Morning Breath

Peep that Notes app time stamp.

December 1, 2024 was the one year anniversary of getting laid off while pregnant. I tried not to notice it. If I didn’t notice it, I didn’t have to acknowledge it to anyone. Instead, I noticed it and kept it like a shameful secret.

But I wasn’t thinking about that at 4:37 a.m. the next morning because while I wasn’t having a job I was having a baby.

These two things — losing my job and becoming a mother — don’t have to be reconciled. They’re real and simultaneous regardless; utterly irrespective of my (in)ability to force a narrative. That they feel intertwined at all is somewhere between a fluke and a travesty. And yet (maybe it’s the sentimentality of this new stage of life) I need to find some sort of wisdom, if not reason in the circumstances.

I need to not have replaced writing with mothering.

Over the past year I’ve periodically tried to wring meaning from the misery. Fits and starts of essays that I abandon when they start to feel too defensive.

The experience is all-encompassing in a way that makes a mockery of everything else that I’ve ever described as such. Never in my life have I done anything like this and now it is happening inside of me every second of every day. Maybe I could juxtapose that with the sudden nothingness I was doing otherwise. More likely, I hoped to have something articulate to say about how unfair this felt. Surely there was some larger injustice epitomized by the exhausted dread that greeted me each morning.

I thought I could write about how unlike myself I felt, in a way that was increasingly reflected in the mirror each morning.

…from when I was pregnant and so, so tired.

When I was suicidal I wrote all the time. I had a journalism job, first of all, which sort of necessitated doing so. But that’s not what I mean, of course. I mean that my brain was a roiling, boiling, serpentine jumble of judgements — of myself and others. Full of self-aggrandizing self-pity and vicious overcorrection. I felt that the pain of being me was somehow peaking. Each new day brought insights born of believing I had seen enough. I had taken stock, found either myself or the world at large terribly wanting, and was ready to issue a memorandum of my misery. I was sad in a way that felt sharp and incisive, vivid and specific. When I look back now on what I wrote at the time, it still strikes me that way. Interesting in its intensity.

Being pregnant and unemployed is so much worse, and so much less inspiring. It feels like a bottoming out rather than a climax. Maybe the perspective is the problem, there’s no urgency to the pain, it’s not the culmination of suffering but rather the beginning of some very boring and demoralizing stress. When the depression was largely internal, there was something satisfying about pressing on the bruise, underscoring my productive public self with the agony within. Now, I’m as pathetic as a I feel and staring at the problem intently isn’t the problem — or the solution — it’s just acknowledging the obvious.

What I mean, more simply put, is that my prior self-indulgent sadness seems fucking quaint compared to the actual abyss of burning through savings while getting bigger and slower and buying all the baby shit.

…from when I was pregnant and so, so angry.

You can see what I’ve been trying to say reflected cinematically in the previews for the Amy Adams movie Nightbitch. I haven’t even seen it yet. (Remember: baby.) But I’ve seen the previews, where Adams vocalizes her inner monologue about how she’ll never be “smart, happy, or thin again.”

The clip makes “thin” feel like both the point and the punchline. A hyper relatable sentiment to attach to motherhood. Your body is, after all, irrevocably different. I think it’s supposed to seem extra real because it’s a little embarrassing, a little cringe. It says: motherhood is awesome and godlike, but it’s ok if you still care about the vain and quotidian. It’s almost funny in that way — juxtaposing the depth of her depression with the girlish desire to be thin. (As if there’s anything funny about the realization that literally making life can’t save you from the shallowness of public value.)

But it’s the first thing she lists that has gnawed at me endlessly. I’ll never be smart again. At least I know how to be thin — I can’t figure out how to effort my brain into moving faster when it’s still adjusting to the weighted vest of perpetual exhaustion and supreme vigilance. I can’t seem to find the old neural pathways after pregnancy rearranged my mental priorities. I can’t remember how any of this worked when I cared mostly about baseball instead of whether or not my baby is still breathing.

(I didn’t account for how much time I would spend making sure he is still breathing.)

And the real truth is: I don’t know actually why I stopped being smart somewhere in conjunction with having a baby. Maybe it’s an energy conservation thing — all of my propulsive power put toward building bones and making milk instead of developing new ideas. Or maybe it’s that there’s so much to learn — about wake windows and sleep training and tummy time and power pumping and introducing allergens and signs of teething and what I would name a second baby and tiny hats in green leopard print with ear flaps obviously and have you seen this picture I took of him the other day where you can see his dimples or at least one dimple and don’t you think he looks so much like his dad here except not as much as he does in this other one from last week, give me a minute I’ll find it.

Relatability is held up as a gold standard in personal expression but I worry the universality will render this kind of vulnerability trite. Parenthood is constantly having the most profound experience of your life, only it’s completely common. I could talk for hours about the specific, fascinating deliberateness in my baby’s chubby fingers as they become increasingly curious and dexterous. It’s a miracle, but it’s nothing special.

Maybe that’s the problem with creativity in motherhood. The insights that feel interesting are only new to me. Still, that’s something akin to inspiration.

I’m fighting the urge to insist this isn’t a blog about motherhood. A ~Mommy Blog~. This isn’t a mommy blog, I think, because I write (wrote???) about sports, like a Serious Man. (This isn’t a mommy blog, actually, because I have no designs on what comes next.) I need an outlet and agency and this provides both. I want to take how I feel seriously.