First, the world makes me think having a baby is the greatest fulfillment of my woman-self paired with pastel nursery items and tiny duck sleep-sacks. Like having a doll only more fun because it gives life everything you need to not worry about death.

Okay, so maybe I’m the only asshole who believed this.

I am not. I am not the only asshole. Look around!

I was, however, twenty-one when I found out I was pregnant with my first kid, and had, admittedly, spent the previous few years face-down in my own alcoholic vomit (aim high), but I really thought having a baby was like adding a small tasteful accessory to the lapel of an otherwise-totally-unchanged life.

And then, I get that kid, and realize having a baby is no more or less fulfilling than any other life activity but your body

We were babies.

will change and your identity will feel like it’s been sucked out of your breasts by this separate human being without whom you would die, which is the whole fucking problem.

And if you get postpartum depression, which many of us do, you’ll feel like a lone monster in a world of organic cotton harem pants while your husband looks at you like “But we wanted this,” or sleeps. Quite soundly, actually.

Not to oversell it.

And then it seems I have nothing but time, all those years of childhood – eighteen! So much can happen there, can’t it? And I’m thinking my life is going to be this raucous, fun thing of running around and telling kids to do shit and watching them grow and thrive and when they finally do – grow and thrive, that is – I will send them off with beaming pride and vague sense of relief.

I sent Ava off four days ago.

This morning I looked at the wad of her hair, permanently placed over our shower drain no matter how or when I ask her to clean it, and I thought to myself “I can’t clean that. It’s my last memory of Ava in the house.”

IN OTHER WORDS I’M DOING REALLY FUCKING WELL HERE FOLKS.

On the morning she left, I walked into the house and buckled, feeling like the air had been removed from my body. I spent the next fourteen hours walking around in a daze, crying, and not showering. I only broke my silence to tell Mac how I wasted it all and “only yelled” and “now it’s gone.”

I also ate a significant amount of brie and played Two Dots on the couch. When she left. Not during her whole childhood. There was a Candy Crush phase in there.

OH MY GOD I HATE EVERYTHING I DID WASTE IT ALL.

On day two I got a shower in at 4pm. That’s it. That’s what I did.

On day three I got a shower in at 3pm, and read an entire James Baldwin book for a book club I’m in.

And today, today I showered at 10am and now I’m writing to you with absolutely nothing to say beyond this: Motherhood is a crock of lies and I’m done with it. I’m out.

Please allow me this tantrum thanks.

Much like the way we don’t recall the pain of childbirth twelve seconds after they put that adult diaper on us, when that child leaves 18 years later, do we remember the endless work of raising her?

No, goddamnit. What you remember is her face beaming in the hallway as she comes out of her room, eight years old, in the most ridiculous outfit ever imagined, ready to go out for the day, and you remember her hair all frizzy in the beach wind and you remember her toddling and you remember her on the first day of middle school and you remember the way she became a woman. Do you remember the flaming cauldron of bullshit that is no sleep? Fuck no, you remember the way her body felt pressed against yours for the first time, the way it felt insane to drive home from the hospital – to actually place something this precious in a vehicle and move it around on streets shared by the common man.

I’m a mess without her. Her absence is a gaping hole in my home, this family, my heart.

The world tells me to be proud. Sure, but give me time. People say the happiest moment of their life was when their kid left. Cool. Good for you. I feel like my bowels have been removed. That was gross.

People say “It hasn’t ended.” Oh but it has. Part of it, at least. Can’t we let that be? Can’t we say “yes, the unbroken 18 years are broken.” It HAS changed. It’s okay, but for things to change, other things also have to end.

LET ME WEEP ABOUT HAIR WADS IN THE SHOWER IS WHAT I AM SAYING.

Nobody told me about the shower-hair sadness. Nobody tells you shit.

Since she was about ten, Ava would play music while getting ready for school. She’d turn it up to wake up the other kids, to lure them out of bed to start the day. She’d play Disney soundtracks. She’d play Hamilton. She’d play horrible pop music I couldn’t name. Sometimes she’d play the Rolling Stones or Grateful Dead. Always she’d play the Beatles. And she’d sing. She’d sing and sing and sing.

I lived for that music. So many mornings, I held that music as my lifeline, proof that our family wasn’t really that fucked up. Here we were, singing. Look at us.

Well, the kids. I may be racing, late, yelling, so tired my bones ache, wondering how and why I’m going to face another goddamn day of driving in circles wondering how much is left in the bank account, but by god here are these four little humans and there’s music playing and it’s our home and we did this, Mac and me. Somehow, we did it and we’re alright.

She’d crank up that music and pull our family into her joy, and I heard it, goddamnit, I heard it.

The morning before she left, I heard it again. She was in the bathroom next to me, singing along to a country song, playing her music just as she’s always done, only I sat on my bed and wept.

It is just her I will miss. The rest we move on from – the regret, the pain, the shock – but her person with us, every day, bringing only what she can bring – for that I’m grieving, for now.

It’s funny, isn’t it, the way everything can change in a single meaningless moment, a single bad country song? It isn’t that I’m fed up with motherhood; I’m fed up with every story we tell about it. All the expectations I have around it. All the ways I think it’s going to be, or should be, or would be if I were a better person.

It is a tragic, heartbreaking, limitless joy, contracted sometimes into my own disappearance. I get smaller, this whole thing does, eighteen years pressed into her voice, singing oblivious to my ears, right next door, dying for her sound and its end.

One of these days, when my heart can bear it, I’ll turn the music on myself. Maybe I’ll even sing the way she did. Maybe we all will.

the day before she left we spent the best afternoon ever on the square in our town, listening to some dude play guitar and sing. I walked over and saw them like this.

***

Hey, hi. Look. There we are, a long time ago.

Also, holy shit my hardcover is $9.50 on Amazon.

Cheaper than the paperback. No idea how these things work, but for sure it will change soon.

Look what kind of bullshit the world handed me recently. These two photos are taken one year apart, to the day:

One day, we have the child we’ve always known, and the next day, we don’t. This is hitting me so hard right now, and I’ll tell you why: The boy who I somehow felt was always going to be a little boy is suddenly a teenager with size 13 shoes and I feel like all I did was yell his entire childhood.

Get off my case about the soaring drama, okay?

Sometimes, I don’t care what my Facebook and Instagram look like and I don’t care about that time you had dinner in my house and thought we were just such a loving family. What we really were is a fraudulent rage family.

Was I ever a real mother?

So many nights I’ve rested my head on my pillow and wondered if I said even one kind thing to any of my kids that day. I don’t mean “You’re the most special creature I’ve ever encountered and I’d die for you.” I mean just a compliment, at all. A recognition of them as human beings trying to grow up.

Or did I simply bark orders? Did I simply lose patience? Did I simply tell them to do this and do that and then, that night, did I think tomorrow, damnit, tomorrow I will be better. Tomorrow I will ask my boy about how things are going in general and maybe I’ll suggest we go get some tea together and my god Janelle you went to the grocery store with him – you could have talked – were you on your phone?

Were you too busy? Did you even notice?

And as I rest right now at 3am on a mattress on a floor in Holland, my four kids tucked into their rooms, the boy in the photo who used to sleep every night in a pile of stuffed animals and blankets on our floor, currently snoring behind a CLOSED DOOR if you can imagine that shit; as I lay here next to my husband who does not stay up at 3am wondering about these things, my whole body aches for some relief. My whole body seems to shiver with a desire to go back, to see him one more time as the little boy I’ve always known, the little boy I held held held until he shut the door to his room.

Those nights, when I’d watch my life screaming past me in frenetic monotony, I’d tell myself, “At least he’s still a little guy. At least he’s still just a boy. Tomorrow.”

What do I say now?

After a week of these highly fruitful midnight contemplation sessions, I have decided I am sick of this fucking guilt. I am sick of the way my brain wraps it all into regret, wraps it all into you coulda done better. You know what? I obviously could not. If I could have done better, I would have.

But let’s talk about this, the “mom guilt.” What a terrible feminist I am for even admitting I have it. MOM GUILT!

We don’t have that since we’ve been liberated. We don’t have it because men don’t have it, because it’s an invention of the patriarchy, because we congratulate dads for bathing their offspring, so this is all nothing more than internalized self-loathing, so stop.

Okay fine, good talk. I feel so much better.

I don’t. I don’t feel better.

And you know what? I’m tired of every feminism that doesn’t meet me where I am. Every feminism that tells me I have to love being fat all the time. Every feminism that tells me feeling a loss of identity when I became a mother is a betrayal of my bra-burning ancestors (read the comments).

Yes, it matters where the guilt comes from so we can deconstruct it. Unexamined life, etc. But HEY FRIENDS I’m here now. There’s no solution in “Don’t feel that way, Janelle, because it’s a construction of the patriarchy.”

OH SO FAKE IT THEN? What a fresh take!

And as much as these self-empowerment gurus tell me to shed that shit alongside all lingering desires to diet, the feeling is still here. If I were to declare otherwise, I’d simply be lying to myself. How is that “empowering?”

I want something real, something tangible, something actually freeing, not just some fucking band-aid rhetoric.

We are where we are, and if you can’t help me from there then you’re just trying to sell me another line. A workshop, perhaps. A retreat. A book.

Weird how the world makes money off polishing my shit into something more palatable.

And the truth is this: I have missed a lot of my kids’ lives and I feel like shit about it. Some of it I missed because of alcoholism, but most of it I missed because I was living a life of seemingly impossible circumstances.

Years of a husband leaving at 3am and coming back at 5pm only to not see raises except in healthcare costs and student loan payments while babies keep getting shot in school and the rich get richer and my degree gets smaller and they keep telling me my discs are crushed because I’m fat, which is probably true. I’ve just spent so much time so fucking tired. Always, it seems. Tired, worried, drained. A frantic monotony. How quickly life can become something to survive, kids something to manage. Manage. Manage.

Play with? Engage with? Cuddle with? Stolen moments here and there. A glance.  A book before bed.

But inside of myself, you know, there was often such turmoil. So much goddam pain.The world suggests “self-care.”

You know what? Sometimes we’re too poor for self-care, too tired to even remember. We squirm under the boot of a damn-near impossible life then beat ourselves up for “missing it.”

And that, my friends, is some bullshit.

After more tears than a feminist like me (lol) would like to admit, as my breath stops in my throat when I think about Ava going back to America in three days to finish high school in the States, when I think about my first two babies never returning to how they used to be, and I feel once again I may die from the sadness of what’s gone, of what’s lost, of all that was once in my hands, I follow it all the way to the end – past regret, shame, wonder – to a deeper part of myself. The part that knows I did the best I could with what I had, and I always fucking have.

We always, always fucking have.

And sometimes, sometimes for years, it isn’t much. But if I look, I see those stolen moments. I see the times I looked at my kids as they sat on our front porch, and handed them an ice cream to watch a movie with me, and watched them sleep, reached for their hands while driving.

Hey, little one. Here I am. And damn, you’re beautiful. In this mess, this fucking crazy life, I race and race but I show up when you need me more times than not and sometimes, for mere seconds, I stop to feel your palm against mine. Could that be enough?

The other day at dinner I asked my teenagers “Do you feel like all I did was yell at you your whole life?”

They threw their heads back and laughed. “Absolutely! It’s been terrible!”

Ava then turned to me, her voice a serious tone: “Why would you ever ask that, Mama?”

And I see in a flash that today is where the freedom lies, the healing, because today is the day I will someday yearn for, when they were young, when we were young. Someday, I’ll look back at today as the years I can’t get back, and I’ll remember the time I asked them if all I did was yell, and I’ll remember the way they glanced at each other and teased me, the sun against their sweaty teenage necks, and the way I sat between them, almost in their hands.

****

Speaking of mom guilt, have you read my book?

It’s not really about mom guilt I just couldn’t think of a segue. 

Also, did you know I’m teaching a five-day writing retreat on a magical island in British Columbia?