And Now We Have Everything: On Motherhood Before I Was Ready
Meaghan O'Connell
Top 10 Best Quotes
“What if, instead of worrying about scaring pregnant women, people told them the truth? What is pregnant women were treated like thinking adults? What if everyone worried less about giving women a bad impression of motherhood?”
“What if having a hard time adjusting to motherhood wasn’t some moral failure or a failure of imagination? What if we thought of the whole endeavor like we do work? Like how a career starts out with a lot of dues-paying, a lot of indignity, a lot of feeling unappreciated and complaining to your friends but then incrementally gets easier or more fulfilling. You get better at it. It becomes part of you. And you start to think, Well, what else would I do all day?”
“With stuff this big, almost any way of looking at it can be true. We all talked like we were going to eventually reach some grand conclusion, some correct stance, but in fact it was different for everybody, impossible to pin down. Was childbirth traumatic or transcendent? Was pregnancy a time of wonder and awe or a kind of temporary disability? Were we supposed to fit our lives around our children or fit our children into our lives? My feelings changed every minute, depending on my mood and on the company I kept. It felt essential, though, to keep asking the question.”
“Day and night bled into each other, coalescing into one big nightmare. My clothes were indistinguishable from pajamas. A lamp was always on. We were in the middle of what felt like an ongoing emergency. Like someone was playing a practical joke on us. Endure the car crash of childbirth, then, without sleeping, use your broken body to keep your tiny, fragile, precious, heartbreaking, mortal child alive.”
“The problem was that with every year of being by ourselves, of moving forward with work, of getting used to our freedom, of learning how to be happy, we got closer to needing to have a baby (Time's up!) and completely upending the lives and selves we'd been building.”
“I'd just agreed to marry him the week before, which made every interaction between us extra-meaningful. I wasn't just calling after him on my bike today, I was facing a lifetime of it.”
“I don't want to be a mother. I want to be a writer. I want to be taken seriously. I want money. I want more time. I want to lose weight. I want to be beautiful. I want a day completely to myself, though I don't even remember what I used to do with them, when days to myself were a thing I had.”
“You have to do this or you will go insane. It’s for the well-being of the whole family. He will get used to it. You will get used to it. It will be hard and then it will be okay.”
“Who wanted to be a mother, anyway? Mom called to mind a relationship with someone, not an individual...There was no mother I wanted to be. I wanted to be myself, but better...To me, this was what a mother was: someone who was one step ahead of everyone, who had her finger on the pulse of the household, who came in with groceries just when you wondered where she was. This was exactly what I wasn't.”
“Were the parts of me that resisted just trained to construct elaborate rationalizations for why I didn't want this thing I might not get anyway? And weren't the hesitations all some version of It might not work out? Sometimes it felt like I spent my whole life trying to tell the difference between fear and circumspection. I was always trying not to want things.”
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Book Keywords:
self, pregnancy, motherhood, mother, parenting
