All the things I wish someone had told me before I gave birth

OK, look. There's a lot to say.

This is my dispatch from parental leave, an update from my first essay about my parenting fears. In case you were wondering, here’s how it’s going.

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AI image-generating software knows, as we all do, that babies love to be held this way. (Source: imagine.art)

Childless Me spent a lot of time ignoring motherhood content. Essays, books, TV shows, movies, Instagram accounts…it simply didn’t exist to me. 

I reckon that this is in part because I was approaching 40 and avoiding the question of whether I wanted to (or even could) have a child.

But also, I feared that all those books, TV shows, whatever, would be dull. It felt like it had all been said before: Motherhood is hard, sleep is scarce, husbands be lazy, you’ll poop on the delivery table, your breasts will leak, lol, amiright, the days are long and the years are short, rum te tum, tra la la.

Okay, so. First off, this was unfair. There most definitely is great writing out there about motherhood. (This excerpt from my NPR colleague Mary Louise Kelly’s new book, for example, has caused me to cry during multiple read-throughs.)

But. Childless Me did have a point…which is to say, it’s phenomenally hard to write anything new or original about parenting – something that billions upon zillions of people have done before me. 

New-motherhood, it turns out, is at the odd intersection of the mundane and the cataclysmic – everyone has done it, yes, but my God, it tornadoes through your life. It barrels in and leaves you breathless at how quickly it can destabilize your very sense of self. And no matter how smart or thoughtful you are, there is no way to really prepare.

Already this feels cliched. Do you see what Childless Me was getting at? “Nothing can prepare you.” “Motherhood changes everything.” “It leaves you breathless.” Tra la la, rum te tum.