My daughter is eight months old, and I’ve finally finished her nursery. For six months she slept in the black, minimalist bassinet next to my bed before my three-year-old was evicted from the crib to make space for her. There was no nesting or carefully ventilated painting during my pregnancy, and it’s taken me some time to recover from the postpartum haze and consider any kind of decoration project. The room was already a beautiful blush pink when we moved in, so I work with our grey crib and pink paint and cobble together a gallery wall with my daughter’s newborn photos.

The pictures show me in a loose, white dress, light filtering through the curtains. My daughter has been lulled to sleep with heated pads, a symphony of white noise machines, and the gentle humming and swaying of the photographer as she carefully arranges her limbs. She instructs me to hold my daughter’s wrists together and support her head as she captures shots from different angles. “I’ll photoshop these together for this froggy pose,” she explains quietly. “Let go quickly when I tell you.”

Earlier, my family sat on a gauzy coverlet. Bohemian wall hangings give us an artistic backdrop. My baby is wrapped in a lace swaddle, and she cries intermittently between shots because she’s hungry, but the pictures don’t show that. They show our family in a beautiful, borrowed room (one I’m complimented on whenever people see the photos). They show a peaceful baby, frozen in between the moments when her mouth twists in a scream.

The pictures are stunning--well worth the photographer’s high prices and the waiting period to get them back, edited to perfection. They don’t show my boys’ bewilderment, my husband’s strain, the antidepressants stowed in my medicine cabinet. They are glimpses, crafted moments, hanging over the duct-taped and rickety changing table my nursing school preceptor passed along to us.

***

It’s the Saturday after Thanksgiving and we’re on the Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica. I strap my 7-week-old son to my chest over one of my husband’s old t-shirts. I’ve pulled my hair into a greasy top knot and foregone real pants for the pair of ratty maternity leggings that may as well be my second skin. I usually make at least a minimal effort when I venture beyond University Village, the graduate student housing where we live, but I’m too tired from the combination of a newborn and post-holiday carb-loading to care.

We’re almost to the end of the mall, and the baby fidgets against my chest. It’s been three hours and eleven minutes since he last ate. I argue with myself, a mental volley of worries and reassurances.

“Three hours is just approximate; it doesn’t matter if he doesn’t eat exactly every three hours.”

“If you let him sleep too long now, he won’t sleep at night.”

“If you wait too long, your supply will go down.”

I smile and nod as my older son points to the dinosaur topiaries in the center of the Promenade, trying to keep the crazy in check. I answer my husband’s comments even as I’m thinking of the three blocks to Nordstrom’s mother’s lounge and how they’ll feel like three miles if my baby cries the whole way there.  

Then I see the Restoration Hardware sign. When my mom visited a month earlier, helping with my new son, she’d brought a catalogue in her purse. I’d combed through it, in awe at the pristine furniture and the idea that someone could pay so much for baby furniture and throw pillows, glancing up from the pages at my second-hand changing table and third-hand crib, complete with teeth marks gnawed into the railing. In our government-subsidized student housing, it’s a complete fantasy, utterly distant from my reality. Face-to-face with the fairyland catalogue pages made physical, curiosity gets the best of me.

The atmosphere changes as soon as I walk in. The Los Angeles smog and noise of the street performers melt away. Soft, chiming lullabies play over the speakers. The colors are muted, blush and fog and pearl. Crystal chandeliers dangle over finely carved cribs; shabby chic stuffed narwhals and foxes adorn plush gliders.

A couple stands with a sales associate, who is checking boxes on a clipboard. The man’s hand is on the small of his wife’s back. He has a well-groomed beard and artfully neglected hair over a face framed by black glasses. The woman wears a pencil skirt, with a basketball belly pushing out her cashmere sweater. She balances gracefully on black kitten heels. She listens intently to the salesperson, looking around her, deciding if she needs curtains in “mist” or “whisper.” Her fingers brush a quilted crib blanket, and for a moment, I can sense her anticipation, her love for the fluttering being turning over inside her. She’s picturing the quiet mornings in the nursery, lullabies softly playing in the background as she feeds her rosy cherub in her plush upholstered glider (Belgian Linen in Dove).

I remember when I thought that was how motherhood felt.

***

I once heard a friend say of another woman, “She’s transitioning gracefully to motherhood.” Nobody ever said that about me. My struggles went beyond the typical difficulty in piecing together the minutes to shower or brush my teeth. Breastfeeding was not the serene island of bonding I’d anticipated; instead, my nipples cracked and bled, leaving my babies spitting up blood and vampirically rooting for more milk. I wore adult diapers and oversized t-shirts. Hydrogel pads, abandoned mid-nursing session, wound up stuck to my socks.

My initiation into motherhood was pain--the crushing folding and stretching of my uterus, the dull throbbing behind my C-section scar, the vise-like latch that came every two hours, accompanied by wails of hunger. My mother’s adoration of babies and the gushing, rose-tinted posts I saw on social media shaped my expectations of motherhood--I imagined myself glowing with love, basking in the sweetness of the new soul I’d brought earthside. I found myself at the Pump Station in Los Angeles, surrounded by bottle brushes in whimsical shapes, swaddle blankets contoured to maximize sleep, and smiling women with babies in strollers and wraps and car seats. I shook with anxiety as I filled out the forms for a hospital-grade pump, while the women strolled around me, seeming to exist in a parallel dimension of perpetual sunlight.

Anxiety twisted my gut every time I had to leave the house. I would pack my diaper bag, checking for diapers and bottles and backup onesies, and then sit back and hyperventilate, panic surging through my veins as I tried to slow my breathing. My brain fought my body’s visceral reactions with logic as I told myself the baby wouldn’t cry, the car wouldn’t crash, the sky wouldn’t fall, but my body just didn’t believe it.

I was either frenzied or unconscious, my body piecing together 20-minute increments of rest. Beyond the everyday demands of motherhood--the exhaustion, the recovery, the meeting of competing, impatient needs--was the overarching idea that I had failed because my life was pandemonium, and because I wasn’t always--or ever--at peace. I’d expected an idyll and entered a circus.

***

I’m tickling my daughter on that second-hand changing table I’ve managed to hold on to through six years of motherhood and three moves. Its blonde wood clashes with the grey crib and dresser, and the shelves are sagging. My daughter looks up at me, her inky blue eyes creased in laughter. I sweep her into my arms and she turns her face into mine, open mouth planting slobbery kisses along my cheek.

She reaches to her newborn pictures on her wall in their dollar-store frames. “Da-da,” she says, smiling at one with my husband holding her. She reaches up to the wooden “E” I’ve decorated with artificial flowers and yanks one off, clapping and dropping it in her delight. The floor is strewn with stuffed animals and hairbows; the kitchen beyond the door is sticky and piled high with dishes. I hear the faint sounds of an argument between my boys in the playroom.

We’re far from a Restoration Hardware tableau, but as motherhood has sunk into my bones and rhythms I’ve made a hesitant peace with chaos. Anxiety and expectation still whisper treachery in vulnerable moments, but I’ve built shaky defenses. My confidence has timidly blossomed as I’ve tackled the challenges and tasted the unrefined sweetness of motherhood.

For me, the key to finding joy rested in releasing my expectations of peace or perfection and sinking my hands into the dirt of daily life. Only when I stopped striving for the photo-worthy still shots did I find the fleeting glimpses of softness and rest that had eluded me.

Motherhood isn’t curated. It certainly isn’t muted. Motherhood is profusion. It’s color, the newness of flowers and butterflies seen through fresh eyes. It’s the music of baby laughter and riotous nursery songs with stomping feet and clanging bells. It’s the sweet smell of baby skin untouched by the world; the unshakeable odor of sour milk in clothes and hair and carpet that lingers until it’s imperceptible; the miasma of the diaper pail. The salt of playdough and the wax of new crayons. It’s the metallic taste formula, dripped on a wrist to test the temperature; the sugar drops of breast milk, surreptitiously licked from a fingertip.

Motherhood doesn’t feel like a carefully arranged room designed for comfort. It’s screaming with sensation.

There are certainly women whose journeys are prettier than mine, but motherhood rattles all of us to our core. We are undone by motherhood, remade by motherhood. Beautiful photos hang on my daughter’s nursery wall, but their orchestrated, flattened loveliness is nothing to the dynamic chaos they are a backdrop for. The ragged nights, the consuming love, the juxtaposition of joy and despair, sacrifice and fullness, build the wild, rich mosaic of motherhood.

Guest essay written by Lorren Lemmons. Lorren is a mother of three, a military spouse, a pediatric nurse, and a lover of words. She lives in Georgia with her family. Her work has previously been featured on Coffee + Crumbs and other websites, including Military Moms Blog, where she is a regular contributor. You can connect with Lorren on her website or Instagram.

Photo by Jennifer Batchelor