I counted 26. No, 27. Wait, did it fly away?
A few years ago, on a cold winter day, I sat on a stone staircase at the American Museum of Natural History and counted doves like the most important challenge in the world. myself. Working at a major high-tech company with a grown woman with a master's degree. Mother to an adorable baby girl.
mother.
This phrase felt in my mouth six months after giving birth, I still felt foreign. mother. mother. Mom. They told me it would feel natural. I'm accustomed to slip it in like a hoodie I like, worn and familiar.
I'll fall in love instantly.
They lied.
A few weeks ago I was standing on a subway platform and wondering what it would take for someone to jump. It's not me. It's not accurate. But I was wondering. And the wonder was dramatic and not urgent – it felt casual. It's like choosing between iced coffee or hot coffee. That was what I was afraid of later. I saw land number 28 next to the others, which scared me. It wasn't that I had an idea, but how normal it felt.
My hands were paralyzed from the cold as I leapt another candied cashew nut out of my pocket. One of the delicious, sugar-coated nuts we got from a vendor in the street corner of Manhattan. I bought them near Rockefeller Center and grabbed a warm paper bag into my palm as I walked through Central Park and headed to the museum.
They were cold now as I sat on the stairs. I should have gone home. My baby was there, laughing and craving.
My baby. Another phrase that didn't suit me at all. It's like wearing other people's shoes.
They had been pulling her from me a few months ago. Emergency C section. The fluorescent lights in the operating room are burning my eyes. I'm shaking on the operating table, like I've laid out in the freezer. The actual meat slab has been hacked.
“She's beautiful,” they said in the crank of a metal instrument. I trembled and waited for it to hit me. Rush of love. A overwhelming joy. The maternal instinct seems to be encoded in my DNA.
The nurse placed her on my chest. Very small. 5 pounds 11 oz.
I hugged her. My eyes glazed as I smiled at morphine for that first photo. He looked happy. I should have been happy. But I was still waiting.
Nothing came.
I was still waiting in six months.
My husband saw me disappear. “You need help,” he says. Sometimes gentle, sometimes desperate. Sometimes I have tears in his eyes.
“I'm fine,” I say, my voice is empty. “I'm just tired.”
It's just dead inside.
New York's Maternal Centre. Even the name made me want to scream. maternal. I was eager to join, as if it were a country club.
“Welcome to Motherhood Centre,” I imagined the hostess saying. “Can I look at your membership card? Oh, I don't know if you love your baby here. I think you'll have to wait outside.”
But it wasn't a country club. It was an outpatient psychiatry program. Five days a week, 5 hours a day.
During the intake call, I stared at the woman's moving lips on my screen, making me convinced I was cheating on her. After answering her questions, she told my husband I was fine. Instead, she asked him if I could attend the next day.
All I remember from the first six months of those are fragments, jagged pieces that don't fit together. During the heat wave, he dug trash on the sidewalk and accidentally dumped his family heirloom. I cried out while I was in my head to call a New Orleans real estate agent and ask for my studio apartment for me.
When my husband finally said, his voice is broken, “I don't know if you'll get help or what will happen next.” An ultimatum hanging between us like a third party in the room.
Five hours a day in a recliner placed in circles like a twisted sleeping party that no one wants to be invited.
The whole setup felt like a shrine, if not an emotional breakdown. The carefully constructed environment that fell apart was not just accepted, but expected. Soft lighting, white noise machines humming in the corners, and places where the voice was purposefully kept calm, “Try ahead. This is where it's going to collapse.”
Recliners felt like an acknowledgement that none of us were feeling, that we were not staying upright under the weight of motherhood.
I sat in that ring on the first day, my body was stiff, my jaw was very tight and my teeth hurt. These women needed help. These women were struggling. It's not me. He was fine. Are you okay!
I sprinted to the reception desk and said, “I'm leaving. I don't belong here.”
The receptionist just nodded.
The next day, the town engulfed me. I walked for hours. My heart elsewhere.
I stopped by the shop window on Fifth Avenue. I pushed my hand against the cold glass. I saw people take photos near the Empire State Building. Where was my office? I sat on the ground in the Herald Square until the police officer asked if I was okay.
“It's fine,” I said. It's always okay.
After that, the museum walks. And pigeons. Now 29.
The next day, I returned to the motherhood center. It's not because I wanted to do it. But counting pigeons on the stairs of a winter museum was not something that “great” people would do. I found myself on the bathroom floor of my apartment as there was nothing left and it was the only thing I could feel.
For my lifetime I have been capable. Became independent. The person I always had with. And now? I spent my days in therapy while my beautiful baby girl was with someone else. Summer camp for broken moms.
These recliners felt like torture devices. “Sometimes, I don't feel anything when I look at her. Daughter. Daughter. Nothing. I'm watching a stranger's baby. I fantasize about running away. I just pack a small bag and disappear.
Words hang in the air as I waited for judgment. Gasp. Instead, I nodded and knew how it looked.
The trip was neither linear nor beautiful. There were days when I felt almost normal and then the crash followed, so I was worried that it would be lost forever. Healing was finding compassion for myself as much as feeling love for my daughter. Forgive women who have not experienced what she is “assumed.”
Understanding love is not always a lightning strike. Sometimes it is a slowly growing plant and it is necessary.
My body has created life. It was cut to bring that life to the world. And absolutely no one prepared me about what came after the congratulations and presents stopped.
A card with floral emotions about motherly bliss. Wans with “Mom's Little Love” engraved on the chest – all these tokens mark an opportunity for joy that they were inaccessible. Nothing contained the promised love I was to arrive. After the visitors stopped coming and the message was slow, I looked like me, but when left alone with a stranger who had no upset in my mind, there was no instructions as to what to do.
I wanted the motherhood they promised in a diaper commercial with soft lighting and a loving smile. The tired things still look beautiful, and the challenges are resolved in a 30-second montage. Instead, I got a few months of this. raw. Brutal. Transformative in ways I never wanted.
I don't know exactly when the fog began to lift. But I remember the first morning I woke up, but I didn't feel any fear or desire to run anytime soon. The first time I felt my daughter laugh and feel something cracked in her chest. This is the first time someone has asked, “How's motherhood?” And I didn't let out any fake cheers.
After countless therapy sessions with another baby, there are still days when I see a child and feel an instantaneous amputation: who are these little humans, and how did they come from me? Like other mothers, I am troubled by the endless cry of “Mama!” I'm irritated, irritated, exhausted. But I also feel genuine joy and deep love.
Recently, when I pass the museum and see those pigeons on the stairs, I sometimes quietly count them as reminders of where I am and how far I have come. And where I go – home, with my family.
