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I’m trying not to gulp my drink now. I need to be careful with the booze.
But it’s hard not to drown these very inconvenient feelings with very good whiskey. I’m not a parent, obviously, but I recognize myself in a lot of what she’s describing. I want it to scare me, knowing we’re going through the same shit.
But instead, it makes me feel warm. Relieved.
Does that make me a dick?
“People keep asking me if I love being a mom. And the truth is, I don’t. I love her. My baby. And I have moments of joy, like when she’s snuggly and warm and sweet in the mornings. But right now, motherhood just feels like a whole lot of thankless, never-ending work. I get so frustrated and so angry sometimes…” She sniffs. I want to say something—I have a million things to say—but I get the feeling she’s got more to tell, so I just listen. “I was telling Maisie’s doctor that I didn’t want to be the girl who got postpartum depression. I wasn’t going to be the girl who had to have a C-section, and I wasn’t going to get PPD.”
I sip my cocktail. As relieved as I am at feeling seen, I still fucking hate that she’s going through this. I knew she was in bad shape from talking to her on the phone. But now that I’m witnessing her suffering in person, I wanna put a whole world of hurt on…well, the whole fucking world. For both of us.
“That’s a lot of pressure you put on yourself,” I say.
“Pressure?”
“To be perfect. Have the perfect experience. You know you had no control over whether or not you got PPD or a C-section, right?”
She blinks. “I hadn’t thought about it like that before, but you’re right.”
“I’m always right.”
The sides of her mouth curl into a grin. “Shockingly, the perfectionist in me wanted to slay motherhood. Do it how we’re told it’s supposed to be done. Naturally and joyfully and all that.” She tilts back her mug. After taking a swallow, she wraps both hands around it and rests it in her lap. “I think part of the reason I feel so much pressure is because I wanted this baby, Beau. So badly I got artificially inseminated, for God’s sake.”
I wasn’t surprised when Bel told me she wanted to have a baby on her own. Her divorce left her scarred, and she understandably wasn’t rushing to settle down with someone new in her mid-thirties. She’d always wanted kids. And at that point in her life, she’d built a great support network—her family, her close-knit circle of friends—to provide the village she knew she needed to help raise a kid. So she went to a sperm bank (we had a lot of fun with that one), endured some turkey baster action (still have fun with that one), and nine months later, little Miss Margaret Mae, “Maisie” after Annabel’s paternal grandmother, arrived.
“You’re still allowed to feel flattened by parenthood, even if you wanted it that badly,” I say. “It’s okay to admit that it’s a lot fucking harder than you thought it’d be. That doesn’t make you a bad mother. It just makes you honest. I bet a lot of people feel the way you do.”
“But no one talks about it. Not really. They just ask me if I love it. Motherhood.”
“And when you don’t,” I say, nodding, “you feel like you’re fucking it up. You’re failing. When, in reality, you’re just figuring out how to survive an insanely intense experience nothing could’ve ever prepared you for.”
Seeing the flicker of acknowledgment in her eyes is making me want to do things I cannot with this girl.
“Exactly. Yes. Yes, that’s exactly how I’ve felt. You know, for a dumb jock, you pick up on things pretty quickly.”
The old joke may be a bad one, but it’s a joke we share, and that makes me love it.
I reach back with my free hand and adjust the bill of my hat. “I thought we got past the whole Lizzie-Darcy-thinking-the-other’s-a-stupid-asshole thing the first week of school.”
“Pulling out the big guns tonight, huh? Casual Pride and Prejudice mentions? You must really want to make me feel better.”
I give my sleeve an obnoxious little tug. “You already said it’s working.”
“It is.” Her grin fades a little. “Thank you.”
“I’ve told you this before, Bel. You’re too hard on yourself—”
“Says the guy who pushes himself to be the best at everything, ever.”
“Hey. When you got it, you got it.”
“You really have to stop hanging out with Gronk.”
“And you really have to cut yourself some slack.”
She looks at me. Earnest. “Easier said than done.”
Right now, I’d sell my soul to make Annabel feel better.
The truth—a sliver of it, anyway—seems like the right move in the meantime.
Maybe I’ll regret it. In fact, I probably will. But I can’t let my girl suffer alone.
