The Motherload: Episodes from the Brink of Motherhood

I got up off my chair and looked out at the streets of West Hollywood splayed beneath me, radiating away from the canyons, whose crevices are always the color of dark iced tea. I stretched

All I’m saying is, why does my baby look like an alien frog? I could hear my sister take a drink of something. Oh my God, Sarah, I can’t believe you’re even saying this to me. Do you know how lucky you are? Jesus fucking Christ. Of course, on some level, intellectually, I did. I knew it was deranged to say anything to my sister whose baby had died.

It made me think of the coldest winter days when she’d let us sleep in from school and wake me up with hot chocolate and whipped cream for breakfast, bringing it into my room and gently nudging me out of bed by tickling my arm.

stomach was huge and loose, I had brown nipples the size of saucers at the end of massive, heavy breasts. I hadn’t realized my stomach wouldn’t shrink immediately and that every part of my body that had changed in the last ten months would look so much worse without the baby inside.

WHEN I LOOK BACK AND think about my own reaction to impending motherhood, I can’t help but see that my extreme distress was informed by anxiety that I wouldn’t be able to be a mother and be happy at the same time. Though my mother had three children, something about dealing with them consistently had been anathema to her core identity, as if she we

But when he rammed his dick inside my small, girlish body,

hands on my tiny hips, their bones about a foot apart, perched on top of a roughly shaved groin, which I kept bare and powdered in case he touched me down there.

episiotomy.

started to perceive our potential marriage as the proof I needed that Tom really loved me, that he chose me, and that I was enough. Yes, it was my little power trip, a small corner I could control in the grand design of our relationship. The more I thought about our future, the more obsessed with a wedding I became.