The Child I Am Meant to Bear

My mother tells me one day my mind will change and I’ll want kids; I tell her she is wrong. Not because I don’t think her dream of truth is possible, but because I am a teenager and I am stubborn and the thought of a child with my DNA sounds like it would end my life. 

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I watched “The Worst Person in the World” and ate sour patch watermelon with Alyssa in the back of an AMC. It’s not exactly a movie about motherhood, but it also is. It’s about motherhood in the way a woman’s life is about motherhood. Like, it’s not about motherhood in the context of an isolated incident—a birth, an abortion, a miscarriage, creating a before and an after. It’s about motherhood though in the way that every woman’s life is about motherhood.

When you are little you hold the shape of a baby made of plastic, fabric, and beads and tell them you love them as you clumsily change an empty diaper. It’s like that most of the time at least, but sometimes when you’re five years old you have weird instincts and do something like forget your baby at school so that they will be mad at you and run away. But, you don’t do that because you hate the baby, you do that because you are the baby and you are processing your emotions by applying them to someone else. You then respond to them the way you want to be responded to, or how you have been responded to—replication instead of change, a dangerous motion.

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You leak blood and it’s a blessing. You’re not pregnant, but oh my goodness how special!

You are a woman now. Your body could make a baby if you wanted to. 

I didn’t even have my period when my mom told me that if later on I ever needed help, meaning like Plan B, I could ask and she wouldn't question anything. I was thankful for that, although I appreciated it much more later on in life than I did at that moment. 

And many years later I would make my sister buy me a pregnancy test because that month I did not leak blood but my breasts did become tender and my brain left traces of pain along my temples. My mom said that however the test read that everything would be okay. And while that is exactly what I needed to hear I did not want to experience the moments between my peeing on a stick and everything being okay. I was not pregnant, but I took the other test in the twin pack a couple days later just to be sure. Still just one line. 

The presence of motherhood also exists as anxiety. 

And you should remember that when you soak the paper of a gynecologist's bed with cold sweat, the product of the thin nails of your left hand piercing the tissue between your thumb and forefinger as a kind woman looks inside of your vagina like it’s open manhole surrounded by pavement baking in the sun. She was nice but she was also now the face associated with the pain your insides felt and so you hate her. She tells you about each step of inserting the IUD and you breathe heavily until she says “wow you barely reacted, did you even feel that?” You definitely did, but you know the anxiety of potential motherhood hurts more. 

And in that way a woman’s life is about motherhood—a woman often learns of herself through pretending to be a mother before she could even be a mother. And a woman learns of the consequences of some pleasure before she even understands pleasure. And even then, there is little pleasure without thoughts of motherhood, or you risk bearing the consequence that is motherhood. 

“The Worst Person in the World” weaves in the narrative of motherhood seamlessly but without fluidity. There is no black and white nature of motherhood and Joachim Trier did not show it that way. Motherhood was shown as arguments with partners because a woman turning 30 has eggs that are aging. It was shown as questions littered with children and cloaked with brutal judgment intended as concern, but really is just bullshit. It was shown as the gray area of the phrase “I don’t know” and it showed how debilitating it is to need an answer when your mind is composed of a thousand voices that are not your own. 

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At nineteen I say I do not want kids. My mom says that she wants grandkids. After so many times she says “or, maybe grand puppies, or whatever.” That, I appreciate. 

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I don’t know how to say that I think motherhood is one of the most beautiful things on this planet, but I also think it’s a burden to carry. It’s funny to me how one’s life can revolve around carrying the potential for more life, and then if that baby can have children one day then the life created by someone else will be spent thinking about the potential to create life, and so on. And, in that way the thought of my baby is older than myself. 

Creating life is amazing, but amazing things come with less amazing things. And motherhood can be beautiful but it can also be a bitter taste in one’s mouth for decades when the thought of taking care of yourself is too much.

Motherhood does not appear when you become a mother and it does not vanish when you aren’t one because motherhood also looks like young people in clinics with appointment titles they are afraid to say out loud—an appointment that ends the inevitable of motherhood also begins a lifetime wondering what it would be like. Motherhood also looks like grief, like imagination, like trauma and violation. Motherhood does not look one way but it is visible from every way. And, so in a way every woman’s life is about motherhood because it’s perhaps the only thing that a woman will have to think about for the entirety of their life no matter their choice.