Who Do I Think I Am?

How much of "the old me" did motherhood leave intact?

I found out I was pregnant early this year, just as vaccines were rolling out and restrictions were lifting. I was too exhausted and pregnant-sober to enjoy the three weeks of irrational exuberance social media managers christened Hot Vax Summer, and so a year of government-imposed COVID restrictions bled into a second year of self-imposed pregnancy restrictions. Those seismic shifts, paired with motherhood's biological brain-scramble, has left me somewhat unrecognizable to myself.

During pregnancy, the brain reorganizes, shrinking its grey matter, eliminating pathways the brain deems unnecessary and enhancing pathways that urge a mother to love her child so much that she has to fight against that love becoming her whole personality. The amygdala enlarges, readying the brain to be more responsive to threats and danger. More anxiety, fewer Trivial Pursuit victories.

More changes occur in the brain of a pregnant person than occur in the brain of a person undergoing puberty. Our brain does not care how miserable all this makes us, as long as we keep our baby alive. Nature does not care about mothers' convenience or any identity crises she may face as a result.

Before the pandemic-pregnancy one-two, my pastimes were admittedly a little hedonistic: Staying out late, going to see bands I like play live, spending a Sunday afternoon in a spa in K-town with an open book and my phone turned off, going to the movies, spur-of-the-moment trips to desolate hikes a day and a half's drive away, hot yoga, hosting friends for dinner parties, getting fucked up and having an impromptu karaoke jam in my living room, the silence of an art museum, baking this pound cake and trying to teach myself how to cook Indonesian food. There are legitimate reasons that those activities, if they ever resume, won't resume for some time. My lifestyle was not baby-friendly.

Now, almost every day, my husband and I have an exchange that goes something like this:

Josh: What do you want to do for yourself today? Outside of the house?

Me: I don't really have anything I need to do outside of the house.

Josh: What do you want to do?

Me: (growing distressed) I don't know. Read?

Josh: (trying a new tack) What's something that you can't do inside the house?

Josh then lists a series of things that a person might want to do that involve leaving while he takes care of our daughter solo, like: go to a coffee shop or take a walk or go to the gym or get a pedicure and I reply with a litany of reasons I can't or don't want to do those things.

I don't want to go to a coffee shop because I don't need more coffee./ I don't want to go to a coffee shop because other people are annoying./ New parent fatigue means patience for my neighborhood's young trust fund hipsters is nonexistent; spending any time around them at all is exhausting./ I still feel as though I lent my body to a person who was too big for it, and they returned it to me all stretched out, and I don't want people to see me like this, even people who I find desperately annoying.

I won't take a walk because we live in a hilly neighborhood on the east side of Los Angeles, and I'm afraid of how weak I'll feel trying to scale a hill that left me winded even back when I was in fighting shape./ I'm bored of walking in this neighborhood./ I'm not as strong as I used to be, and there are few things more demoralizing and upsetting to me than the shock of physical decline. (I'll face reality later, I think, when I have the emotional bandwidth.)

I can't go to the gym because I haven't had my postpartum follow up visit with my doctor. (Not a real excuse, actually.)/ I don't want to deal with the LA gym people with their TikToks of themselves doing squats and their influencing./ By the time I get to the gym and get settled in, I'll be worried about getting home to feed the baby./ My breasts are going to start leaking and the gym people will see it and think I ruptured breast implants. Well guess what, KELCEE (the soul of every influencer is named KELCEE), this is called lactation and if you hadn't failed high school biology you'd know that it's happening because I just gave birth and my body is a runaway mail truck.

I can't get a pedicure because I don't like pedicures. I never liked them. I always got them despite disliking them, because gender is a prison and painted toes are an essential part of the performance of femininity during sandal weather. I got a pedicure the other day, anyway, not knowing what else to do to take a short breather from 24/7 mothering, and I returned home in a worse mood than I was in when I left.

There's a scene in the very silly 1990's romantic comedy Runaway Bride where it dawns on the Julia Roberts character that the reason she keeps running away, as a bride, is that she doesn't have any of her own interests, she just adopts the interests of the men with whom she's romantically involved. To demonstrate that she is achieving personal growth during the third act, the filmmakers show Roberts trying eggs prepared several different ways, to figure out which way she prefers.

Reader, I'm on the verge of staging my own dumbass Robertsian egg tasting. What do I want to do when I leave the house? Do I even want to leave the house? What kind of music do I enjoy, at a reasonable volume, during daylight hours? What are some activities that somebody like me can do that are not self-destructive? Is all of this temporary? Will I ever feel like myself again? Do I want to feel like myself again?

Somewhere between the end of 2019 and now, a part of me passed away and now hangs above a mantle in my brain like the taxidermied bust of a trophy buck. Her face is familiar, but we don't have much to talk about. I confessed to my therapist that this pesky sadness that insists upon itself commingles with the excitement and love I feel for motherhood. Transformation, or evolution, or growth feels a little like a loss because it is. That's why it's hard. To get to point B, you must leave point A.

I was ready for my life to move in a new direction; that's why I chose to become a parent. But now that I'm on the other side of that decision, the questions become who am I outside of and apart from that choice? and How can I fight against my brain's newfound indifference to my own self-nullification?

These are more difficult questions than I bargained for, but I look forward to getting to know more about me as we spend more time together. I'm thinking about getting into puzzles.

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