Meaghan O'Connell > Quotes

“What if having a hard time adjusting to motherhood wasn’t some moral failure or a failure of imagination? What if we thought of the whole endeavor like we do work? Like how a career starts out with a lot of dues-paying, a lot of indignity, a lot of feeling unappreciated and complaining to your friends but then incrementally gets easier or more fulfilling. You get better at it. It becomes part of you. And you start to think, Well, what else would I do all day?”
― Meaghan O'Connell, And Now We Have Everything: On Motherhood Before I Was Ready

“What if, instead of worrying about scaring pregnant women, people told them the truth? What is pregnant women were treated like thinking adults? What if everyone worried less about giving women a bad impression of motherhood?”
― Meaghan O'Connell, And Now We Have Everything: On Motherhood Before I Was Ready

“Day and night bled into each other, coalescing into one big nightmare. My clothes were indistinguishable from pajamas. A lamp was always on. We were in the middle of what felt like an ongoing emergency. Like someone was playing a practical joke on us. Endure the car crash of childbirth, then, without sleeping, use your broken body to keep your tiny, fragile, precious, heartbreaking, mortal child alive.”
― Meaghan O'Connell, And Now We Have Everything: On Motherhood Before I Was Ready

“With stuff this big, almost any way of looking at it can be true. We all talked like we were going to eventually reach some grand conclusion, some correct stance, but in fact it was different for everybody, impossible to pin down. Was childbirth traumatic or transcendent? Was pregnancy a time of wonder and awe or a kind of temporary disability? Were we supposed to fit our lives around our children or fit our children into our lives? My feelings changed every minute, depending on my mood and on the company I kept. It felt essential, though, to keep asking the question.”
― Meaghan O'Connell, And Now We Have Everything: On Motherhood Before I Was Ready

“I don't want to be a mother. I want to be a writer. I want to be taken seriously. I want money. I want more time. I want to lose weight. I want to be beautiful. I want a day completely to myself, though I don't even remember what I used to do with them, when days to myself were a thing I had.”
― Meaghan O'Connell, And Now We Have Everything: On Motherhood Before I Was Ready

“The problem was that with every year of being by ourselves, of moving forward with work, of getting used to our freedom, of learning how to be happy, we got closer to needing to have a baby (Time's up!) and completely upending the lives and selves we'd been building.”
― Meaghan O'Connell, And Now We Have Everything: On Motherhood Before I Was Ready

“I'd just agreed to marry him the week before, which made every interaction between us extra-meaningful. I wasn't just calling after him on my bike today, I was facing a lifetime of it.”
― Meaghan O'Connell, And Now We Have Everything: On Motherhood Before I Was Ready

“Show me a boy’s name and I’ll show you a man who has ruined it.”
― Meaghan O'Connell, And Now We Have Everything: On Motherhood Before I Was Ready

“How had I coped with difficulty before? I would go for a walk with earphones in, disappear into the city, and come back in a few hours when I felt better.”
― Meaghan O'Connell, And Now We Have Everything: On Motherhood Before I Was Ready

“Who wanted to be a mother, anyway? Mom called to mind a relationship with someone, not an individual...There was no mother I wanted to be. I wanted to be myself, but better...To me, this was what a mother was: someone who was one step ahead of everyone, who had her finger on the pulse of the household, who came in with groceries just when you wondered where she was. This was exactly what I wasn't.”
― Meaghan O'Connell, And Now We Have Everything: On Motherhood Before I Was Ready

“Babies sleep all the time anyway, don't they?" she says. "I'm sure it will be easy enough to get writing done."

I turn away from her, full of dread but not wanting to explain myself. The time after the baby feels like an oblivion, like anything could happen. I don't even know who I will be after him. Then, the creeping revelation: If I let him, my son will be the reason I don't do all sorts of things. I'm starting it already.”
― Meaghan O'Connell, And Now We Have Everything: On Motherhood Before I Was Ready

“I had planned for this part to be “hell,” but when I’d imagined it, I imagined us overwhelmed but happy, having maintained our sense of humor. I thought the hell would be logistical, not emotional.”
― Meaghan O'Connell, And Now We Have Everything: On Motherhood Before I Was Ready

“Were the parts of me that resisted just trained to construct elaborate rationalizations for why I didn't want this thing I might not get anyway? And weren't the hesitations all some version of It might not work out? Sometimes it felt like I spent my whole life trying to tell the difference between fear and circumspection. I was always trying not to want things.”
― Meaghan O'Connell, And Now We Have Everything: On Motherhood Before I Was Ready

“Pregnancy makes me feel trapped sometimes, but other times I think, You'll never be this free again.”
― Meaghan O'Connell, And Now We Have Everything: On Motherhood Before I Was Ready

“I wanted the C-section so badly. I wanted it like you want a glass of water at a stranger's house but feel like you should demur for some reason. I wanted it the way you want someone to stick a finger in your butt during sex but would never ask for it. I was thinking like a woman. I was in the most essentially oppressed, essentially female situation I've ever been in and I was mentally oppressing myself on top of it.”
― Meaghan O'Connell, And Now We Have Everything: On Motherhood Before I Was Ready

“Motherhood made me so vulnerable. He had taken care of me and the baby like I knew he would. Of course he had. But part of me felt like I’d never catch up.”
― Meaghan O'Connell, And Now We Have Everything: On Motherhood Before I Was Ready

“We knew how to play it, how not to need anything.”
― Meaghan O'Connell, And Now We Have Everything: On Motherhood Before I Was Ready

“Sometimes it felt like I spent my whole life trying to tell the difference between fear and circumspection. I was always trying not to want things.”
― Meaghan O'Connell, And Now We Have Everything: On Motherhood Before I Was Ready

“We'd been playing house for years and the universe had called our bluff.”
― Meaghan O'Connell, And Now We Have Everything: On Motherhood Before I Was Ready

“You have to do this or you will go insane. It’s for the well-being of the whole family. He will get used to it. You will get used to it. It will be hard and then it will be okay.”
― Meaghan O'Connell, And Now We Have Everything: On Motherhood Before I Was Ready

“I bored my eyes into Dustin and broke into a fear sweat. I was in some kind of war. Wasn't I? This was my moment, my big test, and I was rising to the occasion. I would save the world. Except I wasn't saving the world. I was doing the most banal thing in the world. I was giving fucking birth.”
― Meaghan O'Connell, And Now We Have Everything: On Motherhood Before I Was Ready

“I didn’t know before that when parents talked about 'checking on' their children, they meant checking to make sure they weren’t dead. And when they talked about their love for their children, maybe that’s what they meant too. It was love but keener, with sharper edges, softer undersides. It was love wrapped up with desperate terror, inextricable.”
― Meaghan O'Connell, And Now We Have Everything: On Motherhood Before I Was Ready

“Sharing this feels embarrassing and too vulnerable, like talking about a novel before you start writing it.”
― Meaghan O'Connell, And Now We Have Everything: On Motherhood Before I Was Ready

“We like Cal but it sounds weak and also somehow like a bully. David is okay but Dave sounds like he puts too much gel in his hair. I dated a Charlie and he wore his cell phone on his belt. Toby sounds like his collar is always wrinkled and folded over on itself. Show me a boy's name and I'll show you a man who has ruined it.”
― Meaghan O'Connell, And Now We Have Everything: On Motherhood Before I Was Ready

“Motherhood was the farthest thing from the lives we were living but still out there waiting for us, the great “eventually,” the great “inevitably.” Of course we had more important things to do first, or that was the party line. We had our careers.”
― Meaghan O'Connell, And Now We Have Everything: On Motherhood Before I Was Ready

“I operated as if there'd be a verdict. An easy answer. A story. I operated as if we were setting the tone for the rest of our lives. It did not occur to me that we could simply muddle through, learn as we go, change things later, forgive ourselves.”
― Meaghan O'Connell, And Now We Have Everything: On Motherhood Before I Was Ready

“Pregnancy makes me feel trapped sometimes, but other times I think, You’ll never be this free again.”
― Meaghan O'Connell, And Now We Have Everything: On Motherhood Before I Was Ready

“Maybe under the stress of new parenthood, whatever adult personality I’d concocted was being stripped for parts, and I would be left with only my teenage core.”
― Meaghan O'Connell, And Now We Have Everything: On Motherhood Before I Was Ready