Mother of All Secrets(5)

I put down my phone and took a deep breath. I needed to get outside. Then I immediately picked up my phone again to check the time. Clara had been sleeping in her carrier for an hour; I could probably squeeze in a short walk before she woke up. I walked to the door and clumsily wedged my feet into hideous slip-ons that a few years ago I would never have believed I’d be wearing every day. My hand was on the doorknob when Clara let out a wail. The walk would have to wait.

“Hi, my little lady,” I murmured as I took her out of the carrier, unclipping it eagerly from my sore hips. She glared at me, her face contorting as she cried, ready to be fed. Again.

She quieted down as soon as she was on my breast, like always. She stayed awake during this feed, but when she was done eating, she spat up all over herself and me. It was so much, I wasn’t really sure if it was spit-up or vomit, which worried me. A quick Google search told me it was definitely vomit and that she would probably die. Thanks, Google. I texted Tim a picture and said, do you think this looks like spit-up or vomit? To his credit, he wrote back right away, but only with, what’s the difference? I assured myself it was spit-up and tried to move on.

While I was changing Clara’s bodysuit, I heard that unmistakable thunderous rumble from below, accompanied by her signature midpoop blank stare, telling me she would also need a new diaper—and in this case, new pants, too.

It was 1:10 p.m. now and I honestly couldn’t name a single tangible thing I’d done that day. Well, no: I’d made coffee and unloaded the dishwasher. And I hadn’t cried yet today. Did those count as accomplishments? These days, they sort of did, sadly. I put Clara on her play mat and walked to the fridge and ate a plain hamburger bun. Thank God it was almost time for me to leave for my moms’ group meeting—it was clear that I pretty much needed to be forced out of my apartment in order to make it to the outside world.

In my room, I tried wrestling my legs into jeans and made it only about halfway up my legs before peeling them back off in favor of the same Old Navy leggings I wore literally every day. This was a fun little game I played. Do the jeans fit yet? Nope, not yet. And why would they? It wasn’t as though I had exercised or eaten particularly healthfully in the past year. Who was I kidding? I was definitely not ready for jeans (except my maternity jeans, which, wouldn’t you know, still fit perfectly). Finding a top to wear was actually pretty easy, because I could only wear a nursing top, and there were only two in my dresser, as most were in the overflowing heap of laundry that was practically leaping, accusingly, out of our hamper.

In the bathroom, I laid Clara on the bath mat and put on some blush and mascara despite not having washed my face yet. I didn’t even attempt to tackle the huge dark circles under my eyes. It was obvious that they were beyond the help of makeup, and I was already running late. At the door, I put Clara in the stroller and took one last look in the entryway mirror before walking out—the news wasn’t good. It wasn’t actually that long ago that I had considered myself fairly attractive and could leave the apartment feeling confident. I didn’t have to scroll that far back in my phone to find pictures of myself in a cute outfit, blow-dried hair, and a wide lipsticked smile. A real smile, too. But it felt like a lifetime had passed. I barely recognized that girl when I looked at those pictures.

I hadn’t thought I was the type of person to be in a new moms’ support group. The idea of sitting around talking about breast pumps and swaddles didn’t exactly appeal to me. But Tim suggested I try to find some “mom friends,” undoubtedly after one of my bigger “I can’t do this anymore” meltdowns, so I wrote an embarrassingly pathetic post on Upper West Side Moms—Are any new moms’ groups meeting this summer? Clara is looking for some friends!—with a hilarious picture of Clara making a squinty face, as if she’s searching for her friends. I thought it was pretty clever, but for weeks, it earned only a single response, asking me if I’d be in the Hamptons, and if so, then we should meet up! (But sadly, no, I would not be summering in a Hamptons mansion.) Then, randomly, after I’d all but forgotten about my post, this woman named Isabel reached out and invited me to join a group of moms, all with babies around Clara’s age, who had been meeting for a couple of weeks.

I had been in the group for a little over a month, and I thought it was helping me. A little. I liked the other women—they were smart and kind, and a couple of them were funny. Often I couldn’t help but feel like they were doing a much better job at all this than I was—they just seemed to know so much more than I did, about everything—but for the most part, everyone in the group was pretty honest about how hard this all was, which was refreshing and reassuring. It felt good opening up to them about the various challenges of swaddling, sleeping, and clinging to some semblance of LBB (life before baby). I hadn’t told them about my mom, though; I wasn’t yet capable of gracefully accepting sympathy. At my mom’s funeral, everyone had some version of Look on the bright side, it could be worse to share with me—she had ten good years after her original diagnosis, she was nearly in her seventies, and so forth. But I wasn’t at all ready to concede that her death was anything but shitty, shitty, shitty. And so, because I didn’t want to make my new friends uncomfortable, I avoided the subject entirely. Which was a little challenging, especially when they talked about having their own moms around to help out, causing a lump the size of a peach pit to rise in my throat.