Nobody Put This on the Registry
I Wanted This. So Why Am I Having Such a Hard Time?
The baby is asleep.
This should feel like good news.
Instead, you’re sitting on the edge of the bed watching the small green bars on the monitor move up and down.
You have seventeen minutes, maybe forty-five, possibly two hours. Newborn sleep operates according to roughly the same scheduling philosophy as a delayed flight.
There are things you could do.
Shower. Eat something that requires two hands. Move the laundry from the washing machine, where it has been developing its own ecosystem since yesterday.
Sleep.
Everyone keeps telling you to sleep.
Sleep when the baby sleeps, people say, with the confidence of people who have apparently never met anxiety.
Instead, you open your phone.
There are pictures from eight months ago. Your stomach round beneath a dress you bought because the description said bump friendly. Your partner’s hand across your belly. A tiny pair of shoes beside a sonogram. The baby shower. The cake. That photograph where everyone said you were glowing.
You remember wanting this.
That’s the part that keeps prosecuting you.
Maybe you tried for years. Maybe there were ovulation strips lined up beside the bathroom sink, fertility appointments squeezed between work meetings, pregnancy tests you tried not to look at too hopefully.
Maybe there was a loss before this baby.
Maybe there wasn’t.
Maybe you simply knew you wanted to become a parent in the uncomplicated way we sometimes know things before we actually have to live inside them.
And now the baby is here.
The baby you wanted.
The baby you love.
And sometimes you want your old life back so badly that the thought scares you.
Not forever.
Maybe just for an afternoon.
You want to leave the house carrying nothing.
You want to go somewhere without calculating when another human being last ate.
You want your body to belong entirely to you for three consecutive hours.
You want to sit in a coffee shop and waste time.
God, you miss wasting time.
You didn’t know time was a form of wealth until you lost custody of your own.
The Strange Math Of A Wanted Life
There is a particular cruelty in believing gratitude and grief are opposites.
We have a remarkably tidy cultural story about wanted parenthood: you wanted this, you got this, therefore you should be happy.
The equation leaves out the person who had to change in order for this new life to exist.
Because becoming a parent isn’t simply the addition of a baby to an otherwise unchanged life. Research on the transition to parenthood describes shifts in daily routines, social roles, self-concept, sleep, stress and even neurobiology.[1] Research on maternal identity has likewise described becoming a mother not as assuming a fixed role but as an evolving reorganization of the self.[2]
The science is catching up to something parents have been trying to say from their kitchens for a long time:
Everything changed.
And everything can include you.
This is where ambivalence gets frightening.
Not ambivalence about whether your baby deserves love. Not secret evidence that you don’t want them.
Ambivalence in its much more human form: two apparently contradictory things existing in the same body.
I love you, and I need you to stop touching me.
I am grateful you’re here, and I miss who I was before you.
I would do anything for you, and I would also like to go to Target alone for an amount of time that would concern my family.
I wanted this.
This is hard.
Research with first-time mothers has found that mixed feelings about motherhood can become particularly distressing when women believe those feelings fall outside the boundaries of what a mother is supposed to feel. Ambivalence itself isn’t necessarily the whole source of suffering; shame about the ambivalence can become part of the suffering.[3]
I keep thinking about that distinction.
Because sometimes the hardest feeling isn’t the original feeling.
It’s what we decide the feeling means.
I miss my old life becomes I shouldn’t have become a mother.
I need a break becomes I’m selfish.
I’m angry becomes I’m a bad mom.
I don’t enjoy this today somehow becomes I don’t love my baby.
A passing human experience gets hauled into an imaginary courtroom and presented as evidence about your character.
And motherhood has an unusually crowded jury.
There are relatives and parenting books and social media feeds and strangers at Target and whatever your own mother did and whatever you swore you would never do and the woman on Instagram whose six-week-old apparently naps independently while she makes sourdough.
There are also older ideas underneath all of this about what good motherhood is supposed to require.
Availability.
Patience.
Selflessness.
Sacrifice without visible resentment.
We have spent a long time romanticizing the disappearance of women into caregiving and calling that disappearance devotion.
So perhaps it shouldn’t surprise us that needing something for yourself can begin to feel vaguely criminal.
Sometimes hard is hard. Sometimes it’s more than hard.
Most couples are not arguing about what they think they’re arguing about.
Sometimes the fight about dishes is really about exhaustion.
Sometimes the fight about sex is really about emotional safety.
Sometimes the silence after conflict is really fear of abandonment.
Sometimes resentment is grief that never got language.
A trained couples therapist helps identify the cycle underneath the conflict instead of getting stuck debating the surface details.
This is one reason approaches like Emotionally Focused Therapy are so powerful: they help couples recognize the vulnerable emotions hidden beneath anger, defensiveness, criticism, or withdrawal.
Research from The Gottman Institute also shows that patterns like criticism, contempt, defensiveness, and stonewalling are among the strongest predictors of relationship distress.
But the goal of therapy is not perfection.
The goal is repair.
To help couples move from:
- reaction to understanding
- shutdown to honesty
- blame to curiosity
- survival to connection
The Photograph
The monitor makes a noise.
Your body turns toward it before you’ve decided to move.
Nothing.
The baby shifts and settles.
You look down at your phone again.
The photograph from eight months ago is still there.
There you are, pregnant and smiling at whoever stood behind the camera.
For a second, you feel something you haven’t quite known how to name.
You miss her.
Not because she was better.
Not because becoming a parent ruined you.
Not because you secretly want to undo your life.
You miss the person who could leave the house without checking whether there were enough diapers in a bag. The person whose body wasn’t constantly required by someone else. The person who could decide at 4:30 on a Saturday afternoon that she wanted to go somewhere and then simply…go.
Maybe you miss parts of her you didn’t even know were privileges when you had them.
And maybe that’s grief.
Not the kind that means you wish your baby away.
The kind that accompanies almost every profound transformation: the realization that becoming someone new means there are ways you will never again be exactly who you were.
We understand this in almost every other part of life.
You can take the job you desperately wanted and miss your old coworkers.
You can move somewhere beautiful and still feel homesick.
You can leave a relationship that needed to end and grieve the person.
You can choose something and still mourn what choosing it closed.
We rarely require transformation to arrive without loss.
Motherhood, somehow, gets different rules.
But perhaps it shouldn’t.
Research has been describing maternal identity as something that develops and changes through experience for decades, and newer work continues to examine the transition into motherhood as a meaningful psychological transformation rather than a role a person simply steps into once the baby arrives.[2][6]
Maybe becoming a parent isn’t the moment an old identity disappears and a new one takes its place.
Maybe it’s messier than that.
Maybe for a while there are several versions of you living in the same house.
The person you were.
The parent you imagined you’d be.
The exhausted person you are today.
The person you’re still becoming.
And maybe they don’t need to agree about everything.
The baby wakes.
For real this time.
You put down the phone.
You stand up.
And another version of you goes to get them.
If some part of this feels familiar
The gratitude and the grief, the love and the resentment, the strange feeling of missing yourself inside a life you wanted—you don’t have to wait until things become unbearable to talk about it.
Therapy can be a place to make sense of what pregnancy, birth, postpartum, and becoming a parent have changed: in your identity, your relationships, your body, and the way you experience yourself.
If you’re in Utah and looking for support during pregnancy or postpartum, you can learn more about working with me or reach out to schedule a consultation.
Clinical note:
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