 and ended with an abortion. Even as an ardent pro-choice woman, that decision still colored me, felt like a failing.  I had thought of abortion as something fine for other people, but not something for me. Until I was there.

It wasn’t until many years later, when I wanted to be pregnant, that I realized how much meaning I had assigned my earlier experience. All of a sudden, it was a punishment well-deserved (so I harshly thought to myself) that I didn’t get pregnant the moment the intention popped into my head. In retrospect, it didn’t take long. But for those few months of “trying” (a euphemism if ever there was one), I was worried. Worried that I missed my chance, that I wouldn’t get a second one.

When my second conception ended in a ruptured ectopic pregnancy, that feeling deepened. I was being punished. I wasn’t meant to be a mother. There was something wrong with my body. That experience, complete with the loss of a third of my body’s blood, surgery and a complicated healing process, left me scarred. The scar on my body was deep and made it look like I’ve had a c-section.

The internal scars were more painful, and that awful feeling was deepened by the mystery about when or whether I would ever get pregnant again. The months between my second and third conceptions were sad. It was hard to be around anyone that reminded me of pregnancy or babies or moms.

The third time around, I was much luckier.

That pregnancy brought me my daughter. While pregnancy was fraught with things that felt worth complaining about at the time, it turned out that all of it was a “normal” part of the process. A happy pregnancy in retrospect, even if it felt awkward to live through.

My labor, though, wasn’t normal. It was a 4-day prodromal affair, a possibility I’d hardly paid attention to in my childbirth class. Kind of like the possibility of the ectopic pregnancy before it.

Again, I saw myself as someone who drew hard cards.

Motherhood had a way of easing me out of the feeling that I was being followed by a dark cloud, even as it had plenty of storms of its own.

But I finally felt lucky. I’d made it to motherhood. From early days, my daughter was easy—smart, beautiful, healthy, happier than I could even understand, a pure blessing. Being a mom was hard, but she was easy. Luck of the draw.

Then we gambled again. My second full-term pregnancy wasn’t nearly as cute as the first one. All those “normal” symptoms were even less fun that time around. But I made it through and wound up with a second birth that made me feel strong and capable and blessed. Another lucky card.

And then came nursing. With my second baby, I got mastitis five times before I gave up nursing. I also suffered some pretty terrible postpartum depression and anxiety. Quitting breastfeeding to return to the antidepressants I needed was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done.

When I was agonizing over the choice to stop nursing, I felt so judged. I’d nursed my first baby a few months beyond the one-year ideal. And I made it to nine months the second time around—farther than a lot of women can manage. I should have been happy, but it wasn’t my timetable. I was failing in my own mind, and again, my body was failing me. Failing to be able to do this womanly thing it was meant to do. I wasn’t strong enough to give my second child what I gave my first.

With all of that weighing down, I sent an email to our local parenting list-serv about my struggle to stop nursing. I live in a crunchy, hippy kind of town, where midwives and La Leche League rule the roost. I thought I would be attacked from all sides and encouraged to nurse through anything, no matter the cost to me. I secretly wanted to be told to keep nursing, so my contrarian self could somehow feel vindicated in quitting.

Instead, I got nothing but support. Dozens of emails encouraged me to do what was best for me, congratulated me for what I’d already done, sympathized with my struggle with mastitis, empathized with the guilt and the feelings of failure. Not one person told me to keep nursing through the pain—both physical and emotional. Not one woman said the slightest thing to make me feel bad about my body or what it was capable of doing. Not one.

I can’t explain how meaningful their camaraderie was to me.

Those early years of failed pregnancy, pregnancy and mothering of infants felt so fragile. I was so quick to think: Is there something wrong with me as a woman that I can’t do this pregnancy thing easily? Does the fact that I can’t keep nursing mean that I am less of a woman? Some kind of weaker mother?

Looking back now, I think: Those were my cards. That was the hand I was dealt.

Everyone holds different cards and no one has a perfect hand. Just because we can’t see that someone else has struggled—with fertility, with pregnancy, with depression, with nursing… with motherhood—doesn’t mean they’re winning some game we are losing. If it’s not one thing, it’s another. It’s just not easy. At least, all of it isn’t easy. Not for anyone.

Motherhood is a stacked deck. We’re dealt the hand we’re dealt. I think it helps to think that every woman around has had at least one bad card, something she would discard is she could. And we all have our best card, too. Something to hold on to, to build a hand around.

The best part is—we get to discard what doesn’t serve us well. And we get new cards all the time.

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The Myth of Choice Parenthood

My mom was 21 when I was born. By 25, she had four kids. Today, that has shock value. I get tired just thinking about it.

I was a full decade older than my mom when I was a tired new mom with babies who wouldn’t sleep. It’s no wonder I was always tired. Being up all night in your twenties is easy. I was otherwise occupied on my 20-something late nights.

When I became a mother at 32, I certainly didn’t have the energy (or the body) that I had at 22. Three years later, pregnant again at 35, I was even more tired. The exhaustion of parenting is cumulative. Being pregnant starts it off with a bang, followed by seemingly endless night wakings, and then they learn how to talk… and you learn about a whole new depth of exhaustion.

Coming up on my 40-somethings, one bad night’s sleep can really throw me for a loop.

When I was 20 and pregnant, I made a choice not to have a baby. I had an abortion, stayed in college, and took the time to (kind-of) figure out what kind of life I wanted while it was still all mine. 

Even at 27, newly-married, I still wasn’t ready for a baby. I remember the feeling very clearly—on my honeymoon in Paris, failed birth control left me in tears in fetal position in one of those short, deep French bathtubs. The idea of a baby was terrifying.

We are only two or three parenting generations into birth control being legal for married couples—and (mostly) reliable. The Supreme Court is still ruling on cases that impact women’s access to birth control. And yet the sense that we can control our family planning is almost taken for granted.

Don’t get me wrong—birth control is awesome. But it doesn’t always work. It just doesn’t—there are plenty of unexpected babies to prove it. Still, what it has done for women could fill volumes.

Many of my generation spend a sexually active decade avoiding pregnancy, with the naïve assumption that it will happen when we’re ready. Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn’t.

The idea that you can choose when to get pregnant, naturally or otherwise, choose when to give birth or how, choose what your life will be like when your baby is born, whether you’ll nurse, how much sleep you’ll get, what your children will be like and what they’ll need…it’s all false freedom.

The first lesson of parenting—you have no control, surrender is your only hope. 

So, when I read (here and here and here) about the controversy surrounding decisions by Apple and Facebook to pay for employees to freeze their eggs, my so-called choice feminism told me that more options available to women is always good. Except when it’s not.

There are good medical, economic and cultural arguments against egg freezing as a catch-all solution. For some, IVF is a gift, but for others it’s a disappointment—either way it’s far from a sure thing. And I agree with all of the cynics who see this as a way for companies to take the pressure off being a parent-friendly workplace. It does seem like a ploy to keep younger workers away from that struggle, to insist that pregnancy and parenting are things you can postpone and that will be there for you when you want them…In fact, why even time to date and settle down? You’ve got another decade at least. Just stay at your desk. We’ll take out your dry-cleaning. Go play ping-pong if you’re worried. 

The result is a line is drawn between parents and non-parents, further sidelining those who would ask for more flexibility, day care options, sick leave, and other things that make work work. Even for non-parents, it maintains a cultural work ethic of having no life outside your job. No time for family, friends, whatever you want to do can wait. I hear marathon training is pretty all-consuming. It doesn’t have to be a parents-only argument against reasonable work expectations. Most workers would prefer a life that offers more—whatever that means for them.

It seems to me that we need a re-centering. The articles about the science of egg freezing, the struggles of IVF, the reality that it may not be as easy to have a baby a decade later, those are needed voices. But there’s more to having a family than how hard it is to get pregnant. If you have a partner and want a baby, or even if you don’t have a partner and want to have a baby, it’s misleading to be told it’s all the same.

Forget about getting pregnant and giving birth, having a baby is harder when you’re older. Being up late nights, having the energy to run after a toddler… all of parenting requires energy. While we may be more emotionally ready to parent at 40, we can’t ignore that our body was more ready at 20.

Similar to our focus on the wedding and the honeymoon and not the marriage, our attention to procreation is heavily weighted on the pregnancy and childbirth side of things and not to the life of parenting that follows. No one cares about that until they’re there. And apparently it annoys non-parents when parents so much as open their mouths. 

I spent a good six months planning my wedding. A year is hardly uncommon. And I paid good attention in my prenatal classes, even took notes. Six-weeks focusing on everything up until the baby is in the world. Anything else is left for the steep-learning curve that begins when the baby arrives.

Maybe we should devote at least one week to the “happily ever after” of parenthood. Maybe pregnant couples should be required to do an internship—spend a day with actual parents, ask them questions. They could use your help anyway. Childcare’s not cheap (nor should it be—those ladies work hard!).

Parenting is hard in the same way marriage is hard. Making and birthing a baby—the only things we care about pre-parenthood—have virtually nothing to do with parenting. It’s like saying that someone who could plan a lovely wedding is likely to have a happy marriage.

The baby is easy, it’s being a mom that’s hard. And sometimes the baby isn’t easy. How are Facebook and Apple going to help with that?

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