The Longest Night

Yesterday night, I turned into a suicidal, homicidal maniac. And I am only being faintly hyperbolic.

Explaining last night is risky. It will dent not a few images of me and reveal me to be a pretty shoddy person all around. To prevent my being misconstrued, here is a preemptive explanation of what follows.

There is a plethora of very well-written stuff out there on the joys of motherhood. We have that base covered. We know it is a life-changing, beautiful, almost spiritual journey. What is less well known but, at least for me, equally real, is the dark side of motherhood. It seems that no one wants to write about how hard motherhood really can be.

I feel compelled to expose the other side, not because I want to undermine the beauty of motherhood, I don’t. And not because I want to rant and complain like some spoiled child, I don’t. I write this because I think that as long as we project a one-sided view of what motherhood actually is (at least for some new moms like me), we are doing a disservice to our brethren. If we don’t represent the whole shebang, warts and all, we create a false belief that anything less than complete, blissful enjoyment of the ride makes us unworthy mums. If you read the rest of this entry, you may well come to that conclusion about me as a mom anyway, but other mothers should at least be spared the stigma and self-doubt.

So here is the deal. Last night was the longest night of my life. Sasha simply did not want to cooperate. He did not want to feed. He did not want to sleep. He did not want his chooch (our family’s word for a pacifier). In fact, it seemed that what he really wanted was to piss his mother off. Which he did, admirably, as though he were born to the job. And maybe in a way, he was.

Here is a description of how things went for roughly three hours: I would put him down, drowsy, to sleep. Upon going from my arms to his crib, his drowsiness would evaporate and he would start to cry. So, I would take him out of his crib, and back into my arms. He would semi-stop crying. I would think to myself, Maybe he is hungry. I would position him for a drink. He would appear to be interested in eating, but then would start to cry again, louder this time. With increasing urgency now, I would think to myself, Maybe he has a dirty diaper. I would check. All clean. I would take him in my arms again. He would cry in a plaintive way. I would think, Maybe he has a burp that hasn’t surfaced. That cry is surely the burp cry. I would dutifully stand up and do my little two-step around the room, coaxing that wayward burp up and out as patiently as I could. No burp. But he would sort of settle down for a bit. Just enough, in fact, to lull me into the mistaken belief that he was just tired after all, and what he really wanted was to be put down in his crib.

In retrospect, this was my own exhausted brain rummaging through the possibilities and latching onto the one that I most desperately wanted to be true. He wants to sleep. Perfect, so do I.

I would place him in his crib and watch for a tense moment to see what he would do next. With the chooch securely in place, it would invariably appear that he had dozed off. Accordingly, I would slowly creep back to my bed, three feet away, slip under the covers and lie my aching body down. About ten seconds would go by. Hope would blossom in my heart. I did it! He’s asleep! At about this juncture, he would start to whimper again. My brain would say, Mare, maybe he is just going to whine for a few seconds and then fall asleep. Babies do that. The fact that I even entertained this possibility despite three months of incontrovertible proof to the contrary (he has never cried himself to sleep), illustrates how desperate I was. So I would haul myself out of bed again and repeat the whole process.

I know that every new mom has been through some version of the above. I think what made it very black for me was that we were backtracking. We were making the opposite of progress. Before this, Sasha certainly hadn’t slept through the night, but it was different. He had been waking up in the middle of the night, yes, but only to feed, efficiently, and then go back to sleep. It was tiring, but predictable and most important, survivable for me. I knew what he wanted. I gave it to him. He took it. We both went back to sleep.

This new cycle of whining and crying for no reason that I could discern was new. And it was a nightmare.

The experience humbled me, which is the nicest word I can find to describe myself right now. The thoughts that ran through my head were dastardly. In the back of my mind, my brain dimly registered that I was engaging in the most important task of my life and failing miserably at it. Even though my rational side understood that it wasn’t Sasha’s fault, I took it out on him. I looked him in the eye and asked, alternately pleading and shouting, What do you want? I yelled at him to just eat, goddammit! Sometimes, this was followed by a slightly stronger expletive. I never thought I would be swearing a blue streak at my three-month old, but last night I did.

It occurred to me about halfway through this ordeal that I had made a huge, gargantuan mistake. I was not cut out to be a mother. I was awful at it. Where was my patience? Where was the recognition that it wasn’t the baby’s fault? Why did I want to throw myself and him out of our 7th storey window? Why was I so weak and pathetic, failing at this smallest of tests, when everyone else seemed so strong? Absolute frustration raged inside me.

Somehow, I had trusted in biology. I had thought that motherhood was one big biological lobotomy. Becoming a mother would instantly wash away the person I was and replace it with a new, better, more patient me. I would become more like my namesake, the Virgin Mary, uncomplaining, endlessly virtuous, radiating peace. I would forget the relative control and independence of my former life and embrace this new one selflessly, without so much as a backward glance.

I had thought it would be this way because that is what I had read about and heard about from lots of people. And also because, given the enormous and heart-wrenching obstacles we had had to surmount and survive to get this far, I thought I would never have second thoughts.

But last night, my mind was scrambling for the return counter. Not the exchange counter, the return counter. I wanted my old life back. I pleaded with no one in particular, Please, please understand that this was a big mistake. I’ve dabbled in this whole motherhood thing, and I understand now that I am just not cut out for it.

The fact that there was no return counter made me inconsolable. This was it. We had made a huge mistake and now we were going to have to live with it for the rest of our lives and Sasha would pay the price for having such a shit mom.

At the peak of this bleak scene, when I was on the brink of hysteria, Demian came home. He had been working late and arrived at 1 am or so. I don’t think mere words can do justice to the effect Demian’s arrival had on me. When he walked through that door, I felt like my knight in shining armour had arrived. For me, he might as well have ridden in on a white steed, pennant flying, sword aloft. Don Demian was home and he would make it better.

And he did. Without so much as a wise crack about the night he had had (a 16 hour day at work, no breaks), he took over, gathering Sasha in his arms and putting me to bed. I slept until 6 am, uninterrupted, while he did the parenting.

In the warm light of this morning, I am suffused with waves of guilt. I gaze at my son’s perfect, sleeping face and then later at his laughing smile as he wakes up, and I wonder how I could possibly have thought this was a mistake. Clearly, he is the best thing that has ever happened to me.

All of this backing and forthing makes me worry. I feel like being a mother is making me bipolar. I swing from black despair to unbridled joy in a millisecond, while Demian looks on, sardonically. Why is this happening to me? What is happening to me? It cannot all be explained by hormones. A little voice in my head continues to wonder if in reality, I am actually just going to suck at this forever and make a really terrible mother. Why am I so bad at this? I wonder over and over.

Meanwhile, Demian seems so maddeningly sensible, such a natural parent, that I am ready to tear my hair out.

My friend Iris often condemns the fact that our society fails to adequately recognize the tectonic shift that is motherhood for the modern woman. As she points out, in our society, seeking support and counseling for the other big things in life is considered normal, even encouraged. When you get divorced, married or experience loss, you can count on support. Yet the arrival of a child is supposed to mean only one thing, unmitigated joy.

After last night, I think this is a lopsided view to propagate and it does no one any favours. I’m inclined to agree with Iris: we women need support to shift gears into such a radically new life. Or at least I do.

And thus, this entry ends with a plea to all mothers, new and old: if you have been through something similar or at least entertained similar thoughts, please share your stories and anecdotes with me. Most important, please share with me your coping strategy. My current coping strategy has a name and it’s Demian. But that is no answer. Demian has to work and will not always be available on nights like last night. So, what do I do? How do I cope?

Please send your answers via email or comment on this blog. I will read every single response avidly.