By Allie King
@alliehking

I pause to look back at our home as the front door clicks shut behind me. Clutching my brand-new nursing pillow under my arm, I smile at our happy, teal door—the one that will welcome our first baby home in just a few short days. I turn back around, the mid-July sun warming my face, and waddle toward the car.

Twenty-four hours later, my husband is shouting my name. I’m not sure if his voice is in the room or in my head. Actually, I’m not even sure what room I’m in.

“Allie! Wake up! Stay with us!” he shouts.

Weights must be hanging from my eyelashes. I can’t open my eyes. Why is he yelling? 

“Get the oxygen mask.”

Who is that? What are they putting on my face?

“Breathe, Allie, breathe!”

I am breathing, I think. The mask smells vile, like burning rubber. I try to bat it away, but my husband’s sturdy hand holds it in place. I’m going to be sick.

“Puke bucket, quick!” a woman’s voice says. 

Nothing’s coming out. Just dry heaving. Why is everyone yelling? I need my eyes. Come on, eyes, work. There we go, a glimpse.

“Allie! Allie! Stay awake! You have to push!”

When I open my eyes, the room is blurry. A harsh light beams from above, like God’s peering down from heaven. My OBGYN is at my feet. My husband’s by my face. My mom’s at my side. My sister’s holding my leg? Why are there so many nurses? Ten sets of eyes are fixed on mine. I’m reorienting—I’m delivering a baby, our first baby. I want to tell everyone to please look somewhere else. Sweat drips down my back. A wave overtakes my body; the left half of my abdomen screams in pain.

“PUSH, PUSH, PUUUSH!” a nurse yells.

I have no choice. An electric force squeezes my back, my belly, my bones—wringing out my innards like a wet rag. I push, wailing until my vision blurs again and their voices fade.

We play this horrible game over and over again: push, pass out, repeat. On the final push, adrenaline surges, forcing my eyes fully open. The room is both loud and silent. I grit my teeth. A guttural cry escapes as pain tears through my abdomen one last time, my body bearing witness to a lifelong dream.

Seconds later, my doctor offers my son’s fresh, splotchy body to me. I look at the doctor, then back at the baby, my entire body tensing. She nods, as if to say take him. I reach out to hold him, fighting the nausea and panic rising in my chest. He begins to cry.

“Oh, listen to that little cry!” the nurse laughs. I force a smile, pretending his whimpers aren’t sending electric currents of anxiety through my veins. Small, tender tears stream down my husband’s face—a sight I haven’t seen since our wedding day.

My heart thuds against my chest, faster and faster, louder and louder. I thought skin-to-skin was comforting to mother and baby. Why is he crying? Why am I crying? 

“Pull him to your breast,” the nurse says. 

I try, but his slippery body squirms away from mine. I thought they wiped their bodies clean before they handed them to you. His shrill cry escalates until it’s all I can hear. The nurse is maneuvering my baby now, forcing his head into my chest, pinching at my flesh. I’m drenched in some mixture of tears, sweat, and blood. After an hour of this deafening fight, the nurse pages someone.

“We need a lactation consultant in here,” she says. “Baby won’t latch.”

I read the books. This isn’t right. What’s happening? How do I fix it? I’m sobbing now as a crew of nurses hovers around me, manipulating my body, manipulating my baby. 

My baby. 

My baby?

I’ve been awake for 40 hours. I’m coming in and out of consciousness when the lactation consultant enters an hour later. Her forehead is creased, but her eyes are kind. I tell her how desperately I want to breastfeed.

“Then, we will,” she says matter-of-factly. After she tries everything the nurses have already tried, she starts pushing and rubbing, massaging and coaxing until tiny yellow drops drip from my breasts. She catches them on a spoon. I lie lifeless while she milks me like a cow. My baby lies in the bassinet two feet from me, but because of the ways I feel I’ve already failed him, miles of distance stretch between us.

***

Two days later, a nurse wheels me out of the hospital with a car seat and a baby in my lap. My husband waits at the entrance with our car and quickly snaps the car seat into place. I hobble from the wheelchair to the passenger’s seat, hoisting myself into the car with a groan. We drive home in near silence, both sleep deprived to the point of delirium, and I wonder why my body hurts so badly but my insides feel so numb.

Fifteen minutes later, we pull into our driveway. My mom, dad, and grandmother greet us with giddy smiles. My husband carries the car seat, and in it our sleeping baby, through the front door and gingerly sets the little black cocoon on our living room floor. I follow close behind, smiling with my lips closed, afraid my teeth will give too much away. But my best efforts fail, and I collapse into a heap of tears on our sofa within seconds. Everyone stops moving and stares at me wide-eyed, as if my tears have frozen their very bones.

“Need some water, honey? Are you hungry?” my dad asks.

“Maybe you need pain medicine?” my grandmother offers.

“I can help you go to the bathroom,” my mom says. 

I walked out this front door an expectant mother, I think. I was expectant not only in the physical sense, but in the emotional sense. I was ready to love him with my whole being. I was ready for magic and peace and fireworks. And yet I feel like someone may have disabled my heart in that hospital, like I lost the ability to feel anything other than despair. Please, someone tell me what happened.

“No, thanks,” I say instead, “I’m fine. I’m good. Everything is fine.”

***

Weeks later, I collapse into my oversized recliner, sobbing uncontrollably again. Yanking the lever to recline the chair, I prop my son on my knees to face me. I search his face, desperate to feel something more than a detached fondness. I lower my knees and scoop him up into my chest, lifting one side of my shirt. My breast is an accurate depiction of our first weeks together—bruised, cracked, and bleeding. 

I squeeze my eyes shut and grit my teeth while he attempts to latch. Calm, breathe, relax, I coach myself, knowing I must quell my tears to achieve a letdown. My shoulders soften a bit, and my breathing steadies. The stream of tears slows to a trickle. I’m certain a thousand bees are stinging my nipple, but I open my eyes and breathe through the pain. Focus on him, I tell myself. I study the birthmark between his eyes—a mirror image of my own—and I notice the sparse, feathery hairs that curve around his ear. I feel my body release a current of milk, and with it a shred of my self-contempt. The physical pain softens, and for those few minutes with him attached to my body, the emotional pain does too. 

***

I watch my husband’s interactions with our baby obsessively. I peek around corners and watch the monitor when they’re far from me. My husband smiles and laughs and diapers our son with ease. He holds our baby in his arms comfortably, naturally—as if he’s always been his father. This confirms everything I’ve come to believe since my doctor placed my baby in my arms: I am a defective mother devoid of a mother’s love.

Each evening, I escape to my shower. Crumpled into a ball on the cold, hard floor, I let the running water drown out my sobs and wash my tears down the drain. At night when I nurse, I stare out the window at the empty street trapped in the darkness. During the day, I can’t bear to leave the house, terrified someone might discover I am only an imposter—an empty woman pretending to be filled with a mother’s love.

I ache to love my son how I thought I would, how I want to. I assumed I’d birth a fully formed baby along with a fully formed love. The dissonance between that idea and reality invades every minute I spend with him. Guilt eats away at my heart, and shame at my pride. I mentally berate myself for the discrepancies I can’t explain: His cry should fill you with compassion! His smile should enchant you! His snuggles should sustain you in the middle of the night!

Why don’t they?

***

Our baby is 9 months old when I finally email a therapist for help. I now know I love my baby—just the scent of his wispy blonde hair warms my entire chest—but I’m unsure when or how it happened. Guilt still follows behind me like the trail of blood from a wounded animal. Although I see my therapist weekly, it takes months for the truth she uncovers to permeate my heart: my love for my son was not effortless or instant, but it was there all along. It was there when I triple-checked the car seat harness on our drive home from the hospital and when I braved his first bath by myself. It was slow and steady—built in the face of postpartum depression, forged through hard-fought nursing sessions, and during desperate prayers in the middle of the night. 

I mentally repeat the mantras she gives me until I begin to believe them, until they become part of me. I am no less of a mother because I struggled. My love is no less beautiful because it wasn’t easy. 

***

A year and a half later, my son sits in my lap, eyes glued to my phone while I flip through pictures of the day he was born. We’re nestled in the glider—the same glider where I learned to nurse him and the same glider where I continued to nurse him until he was 15 months old. He is now a toddler, and I’ll deliver his baby sister any day. He’s curious about his own birth with his sister’s on the horizon, so I recount age-appropriate highlights of the day—the outfit I bought for him to wear, the relatives who sat in the waiting room. One day, I think, I’ll tell you how scared I was, and we’ll laugh together because you’ll never imagine a day when I fought for our love. 

A few days later, his sister is born. Her labor spans one day instead of two. I am fully present, in awe of the palpable peace that washes over me after each contraction, even the final push. I ask for my baby this time, and she latches almost immediately. Maybe this is redemption, I think—until my doctor’s movements become frantic. The stitches won’t hold and the bleeding won’t stop and can someone count the lap pads? Extra faces fill the room. For two hours, strangers manipulate my flesh until they deem all crises are averted.

***

Each day that passes, my heart breaks with painfully familiar questions. Do I love her? Is this how mother-daughter love looks? How do I find love for her without taking it from him? I ask these questions as if my heart is a pie chart. As if love were magical and free of pain. As if I could control the intricacies of something so incomprehensible.

As if I hadn’t learned these lessons once already.

“I’m not sure if I love her yet,” I tell my therapist when my daughter is three weeks old, shifting my weight from one side to another. I sit cross-legged in front of my laptop, which is propped up on two pillows. I scheduled this telehealth visit a month before my daughter was born in case the first few weeks of her life felt mentally or emotionally challenging. Now, I’m glad I did.

Just then, my husband knocks on the door, cracking it open. He peeks his head in and mouths, “I think she’s hungry.” I ask my therapist for a second and motion my husband in, taking our daughter from his arms. I settle back in and get situated to feed her while I finish my session. She latches and swallows. I inhale, letting my muscles relax before looking back at the screen. My daughter’s rhythmic squeaks begin, and I laugh, looking down at her again. “She’s really noisy,” I say, stroking her head while she nurses.

My therapist smiles, her lips pressed together. She has that knowing look on her face, like she’s going to let me in on a secret. 

“Allie,” she says, gesturing toward my daughter and me, “Can’t you see it?”

I glance back down at my daughter, her body one with mine.

“This is it. This is love.”

Guest essay written by Allie King. Allie lives in East Tennessee with her husband and two children. She’s passionate about baked goods and mental health, belly laughs and the way God moves. When she’s not writing, you’ll find her walking to the library with her little ones or lost in deep conversation with a friend. Find more of her words on her Instagram.

Photo by Jennifer Floyd.