I've always loved horror movies. Before I was allowed to watch them, I'd wander the Horror aisle at my local Blockbuster and take a minute with each VHS cover, allowing myself to savor the titillating mix of curiosity and fear. When friends who hate horror movies ask me how I can sit through them, I explain that living vicariously through the characters and surviving terrifying scenarios is a balm for my anxiety.

Now, as a new mom to a son, I have a different experience when it comes to identifying with fictional characters.

I finally watched the much-hyped horror movie Obsession this past weekend. Before the premise kicked into gear (man is granted wish, and it goes badly like every fictional wish ever) I was already freaked out. The film's first 10 minutes introduce us to the protagonist: Bear, a scruffy, sheepish man in his early twenties. We get a glimpse into his home, his relationships, his inner life. What we see is bone-chilling. 

Bear lives in a home he inherited from his grandmother. It's clear from the outdated decor and dim lighting that he hasn't changed a thing about the place. He chooses to live alone in what is essentially a tomb. 

He has nursed a romantic fixation on his friend Nikki since high school. Now in their twenties, they spend almost every day together as co-workers and friends, but he's never shared his feelings with her. It's clear from the way he talks about this choice that he views his hesitation as reflecting how considerate and sensitive he is. He prides himself on not being pushy or aggressive. He's a Nice Guy! He doesn't do anything to hurt anyone! But that's because, uh, he doesn't do anything. His cowardice is on full display when Nikki gives him the most gentle and warm opening to share his feelings, and he STILL doesn't. Instead, he makes a doomed wish that she loved him "more than anyone in the world" and thus effectively enslaves her.

I intuit that, like all the Nice Guys I've encountered, Bear believes that simply by virtue of not being an abusive bully, he is entitled to infinite reward. His own personal Hollywood happy ending. Surely his decision to refrain from being an asshole means he deserves the life of his dreams?

The Nice Guy's entitlement is usually accompanied by a lack of responsibility for his feelings. If he finds himself disappointed with how long his dream life is taking to unfold, he views himself as a hapless victim of this sadness. Where did all these bad feelings come from? And, more importantly, who is going to help me with them? (In most cases, Nice Guys look to the closest attractive woman and think, "She'll cheer me up!")

Okay, so Bear isn't a real person. Why do I have so much vitriol about him?

It's not just that I've had my fair share of run-ins with Nice Guys in my day. It's that, as a quote unquote boy mom, I now see all male characters as omens. Beware, I think with a shudder as I watch, this what your delightful baby boy can turn into if you're not careful!

In a world where Vogue published an article asking Is Having a Boyfriend Embarrassing Now? and reels like this one

have gone viral, I feel like raising a son has never felt more high stakes. My son cannot be a Nice Guy. An embarrassing boyfriend. A mid loser manchild. A bad guy.

The specter of the bad boyfriend has loomed large in the books I've read over the last decade. Some of my favorite writing is women writers inflicting their protagonist with terrible male partners.

I think of A's boyfriend C in Alexandra Kleeman's You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine. Although he isn't explicitly rude or dismissive, all of his responses to A's concerns undermine her trust in herself. Ultimately, I think he, more than her copycat roommate B, pushes her to the edges of her sanity.

In Yesteryear, Caro Claire Burke gave her tradwife influencer protagonist Natalie a challenging husband.

In a LitHub interview, Burke explains:

Since one of Natalie’s main frustrations in her life (according to her) is that she has too many masculine traits, I thought it would be really fun to give her a husband who (again, according to her) has too many feminine ones. They both are people who don’t naturally or comfortably fit into the traditional gender stereotypes, and this is an issue that plagues them increasingly throughout the book. Poor Caleb just wanted to become a kindergarten teacher! My toxic trait is loving him.

I think Caleb's issues are more pernicious than gender non-conformity. He is spineless, allowing himself to be easily swayed and manipulated by anyone around him. His transformation into a domineering and abusive husband demonstrates how readily he adopts misogyny as a governing ideology.  

My Favorite Bad Boyfriend Award goes to the one in Ottessa Moshfegh's short story The Weirdos. He's not only condescending and immature, but also unnervingly strange: 

If I turned my back during breakfast he’d say, “I noticed you spilled some of your coffee, so I wiped it up for you.” If I didn’t thank him profusely, he’d put down his fork, ask, “Was that okay?” He was a child, really. He had childish ideas. He told me he “walked like a cop,” which scared off criminals on the street at night. “Why do you think I’ve never been mugged?” He made me laugh.

The narrator asserts "I hate my boyfriend" right before exhaustively detailing all of his peculiarities. She seems almost aroused by how repulsive she finds him and how unaware he is of her disdain.  

My fears about my son's future are not unusual. Content about how moms are shaping their sons to be good partners has become more and more popular.

I study these, taking my job to raise my son to be a vocal feminist capable of emotional regulation and domestic duties very seriously. 

The more energy I put into shaping my son, the more I remind myself of this other genre of content I see with increasing frequency. Perhaps you've seen it too: the viral trend "Because I didn't marry a loser." 

The brilliant Tracy Clark-Flory wrote about this phenomenon that she calls hetero-exceptionalism:

I’ve been thinking about this concept of hetero-exceptionalism.

I’m envisioning it as a variety of heteropessimism. It’s a perspective that recognizes that heteronormative love and sex can be punishing for women, while emphasizing exceptions (happy heteronormative relationships) that are attributed to men who are unicorns or women with discerning taste and romantic savvy. Crucially, it comes along with a sense of blame, specialness, and superiority, as opposed to solidarity.

It is part traditional romantic fairytale around The One and Prince Charming, and part neoliberal feminism with its focus on individually navigating systemic oppression (in other words: getting yours within patriarchy).

I’ve been thinking about this concept in part because I came across this from Moira Donegan:

Gotta love the new genre of tweet from millennial women that's like “I can't relate to all these divorce books because unlike you losers my husband is a perfect kindly angel who does all the housework.” As if patriarchy is merely a skill issue.

The genre of tweet that Donegan references is a perfect encapsulation of hetero-exceptionalism: it implicitly or explicitly paints women’s romantic and sexual unhappiness as a personal failure. That is the water in which we swim. So much hetero dating advice for women ultimately reads as instructions for personally navigating patriarchy.

So much of my concern and the concern I see in my fellow boy moms' reels is heteronormative. We're worried about how our sons will show up as a partner to a woman. What if my son is gay or asexual or aromantic?

Also, I recognize that I'm taking all the annoyance and frustration and disgust I feel towards Bear and other Nice Guys he reminds me of and channeling it into constructing my parenting approach. I shouldn't center my thirst for vengeance against toxic masculinity in my mothering journey…right? 

My biggest concern is I'm making the mistake Clark-Flory points out in her critique: focusing on an individualistic solution to a systemic problem. So I believe If I successfully complete my mission to raise my son to be a feminist and an ideal husband to a straight woman, I will have done my part in taking down the patriarchy?

As I've mulled this all over, a thought buzzes around in my skull that I can't swat away: 

Is having a child an inherently individualistic solution?

Becoming a mother has strengthened my desire to fight for justice in the world, to invest in my community, to be kinder and more empathetic to everyone I meet. But it has also sapped me of time and energy. Since giving birth, I have had to abandon everything I used to do that could potentially ask me to over-extend myself. I now pour all of my resources into one person. That's why it makes sense that my new primary mode of combatting misogyny would be mothering my son. However, I can't pretend that he alone could defeat the patriarchy. To believe this would be childish.

As I've puzzled over this, I've thought about one passage from the poem On Children by Kahlil Gibran:

You may give them your love but not your thoughts,

For they have their own thoughts.

You may house their bodies but not their souls,

For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.

(I highly recommend listening to Sweet Honey in the Rock's song of this poem.)

I appreciate this poem's lesson, and I want to surrender to its wisdom. But I don't know how I can stop myself from wanting to accompany my son to the world of tomorrow. Maybe it's a deluded grasp at immortality. Maybe it's a desperate bid at feeling like I have some control. Maybe I simply can't bear the idea of being parted from him. Installing in him a strong vein of feminism feels like the only guarantee that he will carry me with him always.

One of my favorite conversation starters is: Where are you temporally? What time do you live in? Five minutes in the past? Four weeks in the future? In your head, are you most often reviewing memories from three years ago? Or are you envisioning what you're going to do tomorrow?

For many years, my answer has been two to four hours in the future. I'm always trying to work out what is around the very next corner and how I should adjust and prepare to meet it. 

Recently, my answer has changed. Motherhood has unmoored me from my time zone.

This past Saturday, my son turned 6 months old, which is strange because he was born two days ago and also I have known him my entire life. 

To celebrate his half birthday, my husband and I brought him to a Toys R' Us inside a Macy's to buy stuff with a gift card I got at my work baby shower. A true relic from the past. I no longer work at that job, and I can barely remember what life was like before my son was here.

While browsing the clothing section, I found a pair of pajamas with dogs on it and held it up for my husband, my tear ducts firing up.

"These look like his newborn pajamas, remember?" I moaned. After I said this, it hit me that this memory I was mourning was only five months ago.

Almost every day my husband and I are blindsided by 4 pm. Where did the day go? I think it slips by us while we’re buckling and unbuckling, velcroing and unvelcro-ing, putting down and picking up. The preparation to go somewhere and do something takes more time and effort than the actual activity itself. My husband and I are aware of this irony. Our baby isn’t. For him, it's all the main event. 

The last time I rented roller skates, the person behind the counter asked how old I was. Without skipping a beat, I answered "27." I was 31. Those four years hadn't made much of an impression, apparently. Time is often measured by change, and changes feel minuscule when you’re an adult.

My son is change embodied. Every day he unveils a new skill, a new sound, a new strength. For example, he now sleeps exclusively on his stomach. As soon as we put him down in the crib, he confidently rolls over and snuggles his face against the mattress. This is a sleeping position that would have had CPS called on us only two months ago. 

I can't believe time is going to continue at this rate. Is rate even the right word? Rate implies a fixed speed, and time's new speed strikes me as erratic. One wake window is an eternity. The next is gone in a blink of an eye. Sometimes I am nailed to the present with my baby, so engrossed in him that my concept of time evaporates. Other times, I can't keep myself glued to the here and now, instead floating years into the future and imagining him as a little boy, a teen, a man. 

With my new temporal dislocation, the call isn't just coming from inside the house. Other people are often asking me to time travel.

"You think it's hard now? Just wait until they're older."

"He looks like you when you were this age."

"You'll miss this."

These comments ask me to zoom forward or zoom backwards or, most trippy of all,  zoom forward and then look backwards. 

I understand why parents say these things. In the first weeks of his life, I saw my newborn as just a newborn. Now I see that he contained the seeds of my 4 month old and my 5 month old and my 6 month old. When I gaze at early photos of him, tiny and pink with puckered lips and marble eyes, I see the beginnings of his gummy smile and long eyelashes. We can't let a child be a child. We see them as an invitation to reflect on time's machinations.

One of the pleasures of narrative is how writers can manipulate time. Shrink it. Expand it. Skip it. Weave it together to reveal something unexpected.

The recent popular thriller The Silent Patient's memorable twist toys with the reader's assumptions about the two narrative threads' timing. This twist reminded me of the twist in the first season of Westworld. And of course, before Westworld, Saw II (iykyk)

When I think of writers manipulating time, I think of Story of Your Life by Ted Chiang, which I read back in 2016 before the movie adaptation Arrival came out. I thought Chiang's subversion of chronology, mirroring the heptapods' teleological approach to time and causality, was very clever. Now I don't think it's clever at all. Just true. Parenthood alters how you feel about time and causality. 

I've thought a lot about Story of Your Life over the last few months, thought about it more than I have in years. Something about the sensation of living two timelines at once – the beginning of my baby's life and the beginning of my life as a mother – reminded me of the novella's structure. Juggling these two experiences, I worry I neglect one in favor of the other or let one overshadow the other. The physical pain and sleep deprivation of early motherhood made me want time to speed up while my awe over my son made me want to slow it down. It doesn't feel right that the two experiences had to unfold simultaneously.

Midwife and writer Robina Khalid shared this excerpt from her longer Substack essay "We might be hollow but we’re brave: mothering through the unfathomable Inevitable" on her instagram:

I related to how motherhood inspired Khalid to time travel. To teleport back to moments from her past and see them in an entirely new light.

In my third trimester, I spent a lot of time ruminating on my impending labor. One therapy session, while vocalizing all my worries, I stopped mid-thought and asked my therapist, "But whatever happens, it'll all make sense, right?."

She nodded.

I trusted time. It had done its magic on every shock, every heartbreak, every mystery and eventually granted me a sense of meaning and peace.

But it's not the same time anymore. It doesn’t move the same. It doesn’t feel the same. It’s not as inconsequential as it once was. I won't ever lose four years again. 35 isn’t the same as 39 because, at 39, my son will be 4, and he will never be 6 months old again. 

My trust that I can let time pass and do the meaning-making for me is gone. Instead, I must bring the meaning to each moment. A jumble of grief and gratitude for all the versions of my son that exist too briefly in the world and then live on forever inside me. I light a candle for each. Being his mother means holding a never-ending vigil. I'm happy to do it.

The fall I moved back to Brooklyn after finishing my MFA program, The Cut published an article that sent a shiver through the city. It recounted how a family in a Jersey suburb received mysterious and sinister letters, so sinister that they abandoned their expensive home and sued the former owners. 

While many readers launched into speculation about who wrote the letters, I was investing my energy elsewhere. Desperate to start my literary career, I spent my days sending my first novel Psycho Loser out to countless agents while juggling two substitute teacher jobs. Although I understood most people’s desire to identify the letter-writer (I love a good whodunnit), what intrigued me was the writer's talents. I mean, look at these lines.

"Do you need to fill the house with the young blood I requested? Better for me. Was your old house too small for the growing family? Or was it greed to bring me your children? Once I know their names I will call to them and draw them too [sic] me." 

Positively gothic! 

"The house is crying from all of the pain it is going through. You have changed it and made it so fancy. You are stealing it’s [sic] history. It cries for the past and what used to be in the time when I roamed it’s [sic] halls.” 

I would have killed to have written these words.

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Sometimes, the possibility of discovering a sparkly new voice feels like the only thing that gets me out of bed in the morning. Now I don't even need to leave bed to get my fix. I hold my phone up to my face, and social media takes care of the rest.

Cathleen Allen a.k.a. timeline.alchemy, a self-proclaimed oracle, materialized on my feed this past fall.

Where do I even start with Allen’s voice? One caption reads: I’m a Connecticut hedge fund wife whose lifestyle was obliterated by sudden onset clairvoyance that started showing me evil spirits behind the veil.

Where else have you seen “hedge fund” in the same sentence as “evil spirits behind the veil"?

Her life didn’t her change. No, her “lifestyle” was “obliterated.” There’s an intensity to her words — “LIFETIMES of horrific karmic abuse” she writes in another reel — that clashes with the serene imagery she chooses to accompany them. Her visual aesthetic is rooted in realism (okay, luxurious realism, but still realism) yet she nonchalantly mentions exorcists and third eye openings. 

This practice of confidently mixing lingo from different worlds is a feature of some of my favorite writers’ voices. George Saunders is the first that comes to mind. This passage from his short story "Sea Oak" about a male stripper in a near-future dystopia is a good example:

Lloyd's finished. We give him a round of applause, and Frendt gives him a Farewell Pen and the contents of his locker in a trash bag and out he goes. Poor Lloyd. He's got a wife and two kids and a sad little duplex on Self-Storage Parkway…

…What a stressful workplace. The minute your Cute Rating drops you're a goner. Guests rank us as Knockout, Honeypie, Adequate, or Stinker. Not that I'm complaining. At least I'm working. At least I'm not a Stinker like Lloyd. I'm a solid Honeypie/Adequate, heading home with forty bucks cash.

Tobias Wolff explores the obsession with voice in his short story "Bullet to the Brain." The main character, Anders, a book critic, spends his dying moments remembering a turn of phrase he heard as a boy: 

Anders is strangely roused, elated, by those final two words, their pure unexpectedness and their music…

…The bullet is already in the brain; it won’t be outrun forever, or charmed to a halt. In the end, it will do its work and leave the troubled skull behind, dragging its comet’s tail of memory and hope and talent and love into the marble hall of commerce. That can’t be helped. But for now Anders can still make time. Time for the shadows to lengthen on the grass, time for the tethered dog to bark at the flying ball, time for the boy in right field to smack his sweat-blackened mitt and softly chant, They is, they is, they is.

My "They is" might be this line from Denis Johnson's short story "Two Men." The story's narrator, the incorrigible Fuckhead, shares that he made aggressive sexual advances towards a woman right before her husband showed up. Then out he comes this gem: 

The rest of the evening I wondered, every second, if he would come back with some friends and make something painful and degrading happen. 

This line is so special to me. I often post it to my Instagram stories with no context. Because it needs none. It encapsulates what I believe lies at the heart of every worthwhile fictional protagonist: a titillating cocktail of equal parts yearning and fear that life will have its way with them. "Oh, please don't let something painful and degrading happen to me. Not something that would change me forever. Not me. Please no."

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In the process of writing this essay, I’ve tried to formulate a definition for voice. Something like: voice is how the impact of all the forces in your life - where you’re from, who educated you, what traumatized you — trickles out when you attempt to communicate with the world. Voice is psychological leakage.

My professor Steve Erickson told me George Saunders advised that writers should put all of themselves in their first novels. That your manuscript must be “demented by you." I agree. Whatever story pours forth from you should feel like it can’t have been wrought on this earth by anyone else but you. 

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During the pandemic, I started following the account of a college student who worked part-time as a baker and spelled her name Isobel with an o instead of an a. I didn't covet her life, but I found myself enraptured by how she told the story of her daily routine. Her selection of moments from her day turned the mundane poetic. Driving to work before sunrise. Her pensive, unadorned face. Her puffy eyes scanning the road. Her red fingers drumming her steering wheel. Tying her apron behind her back then adjusting her messy bun. Egg yolk bubbling from the breakfast sandwich she made herself after she finished her shift. She never spoke, but her voice was unmistakable to me. Irreplaceable. I couldn't get enough.

This inspired me to approach social media as a new medium of narrative. Since 2020, I've created two interactive narratives. You can find them here and here. I hope more writers start to embrace social media's narrative potential.

But social media is performative and curated!

You mean like a novel?

Yes, but social media purports to capture real life.

Early epistolary novels used improbable framing devices to package their narratives. "Look at this intact stack of letters I stumbled upon! Let’s take a peek and see if there’s anything of interest within?"

Yes, but social media is voyeuristic! It's parasocial! Creepy!

Call it what you will. I hope I never lose my insatiable curiosity about other people. Not just what has happened to them. But how they choose to conceal and reveal this information whenever they open their mouth.

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In his interview for the book The Film That Changed My Life: 30 Directors on Their Epiphanies in the Dark, John Waters shares the line from Wizard of Oz that had a profound impact on him:

When they throw the water on the witch, she says, “Who would have thought a good little girl like you could destroy my beautiful wickedness?”

That line inspired my life. I sometimes say it to myself before I go to sleep, like a prayer.

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I'm not saying that, as a writer, you should consume social media.

I'm asking, as a writer, how can you resist?

A guy once charmed me on our first date by griping about an upcoming cruise he was taking with friends. His disdainful critique of what seemed to be a pleasant vacation tickled me.

After we'd been seeing each other for a month, I learned the cruise was actually no laughing matter. Every day he'd give me a report on the rising sea level of his dread. You’d think he had been charged with a crime, and the sentence passed down by the judge was this all-inclusive trip to the tropics. 

If you're confused why he agreed to go, I was too. So was he. 

It wasn’t a bachelor party or a 30th birthday celebration or some other invitation laden with social obligation. No, his friends asked if he wanted to join them on their vacation, and he agreed. He thought it had sounded fun at the time, but his feelings soon morphed and turned on each other. There was some part of him still in touch with this initial optimism, but that part was drowned out by his distaste for too much forced fun and intimacy. He eventually confessed to me that his mom had forbidden him from mentioning the cruise because even she was tired of hearing him perseverate – the conversational equivalent of treading water. 

When I look back at our short-lived relationship, I always return to this cruise quandary as it so clearly revealed our incompatibility. Because me and ambivalence? I don't know her. I applied early decision to college. After only a couple weeks of knowing each other, I asked my husband, “Should we just run away and get married and have babies?” I’ve always prided myself on my ability to order off a menu in less than 20 seconds. I refuse to let a decision spin me in circles or turn me to stone. 

Motherhood has bucked me off this high horse. These days I am often stuck between two competing impulses. As I write this, I can hear my baby crying in the other room. This cry (he is very tired and he wants to sleep, but he doesn't know how because he is a baby) is a normal step in his nap ritual, which my husband is facilitating right now. I am fighting the instinct to go comfort him. I am also grateful that it's not my turn to deal with his tears right now. These two feelings arm wrestle inside of me, equally strong, perfectly matched. 

I know I'm not alone in this. If you search the social media trend "Top 5 Horror Movies," you'll see a lot of videos from moms. Many of them follow the same pattern:

I jumped on this trend with my own version:

In all of the education on birth and postpartum I did while pregnant, breastfeeding was treated like a footnote. Do you want to see a midwife or an OBGYN? Do you want to give birth at a hospital or at home? Do you want an epidural? Oh, and do you plan to breastfeed? 

Labor lasts a day (two or three, if you're unlucky). Breastfeeding lasts for months. Potentially years. Breastfeeding is relentless. Even if everything goes well (your baby latches consistently and your supply matches their demands), breastfeeding entails mental, emotional, and physical labor around the clock. 

Personally, I rank the physical labor as the most difficult to endure. I found the sensation of having milk sucked out of my nipples initially painful and now uncomfortable, so having to do it multiple times a day for months has been less than ideal. I'm embarrassed to write this. I fear you’ll think there's something wrong with me for experiencing breastfeeding as strange. I mean, biologically, it’s the furthest thing from strange. It's completely normal. Mundane even.

Perhaps you're not judging me, but you might wonder: if you don't like it, why don't you just stop?

First, weaning is hard. At five months postpartum, I'm down to one night feed, and the process of getting my boobs to this point took the same amount of planning and effort as training for a marathon. If I push the endurance of my boobs too much too fast, they get injured (clogged ducts, which can lead to mastitis). It's not as simple as "just stop". Even if I nailed the physical process, then I would need to contend with the mental load of juggling my weaning schedule and a new feeding routine for my baby. 

Second, when I seriously consider stopping, an amorphous sadness rises in me. I cannot identify what bums me out about the thought. I don't enjoy the physical act of breastfeeding, and I don't consider it particularly bonding. My son drank formula for the first week of his life, and feeding him via bottle didn't dampen my fiery attachment to him. 

And yet, there is my mysterious grief.

I have spent many therapy sessions circling this ambivalence, determined to defeat it. I want to understand it, so I can overcome it. This is the formula I’ve used all my adult life: Identify problem → Take action to solve problem → Feel better. 

During all this rumination on ambivalence, I remembered reading Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in college. When prompted by our professor to share our analysis, my fellow students and I were basically like: these old-timey people are sooo scandalized by Mr. Hyde's antics. 

One day, seemingly fed up by our shallow interpretations, our professor dropped a new one: Stevenson wasn't condemning Mr. Hyde's behavior. Rather, he was condemning Dr. Jekyll’s attempt to deny his dark impulses by splitting himself in two. Disowning our shadow selves, he suggested, was a form of violence, and violence begets violence.

I was relieved to find that Lucy Jones addresses ambivalence in Matrescence (the quintessential text of my early motherhood): "According to psychoanalysts such as Parker, maternal cruelty may be the result of unmanageable ambivalence. When unreconciled feelings of love and hate go unaddressed, they can intensify, and then explode into helplessness and violence."

Like my professor suggested in his analysis of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hydes, Jones proposes there are dire consequences to denying mothers' internal conflicts. 

"The assumption that ambivalence is abnormal has also affected the direction, framing and focus of science," Jones writes. "[It] boxes maternal ambivalence into the study of 'the odd' (psychoanalysis), rather than the study of 'the natural' (evolutionary biology)."

Did you know that normally one breast produces more milk than the other? I didn't learn this until I started nursing. I can't help but project a story onto my boobs; one is much more committed to this new milk production job than the other. Even my mammary glands are at odds. One boob in, one boob out.

Now that I'm figuring out how to embrace my ambivalence, I've become aware that much of my discomfort lies with how my indecisiveness makes me come off. Do I seem weak-willed or oblivious complaining about doing something I could technically stop doing? 

Several weeks ago, a friend texted me asking if I had figured out a solution to my breastfeeding ambivalence. The impulse to lie – tell her I planned to wean or claim I turned a corner and started disliking breastfeeding less – swelled inside my chest. Instead, I let out a long breath and wrote her the truth.

"No, I've just stuck with BFing lolol I've talked it over with my therapist and I think I've just come to terms with the fact that I feel very ambivalent about the whole situation. Like, I do want to continue but I also want to still complain about it. Probably a combo that makes me an extremely annoying person to be friends with right now."

(Please note my gratuitous "lolol")

Maybe I need to give up my impulse to be palatable and simply let myself be the dull conversation partner. Excising this part of myself may result in something much more distasteful.

I only care about books where women go insane. That's primarily what I read, and what I want to read, and what I write and want to write. This is because I have always wanted to go insane. 

Since becoming a mother in January, I've realized that all I needed to do to go insane was have a baby. 

A baby is a little unit of madness. There is no reasoning with a baby. They are thoroughly dysregulated — digestion, sleep, limb control. They rely on you to shepherd them into the realm of the living. This is how we eat. And this is how we sleep. And this is how we distinguish between day and night. And this is how we receive comfort when we are upset. And this is how we come to know and depend on one another. 

Onboarding someone to human existence would be a tough job if I were in peak condition. But I did it as most mothers do: my brain demented by lack of sleep, my taint in tatters.

Delivery was my first taste of the madness.

After pushing for a couple hours to no avail, the OBGYN on call informed me that my baby was “massive.” This news startled me. At the advice of my OBGYN (who wasn't on call and therefore not present), I hadn't done a third trimester ultrasound because my pregnancy was progressing normally without complications. Up until this moment everything indicated my baby was of average size. 

The doctor added that my baby’s shoulder was stuck on my pelvic bone (this is called “shoulder dystocia” if you want to look it up on TikTok and freak yourself out – no judgment here, it's one of my favorite pastimes). To get the baby out, I’d need either an episiotomy or a C-section, and my pushes in the next ten minutes would determine which. 

Suddenly, the room flooded with people in scrubs. In my memory, I blink and there they were, cluttering the previously empty room. I don't know what their jobs were and how they could help me. They just quietly watched me.

As I mustered all of my energy into each push, my doula, OB and nurse insisted over and over and over with unfailing enthusiasm: “You can do this!” 

Why are you saying that? I thought. What evidence do you have that I can do this? I didn't dare say this out loud.

Now I understand that this is the unhinged contradiction at the heart of motherhood: You are given an impossible task. You are told over and over that you can do it. When you express doubt or anxiety or despair, you risk being pathologized.

My plan was to enter the first weeks of motherhood on the lookout for anxiety and depression. I was determined to scan myself frequently for unrecognizable thoughts and behavior.

As soon as I was thrust into early motherhood, I found this understanding of postpartum anxiety and depression absurd. You know what was insane? The idea that anyone would not feel anxious or depressed in these circumstances. 

My vulva and butthole alternated between aching and burning. Even laughing sent a jolt of pain through my anus. When I told a lactation consultant that I found breastfeeding painful, she cocked her head and asked if I had especially sensitive nipples. I slept in mercilessly short bursts, awoken either by imaginary cries or real cries. My body seemed unable to refresh on this little sleep. To be awake meant brimming with sluggish confusion and dread.

I fantasized constantly about abandoning my life. How would I do it? I pictured jumping in my car and driving far, far away. But I wanted to bring my baby, whom I felt an opioid-level attachment to. I'd bring my baby with me, yes, but, somehow, when I was far, far away from my home, I wouldn't have to breastfeed or stay up all night, and I'd have an entirely new body. 

I can't even come up with a competent fucking fantasy, I seethed to myself.

I was absolutely certain I could not go on. I could not tolerate having milk sucked out of me every 2-3 hours – neither the physical discomfort nor the constricting schedule. I could not spend another hour rocking my baby with no guarantee of relief. I could not function on so little sleep. 

"I'm shocked more babies don't die," I told a friend when he called to check in.

"I mean, that does happen," he said with a nervous laugh.

"Not nearly as often as makes sense to me now," I replied.

Reading the book Matrescence by Lucy Jones was one of my sole comforts.

In it, she writes: "As a society, we just don't seem to be very interested in the actual flesh and bones of the maternal experience. Maternal subjectivity has, until very recently, been almost entirely absent from Western philosophy, literature and culture. I hadn't read about it in any of the core texts in my English literature degree."

I got a MFA in creative writing. None of our assigned short stories or novels addressed motherhood in depth. We were always talking about finding the universal in the specific. Mining life for magical moments that unexpectedly sparked empathy and revealed profound emotional truths. 

None of my life experience from before held a fucking candle to these raw months. I will never be done processing it. I could write about it forever. How has anyone kept silent about this?

I had a friend whose newborn was deemed underweight at one of her first pediatrician appointments. The pediatrician informed her that she'd need to "triple feed" her baby, which means breastfeed the infant every two hours, then bottle feed the baby formula and then pump to encourage her breasts to produce more milk. 

By my estimation, it would take two hours to do all of this – nurse, then give the baby a bottle and then pump – meaning this schedule effectively guaranteed no sleep. It demanded round-the-clock physical and mental labor.  

At the same appointment, my friend had to fill out the Edinburgh survey. I know because I had to at my baby's appointments too. We were asked to rank how much we identified with the following sentences:

I look forward with enjoyment to things. What should I look forward to? I alternated between changing my diaper and the baby's diaper. Nobody could give me a clear answer on when this would change.

I have been so unhappy that I've had trouble sleeping. I wasn't sleeping because my baby wouldn't sleep, and that made me unhappy. My sleep-deprived mind couldn't sort out the causal relationship here. Which came first? The chicken or the egg? The unhappiness or the lack of sleep?

I have blamed myself unnecessarily when things went wrong. This baby depended on me for food, sleep, hygiene, comfort. Was it irrational to have a pronounced sense of culpability? 

I have been able to laugh and see the funny side of things. Sorry, what was funny about all of this? (I actually did find many moments hysterical, like watching my baby stare in amazement at an illustration of just a white circle on a black background, but I blame delirium.)

In Matrescence, Lucy Jones writes, "Why are we sending a high-risk group off the spend an unknown period of time at home alone, where they must look after vulnerable infants and recover from the trauma of giving birth, while burdened with loneliness, lack of sleep, and a shedload of impossible cultural expectations, including the imperative to enjoy every minute of it? Are these the actions of a responsible or functional society?"

When they tell you, “You can do this!”, what they actually mean is, “You have to do this." 

What they should say is, "You have no choice but to reconfigure yourself in such a way that you can do this.” 

I would have told myself, "You're right. You cannot do this. What's being asked of you is unfeasible. Your despair is normal. You have every right to question platitudes, doctors, reality itself. And also, little by little, your brain and body will transform and adapt. The process is unprecedentedly painful and gradual. It will render you unrecognizable. You will run yourself dry of your resilience. You will continue somehow. This is insanity."

It’s not insane that mothers think they can’t do it. What’s insane is that mothers do do it.