Chapter 5 Gwen #2
She was not thankful at all, but she’d already learned that she had to be calm and smiley for Dr. Goodall, or Dr. Goodall would team up with Jeff to question every single thing she was doing as a mother.
That night, another night of half-hour stretches of sleep, Gwen googled recipes while feeding June.
She’d decided she’d start by removing dairy, soy, and eggs.
“It can’t be that hard,” she’d told Jeff, who looked skeptical.
She used the Notes app in her phone to prepare a grocery list to give him the next day.
When she was satisfied with her list, she tapped over to Instagram for her daily visit to the Mother Nurture page and saw that Angeni Luna had posted her birth story.
There was an all-caps Trigger Warning at the top of the caption with an explanation that said If natural births disturb you in any way, shape, or form, I encourage you to skip this post and protect your emotional state.
Gwen did not think she qualified as someone who would be disturbed by a natural birth, so she swiped away the “sensitive content” warning and watched the video.
She had watched plenty of natural birth videos during her pregnancy, studying them with the same intensity she’d used to pass the bar exam on the first try.
The video was beautifully edited, nothing like those amateur iPhone videos on YouTube.
Angeni Luna described it as “real and raw,” but it was only two minutes long, representing just about 0.
1 percent of the actual labor (Angeni Luna said it had been about twenty hours from first contraction to delivery).
Still, it was enthralling—the close-ups of the pain on Angeni Luna’s face, her eyes closed, her skin covered in a sheen of sweat, as she crouched on all fours in her giant birthing tub, her head resting on its edge.
Her husband was behind her in the tub, his arms wrapped around her middle, his face contorted in a pain that mirrored hers.
They cut to her still in the tub but squatting, her husband still behind her, his palms pressing into her thighs.
Her breasts and her vulva were blurred in accordance with social media policies.
After the next cut, she was there with the baby in her arms at some undefined period of time later.
Angeni and the baby were both clean and calm, looking as if they had not been through any kind of trauma at all.
Gwen didn’t realize that she was crying until she heard a voice, seemingly from another dimension: “You okay?”
Jeff was standing in the doorway, in his suit, which was extremely confusing until Gwen realized that it was no longer the middle of the night but the early morning.
June was asleep on her chest, undisturbed by her mother’s sobbing.
Gwen was starting to realize that this was motherhood—giving every part of yourself to your child while they were completely oblivious to your sacrifice.
She wiped the tears from her cheeks and sat up straighter in bed, only then noticing that she had been in an awkward position all these hours, her back hunched, neck cricked.
“Where are you going?” she asked him, trying her very best to sound sane.
He looked at her like she was not sane at all.
“I’m going to work,” he said. “Remember?”
She tried to laugh it off, playfully face-palmed herself.
Of course he was going to work. They had been talking about this day—his first day back—for the past couple of weeks.
His law firm had been progressive in offering him a month of leave—double what most companies offered, if they offered anything at all—and now it was time for him to return.
She envied him, his ability to just go to this other place and dedicate his thoughts to this other thing.
“I remembered. I was just . . . not thinking straight.”
He glanced at the phone in her lap.
“What were you looking at? Why are you crying?”
“It’s nothing,” she said. “I’m just emotional these days. Hormones and all that.”
She wasn’t sure why she couldn’t be honest with him. They had always been so honest. She knew it would create a divide between them, this hiding of the person she’d become, but she thought that showing the person she’d become would create a divide too. There seemed to be no winning.
He came closer, peered at the phone. The video of Angeni Luna’s home birth was still playing on a repeated loop.
He sat on the edge of the bed with a sigh.
“Hon,” he said. “You can’t be doing this to yourself.”
She didn’t want to resume crying, but she couldn’t help herself.
“Maybe you need to talk to someone?” he suggested. “Or weren’t you going to do a support group for new moms or something?”
She had been going to do a support group for new moms. She’d identified a popular one—there was a waiting list because they insisted on keeping the group to just ten mothers “dedicated to fostering intimacy”—and enrolled when she was halfway through her pregnancy.
She’d envisioned herself showing up and serving as a sort of role model for the other moms, who would be emotional and harried and desperate for guidance.
She would be the leader, the mother of all mothers, the Mother Hen.
If she was lucky, a couple of them would become lifelong friends.
She couldn’t imagine herself showing up to that group now.
“Or maybe my mom can fly in for a week or two?” he said.
This was an option they had never discussed.
She thought about that doctor’s advice—“tap into family.” Everyone always assumed that people had family nearby, waiting in the wings to offer support and comfort, or at least bring a selection of casseroles.
She and Jeff didn’t have that. Jeff’s parents had divorced when he was young, and he rarely spoke to his father.
He was close to his mother, but she was in her seventies and living in a retirement community in Florida, clear across the country.
“You’re not calling your mother,” Gwen said.
“What about your mom?”
“No,” Gwen said without a second thought.
Gwen’s father had had a sudden-death heart attack when she was in middle school, and her mother had gone into a reclusive depression from which she’d never emerged.
There is so much said about how hard depression is for the person who has it, but so little said about how hard it is for the people who depend on them.
Gwen had only known her mother as someone completely self-absorbed, gazing at her own glum navel.
When Gwen was in the hospital after June’s delivery, when she felt more fragile and vulnerable than she ever had before, she couldn’t deny the craving she felt for her mother.
Did every daughter feel this craving? She caved, called her mother, who had done nothing for her during the pregnancy except send a check for a hundred dollars as a shower gift.
“The baby is here already?” her mother said, seemingly offended by the news.
Gwen informed her that, yes, the baby had been born early. Then she took a risk by suggesting that her mother come visit. Gwen had visions of her mother transforming into someone she wasn’t—someone generous with her time and energy, someone loving and helpful.
“Well, I wasn’t expecting the baby to come in May.”
“Neither was I, Mom.”
“I had some days reserved for you in June, but May is just . . . well, it’s packed.”
“Never mind,” she said.
“Maybe—”
“Mom, forget it.”
She couldn’t handle her mother’s rejection, the implication that she was a burden.
She wouldn’t ask her for anything again—a declaration she renewed with herself anytime her mother let her down.
When May turned to June, her mom texted regarding the “days reserved” for Gwen, and Gwen told her not to worry about it, that she was fine.
She knew this was what her mother wanted to hear.
After her father’s death, Gwen had had no choice but to become the self-sufficient overachiever that she still was.
Her mother had always praised that—not because she was proud, but because she was off the hook, released from any maternal duty.
There was no other family nearby. Neither Jeff nor Gwen had siblings—a first-date discovery that they’d added to the tally of their similarities.
There were some cousins, a smattering, but nobody who was close—location-wise or otherwise.
They were on their own. They had always taken pride in being on their own.
Jeff, sweet Jeff, was still trying to come up with a solution.
“What about Deena?”
Deena was Gwen’s closest local friend. Her friends from high school and college and law school were scattered across the country.
Gwen had met Deena at her first job out of law school, and they’d done dinner and drinks regularly until Deena had her first child and promptly vanished.
She surprised Gwen with a text every now and then, but the communication was always sporadic—text conversations begun and then deserted.
It wasn’t personal, Gwen knew that. This was what happened.
“Deena has a kid of her own, and she’s pregnant with another,” Gwen said.
Had Deena struggled with new motherhood?
Gwen assumed she hadn’t, or she would have heard about it, but maybe that was the problem—nobody talked about it.
They made blanket statements about being tired and “adjusting to a new norm,” but nobody discussed the nitty-gritty.
Each woman was wandering into this abyss, thinking that it must not be that scary or someone would have warned her.
The lack of warning probably wasn’t malicious.
It was just that the abyss sucked you in, and you lost the ability to track time and organize your thoughts, let alone communicate them to others.
Gwen watched Jeff’s eyes go to the clock on the nightstand, a little white clock with bunny ears that someone had bought off their baby registry.