Scratch by Manjula Martin

Author:Manjula Martin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

SAD BIRTH LADY™

Meaghan O’Connell

A few weeks before I found out I was pregnant I was on a walk with my best friend, a TV writer who was also just starting out. Like many other afternoons, we were away from our laptops and walking in circles, berating ourselves for not writing. Tomorrow we would get up early. Tomorrow we’d go to the gym, not waste time, not read Twitter. It was difficult to take ourselves seriously, to take our work seriously, to believe we would do it, when we hadn’t yet. We were so confident of our talent, of our future selves’ inevitable success, but unsure of how we’d get there. We were tortured, hating this middle part.

Just promise me, I said to my friend as we stood on some New York sidewalk waiting for the light to change, if I start talking about trying to have a baby as a way to distract myself from writing—just slap me. She knew what I meant, and agreed. Most women, I think, would know what I meant. Writing and motherhood take up the same sort of space in a woman’s life—that shrinking, typically non-­remunerative space that we reserve for fulfillment, for reinvention, for growth. Both writing and motherhood are sentimentalized and undervalued in the market; both seen as a choice, a lifestyle, something you should feel lucky to do if you get to. I wanted them both, and I suspected this was too much to ask. I suspected the only way to have it both ways (a baby and a life) was to do everything else I ever wanted, then get pregnant—to build up my life and then, when I was good and ready, throw a bomb in it.

After all, writing was merely vital to my sanity, which wouldn’t hold much water in the face of a child, who, as feminist author Tillie Olsen famously put it in Silences, “needs one now.” I didn’t know what “one” referred to yet but I figured it was not “to lie quietly in my crib while my mom finishes a personal essay she won’t be paid to write.”

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