Mom Guilt

There was a moment when I realized that my life as I had known it was over. It was a few days after my daughter was born. We were home, and I was tired — not tired in the sense that I needed sleep, but tired in the sense that my time was no longer my own. It had slipped through my fingers without my noticing. I suspect it happened sometime in the second half of my pregnancy.

Postpartum me was tired, new, obsessed with a very small girl, and making clumsy attempts to reclaim some sense of self.

Cue guilt.

I don’t believe I experienced postpartum depression, per se. I know women who were debilitated and flattened by it, and that was not my experience. What I felt instead was a kind of transitional haze. The only things that felt clear were my responsibility as a mother and my absolute adoration for my daughter. Everything else receded into fog.

This was also the period during which I was determined to publish my debut novel. That, too, became harder. I worked at night, during naps, or on days my partner could stay with the baby so I could leave the house. During that time, the identity I had known imploded. I was a mother. Everything else lived at the edges, if it existed at all.

I fought very hard to publish — and I was late.

The guilt I felt (and still sometimes feel) came from reaching toward those edges, trying to preserve the person I had been before giving birth. She had carried me through my life until then, and I wanted her back. I wanted her freedom. I wanted to return to doing whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted.

At night, I visited the fringes. I visited my old self. But even as I did, she began to fade. Things lost their flavor, or I was too exhausted to care. The phrase live and let die never made much sense to me before, but I was letting a part of myself die — and what followed was grief, laced with guilt.

Maybe it was postpartum depression. But more than that, I think it was becoming.

When you have your first baby — regardless of the other ways you may already be a parent — you undergo a kind of metamorphosis. And it hurts.

It has been one year and three days since my daughter was born, and it took me until now to recognize what happened to me after her arrival. That haze, that confusion, that seemingly endless initiation — I believe it is something many people experience in the first year.

So is the guilt.

Does missing my old life make me a bad mother? At the time, it felt like it did. I felt cruel for thinking it. How could I want only this and still mourn the freedom I once took for granted? I lived in constant contradiction during those early months.

I need a break, I would think — and a moment later, I never want to be away from her.

Even now, a year later, I find it strange that sometimes at night, while I am writing, or playing The Witcher 3, or reading The Year of Magical Thinking, I miss my daughter. She is just upstairs, sleeping — breathing, cooing, sleepily reaching for her pacifier — and I can see her on the monitor.

But I miss her.

It feels as though, after months of moving through fog, the air has begun to clear.

The guilt still comes in waves, so I have anchored myself to sturdy, enduring parts of who I am: writing, of course. Gardening. And, unexpectedly, cleaning — perhaps because it has always allowed me to clear my mind. Building, too. The verb. I have had the privilege of building something slowly, mistakes included, from the ground up.

This is what I have learned, and this is what I offer you, reader: let it come. There will be guilt and grief and ecstasy, alongside the deep, anchoring love of a child. The first year is intense. It can be disorienting. You may not recognize yourself, or know where you are going.

Keep going.

I am cheering you on.