On Shame: In the Realm of Death and Awe

What I hated most about pregnancy wasn’t back pain or weight gain or even gestational diabetes. It wasn’t the nonstop medical appointments or the strangers asking to touch my belly. It certainly wasn’t nausea, which I experienced only fleetingly. Pregnancy is a parade of indignities, but the hardest to endure was the shame I felt. I wanted to have a baby and everybody knew it, just by looking at me. Heaped atop the discomfort of my exposed ambition was the possibility that, should I miscarry, this, too, would be public.

Choosing to have a baby betrays a kind of hope: a commitment to the future, to life, and, on some level, to banality. I am not above child-rearing, my pregnancy told the world, quite accurately. I was a writer, but perhaps not that kind of writer. My writing was not more important to me than my wish to have a family. And this is the well from which much of my shame flowed. Inside me was a yearning so powerful, so basic, that it dominated my every instinct. I, who had willingly abandoned nearly all of life’s landmarks for the sake of my art, was not willing to abandon being a mom. Instead, I was casting aside almost everything I recognized about myself, everything I had built, all for something that nearly everyone I’d gone to high school with had achieved a decade earlier.

If you had asked me how I felt during my pregnancy, I probably would have said, “Great! No morning sickness! Hiking four miles every day!” Those closest to me knew I was battling severe anxiety, but I don’t think I ever admitted to anyone how ashamed I was—ashamed of how badly I wanted a baby and how long I had waited to have one. I was ashamed of the realization that, after years of insisting being an artist doesn’t make you special, being an artist had made me special—in the sense that it had shaped the choices I made, the life I had constructed, my identity. Where would all that go when I was caring for an infant full-time? I’m familiar with the countless examples of successful artists with children—many of them are close friends—but, frankly, I wasn’t sure I would be one of them. My writing didn’t necessarily seem significant enough to compete with a child.

Let me be clear: I am not of the opinion that having a child is an inherently good or important thing to do. I am not attempting to position myself as some self-sacrificing maternal figure, setting aside my own needs in order to raise a baby. On the contrary, I wanted to be a mother. In fact, I have often worried—and felt deep shame—over what felt to me like a mostly selfish choice, made in pursuit of my own pleasure and fulfillment above all else. As Cody-Rose Clevidence puts it in their book Listen My Friend, This Is the Dream I Dreamed Last Night:

oxytocin is released in both your brain and your dog’s brain when you look at each other. personally, I think it’s unethical to have kids, that there is so much pain in the world that it is unconscionable to bring another conscious being into it. but, I don’t speak for the morals of others.

I read this, and a part of me agrees. On the other hand, as my husband Robert said when I aired this concern, “ethics have nothing to do with it; it’s natural.” Can I quote my own poem here? What drives me/is baseless/and therefore/indisputable. That’s what Robert means: not that procreation is essential, or even innate; rather, to those struck by it, the yearning to have a child doesn’t occur in the realm of reason or justice but in the realm of death and awe. Some things just are. Still, I would be much less embarrassed if I were writing an essay about my willingness to abandon my writing career in order to become an organizer, or a public-school teacher, or, I don’t know, a gardener.

My daughter, Ramona, is now eighteen months old. Being a mom is, without question, the best thing to ever have happened to me. I am happier and more relaxed now. Motherhood has even, inexplicably, cured me of the insomnia that has plagued me since I was a child. Still, my writing life has suffered. In the first year of Ramona’s life, I wrote one poem. It was about her birth, a highly traumatic and very nearly fatal event that left me in the hospital for a month. I would like to say that being so close to death finally rid me of my shame, but the opposite is true. I sent my friends text updates from the Maternal Fetal Care Unit: “if you tell me ‘I’m sorry’ I’m going to stop speaking to you.” My illness seemed the final, totalizing proof of my humiliating desperation: I was willing to give up everything to have a baby.

People say that if you shine a light on what you’re ashamed of, it will have less power over you. That is definitely not what happened over the course of writing this essay! Instead, the more I examined my shame, the more it consumed me. I became envious of my students, whose poetry I encourage and guide. I made cutting comments to my husband—a writer himself—and then rejected his attempts to make space for me to work. Every publication announcement I saw felt like an accusation. I was being choked by the pettiness of my own emotional life. Is this the cost of motherhood? I have always been irked by the suggestion that one should suffer for their art. Why am I so accepting of the idea that I should suffer for my child? At this point, I suppose I’d be too ashamed not to.