The Joys of Motherhood (It’s a trap)
I lie awake at 5AM, wondering what I’m doing with my life. I can hear the moan of cats in heat and the honk of a garbage truck sailing across the empty street; not many other things are awake at this hour.
That’s not to say I didn’t lie awake questioning my existence at the crack of dawn before — I was an emo kid of the 90s afterall — but I did it with significantly less frequency than I do now.
I’m a mother now. A month before my 32nd birthday, after nearly 17 hours of labor (where, by the way, you’re not allowed to eat anything but horrendous hospital chicken soup, flavorless red jelly, and diabetes-unfriendly sweet lemon ices), I gave birth to a tiny alien-looking baby boy at 1:07AM. Just a year ago, on the same day, I’d been waiting for a plane at Haneda Airport, preparing to spend the next month traveling through Beijing and Shanghai. How quickly your life can seem like someone else’s.
The past few months have taught me that being a mother is the hardest job a woman can have.
I know a few feminists who would probably scoff at this sentiment. I was one of these people before I fired a new life out of my loins. Riding tuk-tuks at dawn in Cambodia, powering across six islands on a bike on the 60km Shimanami Kaido trail, swaying at midnight to the surreal lights of Radiohead's 'Paranoid Android' at Fuji Rock, battling coffee-deprived crowds during the daily morning commute, fielding awkward questions from half-drunk coworkers at Happy Hour, slaving overnight for pitch presentations and still ready to take on an 8AM call, I was crushing the hell out of work-life balance and thought being a stay-at-home mom was the epitome of “taking it easy.”
Now let me rephrase my original sentence: being a mother is the hardest job any damn person can have. No one appreciates you— not even the shrieking baby who’s reduced your nipples to chewing toys. There’s no annual bonus for being best diaper changer, no one patting you on the back and telling you to take it easy after staying up all night to soothe an inconsolable baby after he’s had a bad nightmare. Everything in your life gets put on hold. Goodbye travel plans, weekend plans, putting time into those hobbies you once loved. Goodbye all vestiges of a social life — your friends may forget your face and they certainly won’t recognize the sleep deprivation-ravaged one they’ll see in a few months. Even taking a shower becomes a carefully strategized and timed team effort with your partner. Everyday chores need to be re-tuned so that they double up as baby entertainment. I’ve turned cooking dinner into “The Mommy Dancing & Cooking Show,” folding laundry is now an interactive lesson on fabric textures, and cleaning up massive piles of spit-up tissues off the floor and tables often becomes an impromptu musical number.
Eating lunch at a restaurant feels like heading into survival camp. My husband and I go out with a massive bag packed with diapers and wipes, back-up formula, a changing pad (because few bathrooms in restaurants have them and they’re almost never available in men’s bathrooms), a plastic cover for the stroller in case of rain (which looks more like hazmat suit than a rain coat), a small blanket for when it’s too cold in a restaurant. Stuffed somewhere behind a change of clothes and a handful of bibs, I’m pretty sure I’ve packed some back-up sanity for when I’m one bite into an appetizer and my son starts squirming in his stroller, giving me that warning look like he’s gonna blow if we don’t get out of the restaurant within the next ten minutes. Babies are like gremlins — anything can set them off: overly dim lighting, overly bright lighting, overly hot air, overly cold air, loud and unsolicited baby advice from strangers. And when they’re set off, the only thing that will soothe them is the gentle shaking of their stroller as you quietly evacuate wherever it is you were trying to spend your time like a human being. I respect (borderline idolize) mothers who can get on a plane with their newborn and continue their travel adventures. I saw a photo of an old classmate with her 6-month old on the beaches of Cuba and silently wondered what type of special deal she’d cut with the devil for her superpowers. At 4-months, I still have trouble going out for longer than just a few hours. With the lack of sanitary diaper changing spaces and breastfeeding/ pump-friendly places (unless you consider a urine-stained Starbucks bathroom a good pumping place), New York City is not exactly an infant-friendly city.
After becoming a mother, I realized that working a regular office job is so much easier than being a full-time mom. If I worked a full-time office job, the 8–9 hours at the office would feel like a vacation away from the house. When you work from home, you have no breaks. You're always on call. My only down time now are the few hours my son sleeps during the night where I can choose to 1) catch up on precious sleep, 2) finally get some writing or other work done, or 3) de-stress/vegetate while watching something on Netflix without having to pause every five minutes. I usually end up wasting 30 minutes just nervously mulling over which one to choose (and still regretting my decision).
I’ve had jobs where I worked 70+hour weeks for months due to hellish product launches and client pitches, and I can say without any hesitation that motherhood is by far the hardest thing I’ve ever done. It’s like comparing a 100M sprint with a cross-continental marathon where a troll is whipping you from behind the entire way. There’s no competition. The sleep deprivation is devastating. The beating your body takes from the back pain of late-pregnancy to the lower body blow-out of delivery to the full-time job known as breastfeeding to the literal kicking/hair-pulling from your infant is insane. My wrists are in constant pain from breast-pumping (electric pumps caused my nipples to tear, which was another enthralling new experience of motherhood) and supporting a growing baby’s wriggling weight. The first week after delivery, I was on a cocktail of painkillers from prescription-strength ibuprofen that I chased with large doses of acetaminophen. I dreaded the 1–2 hours when neither medication would be working. What I dreaded even more was going to the bathroom. The hospital gives you a squirt bottle to clean yourself, sheets of lidocaine to numb your lady parts, and laxatives to “help with constipation,” but none of it really dulls the nonstop feeling that everything down there is tearing up with even the slightest movement. Even sitting down was painful for weeks. My friend used a donut cushion when she had her daughter, which sounds a lot more cute and fun than what it actually is. Did I mention the silent nightmare known as postpartum incontinence which is like that dream where you really need to use the bathroom but can’t find one, except that’s just every time you go outside? Or the unique hell known as milk blisters? The fact that the average maternity leave in the United States is less than four weeks shocks and infuriates me — a woman’s body has basically been used up as an incubator, baby food generator, and punching bag for nearly 10 months in order to provide a future tax contributor for the country. Can’t she at least take a bit more time off to put her body back together?
From an emotional standpoint, motherhood is equal parts joy and self-induced misery. I cried when my baby smiled at me for the first time — there really is no exaggeration when mothers say their babies bring them the greatest joy imaginable. But for every smile and laugh, there are countless times where he doesn’t respond or even look at me when I talk to him. During these moments, the confidence-lacking teenager in me who I thought had been buried years ago, murmurs somewhere deep in my heart: “Maybe he doesn’t love you?” It’s absurd, immensely depressing, and a surprisingly common fear among mothers based on my numerous late-night Google searches. I often find myself on mom forums on those late nights/mornings where I can’t sleep and question my life decisions, and I find that motherhood reduces many confident working women to broken middle schoolers who nervously need to ask strangers if it’s ok that they sometimes need to hide in the bathroom to cry.
(As I side note, the worst thing a new mom can do is check social media, particularly Instagram. The visual assault of every friend, acquaintance, and coworker’s perfectly curated (and pretentiously captioned) vacation photos to social events you probably would have made excuses not to attend before will leave any new mom either regretting all her life decisions or trembling with rage.)
Sometimes I overhear people talking about how lazy stay-at-home moms are, sipping on their afternoon tea and gossiping with other moms. I may have missed the invitation, possibly in the middle of doing another sing-and-dance number to keep my child from screaming or desperately trying to sneak in a 15-min nap while he’s mercifully dozed off at his activity gym. I sometimes fantasize about applying for a job in Manhattan just so I can board the subway and escape the house for multiple hours a day.
My child-free friends often approach me with the curiosity and sympathy of a researcher studying a patient with a new disease. “What’s it like?” “How are you managing?” “Have things gotten better?” “Are you getting enough sleep?” “How long did it take before everything stopped hurting?” “Are you really sure it’s okay to visit?”
I send them cute photos of my son cooing or laughing or wearing silly outfits, the kind of safe things all your friends and family look at and collectively swoon. I save the uncensored contents — the videos of his projectile poo launching an admirable five feet into the air, his fountain-like spit-up after watching his crib mobile too frantically, or him coughing like a middle-aged man while passing gas. That’s the fun stuff that I don’t think anyone but a mother or father could watch and think “aww.”
The biggest trap about motherhood is that it really is wonderful, even though it really is terrible too. It makes me lie awake at 5AM thinking about what I'm doing with my life. At 6AM, just as I’m about to doze off with an overwhelming sense of regret, my son starts crying and I tiptoe over to his sleeping mat (since he hates his crib) and call out his name. He suddenly stops crying, blinking his little eyes open, and looks up at me with a smile that makes me remember that it doesn’t matter what choices I’ve made up until now or how I ended up here or what I’ve missed out on. What matters is that I’m here and that I’m choosing to stay for the terrible and the wonderful because that’s what love is.
