“Excited?” the nurse asked as she passed me in the hallway of my doctor’s office. I was sitting with my husband and clutching our first-ever sonogram. I was dizzy and six weeks pregnant, although I’d known for two weeks already.
“Working on it,” I said to her. She stared for a second, as though I’d just told her that my favorite hobby was tossing puppies off bridges, and then walked away.
I wasn’t surprised by her reaction, but I was disappointed by it. For all of my adult life, the idea of becoming a mother and having children had left me in a state of ambivalence. I could just as easily picture life without kids as with them. But in the age of public bump watches and gender reveal parties on social media, confessing that to others felt too vulnerable.
That day at the doctor’s office, it wasn’t that I was unhappy we were having a baby. Mostly, I was scared, which I quickly learned is not something others like hearing from expectant mothers. It seemed the world wanted me to say I’d always known I wanted kids, or I was over the moon about being pregnant, or I was sure every moment of those nine months would overflow with joy.
But none of that was accurate. My ambivalence did not magically transform into confidence at that doctor’s appointment. Instead, it morphed into something more akin to anxiety. What would I do about work? Would I be a good parent? Would my kid like me? Would I ever write again? Would I even recognize my life in a year? I was relaxed and going with the flow on the outside—but panicked on the inside.
When people asked how I was doing, I based the truthfulness of my response on how much I trusted them and how much I thought they would balk at any answer if it didn’t burst with maternal bliss. For reasons I didn’t fully understand, I resisted some of the common trappings of modern pregnancy, like having a gender reveal party or baby shower (I compromised on a small family “get-together” when I saw how much it meant to my mother). I didn’t want to post bump updates online to share that my baby was the size of a coconut that week. Some people understood how I felt, while others couldn’t wrap their minds around why I didn’t want these things.
It was the still-persistent ambivalence but also a lack of interest in being a part of modern pregnancy culture. I worried I’d be a terrible mother because I didn’t want the things so many other women seemed to want while pregnant.
But on a cold February morning just after midnight, our son was born. In an instant, my feelings morphed again, this time into something I was better able to understand.
Once I had that squishy, tiny boy in my arms, wrapped in a hospital blanket like a breakfast burrito, I felt an internal Oh. Now I see.
I now understood my ambivalence for what it was—simply a part of me that had to see the outcome to feel sure about it.
There have been things in my life I’ve been able to visualize and times when I knew for certain that I’d be happy with a choice, like buying a house or going to grad school or marrying my husband. I didn’t have the same certainty about becoming a parent, not because I was bound to be a horrible mom but because between the choice of having kids or not having them, neither felt more or less right.
It became clear to me that I also had been pushing back against the way pregnancy and motherhood are commonly viewed today. There seems to be a performative expectation to all of it, as if women can only be totally good with these two tremendously life-altering, sometimes difficult transitions. There’s room for us only to say we’re excited, we’re feeling great, we love motherhood, we’re exhausted but happier than ever. Often, we can say the rest of the truth only when we’re with someone we trust.
I wonder what might’ve happened if that nurse at our first appointment had smiled at me and said, “Hey, that’s OK. However you’re feeling right now is fine!” The emptiness of her response, however, has stayed with me. Motherhood is hard enough without being expected to act overjoyed at every moment, too.
Now that my son is here, I wouldn’t change a thing, of course. He was the right choice and I’m sure about him in the deepest part of my human makeup. But it was only after I made the transition to motherhood that I knew feeling ambivalent before feeling sure is absolutely OK.