Brynn Nelson seemed to be nursing the worst hangover of her life. The kind involving six dirty vodka martinis, a pack of Parliament Lights, smudged eyeliner, a tank top strap slipping down a shoulder, dim lights at a crowded dive bar. It was early morning now, and her head throbbed, her stomach churned, and her body ached.
But she wasn’t hungover. It had been months since she’d even tasted a dirty martini—almost a year. And she hadn’t smoked a cigarette in almost ten years, when she was in her early twenties, living in a shoebox apartment in the West Village. She yearned for that shoebox apartment now, a world away from the island of Martha’s Vineyard, where she lived today. She longed for the freedom to drink martinis with abandon and smoke cigarettes with a stranger, knowing that she’d never be able to do that again. Not really.
Brynn only felt hungover, because she was a first-time mother to a three-month-old who refused to sleep. She was exhausted, and this was now how she felt all the time. A hangover seemed like a luxury in comparison to the way she felt now.
That morning had started for Brynn like any other since Lucas was born: with a headache and a sense of dread. She’d spent most of the night wide awake, either feeding Lucas every hour and a half, which he demanded almost down to the minute with a glass-shattering wail, or pumping in the dark stillness of the kitchen, and then carefully transferring the milk into freezer bags and labeling them with the date and time, and finally stuffing her face with blueberry muffins and cookies—whatever carbs she could find—then putting on a fresh change of clothes, as her shirt became drenched in sweat every hour throughout the night, and her underwear still became speckled with blood, even though she’d had a C-section. No one had warned her about the sweat, or the blood.
Last week, Brynn thought she’d successfully implemented the sleep-training technique from a virtual sleep coach for which she’d shelled out four hundred dollars. She’d found the coach on Instagram while she was pumping at three in the morning and immediately purchased the “Magic Sleep Package” in a moment of sheer desperation. The package included a half-hour phone call with the sleep coach and an emailed brochure with a personalized plan. But really, in its most distilled form, the plan simply gave Brynn permission to let Lucas cry. For one torturous week, she followed the instructions. And at the end of the week, it really was like magic: she and her husband, Ross, had enjoyed an entire night of peace and quiet, when Lucas hardly moved during a glorious nine-hour slumber. But that had turned out to be a fluke, and now he woke throughout the evening in a relentless pattern, screaming and crying at such an acute, guttural pitch that Brynn thought her eardrums might actually burst.
Brynn had tried other things, too, in addition to the expensive sleep coach. She still kept notes on her phone documenting his sleep stretches and feeding times throughout the night. She’d read every parenting book, she followed all the advice-giving social media accounts, she bought all the baby gear and gadgets out there, she had the pediatrician on speed dial. She’d even reluctantly joined a local support group for new moms through Martha’s Vineyard Community Services, which she knew had been a huge help to many island parents before her.
Lucas had cried a raspy cry the entire meeting. And the more he cried, the more anxious Brynn got. She could feel her own body temperature rising, her muscles tensing.
“He’s just fussy,” she had said to the group while bouncing Lucas in her arms. No one asked for an explanation. The other parents just looked at her with a mix of what she discerned as pity and confusion.
“Brynn,” the group leader had said, as her own toddler sucked away with ease at her breast beneath her cocoon sweater, “he’s a baby. When he cries, he’s trying to communicate with you. You’re his mother. You just need to listen to him.” Brynn had nodded. She’d heard this advice before—that babies cry to tell us something. Usually, that they’re hungry, or tired, or need a diaper change. The problem was, whenever Brynn addressed these potential needs, Lucas still wasn’t satisfied, and his relentless wail continued no matter what kind of comfort she offered him. She tried to listen closely, as though something might suddenly click, and she’d innately understand him, the way she thought a mother was supposed to understand her child. She shut her eyes and tuned out everything else around her. But Lucas’s cries only stabbed away at her eardrums, tightening her chest, and filling her with panic. The truth was, all she really heard when Lucas screamed was the disappearance of herself, and the suffocating feeling that she was forever lost. Each time he opened his mouth to howl, she swore that she could feel a piece of herself being erased. Sometimes, she felt like she’d do anything to silence him for just a moment, to have a few seconds for herself. To breathe. “I’ll try that,” she had responded to the group leader. Brynn never returned to the support group again.
Now, it was just past seven in the morning, and she’d already fed Lucas, changed him, and put him down for a nap. The daytime schedule the sleep coach had given her was a far cry from the reality of how Lucas’s day unfolded. “Try to sleep when he sleeps,” the coach had advised, as so many others had, as well. Brynn wanted to, and sometimes she did, but she found it difficult to mentally unplug enough to fall asleep. She had too many worries constantly jogging through her mind: Did she put the next pediatrician appointment in her calendar? Did she move the laundry into the dryer? What was she going to make for dinner? Did she wash the bottles from last night? Did she rub the vitamin E oil on her scar? Was her car-insurance payment due or did she already pay it? Did she respond to the email from her literary agent asking—for the third time that month—when the new chapters of her next book would be ready? Quieting these thoughts was impossible. It was easier, instead, to stay awake and distract herself during Lucas’s naps with Instagram or Bravo or by cleaning the house.
The other baby she needed to take care of—her third book—she’d all but abandoned, and the guilt ate away at her constantly. Brynn had already published two romance novels, which had sold well enough to give her financial independence and a respected name in that genre, but with that success came responsibility—and deadlines. She’d secured a third book deal halfway through her pregnancy, thinking she’d zip through her first draft before Lucas was born. But she’d gotten sidetracked. She’d fallen into nesting mode, something she never thought she’d do. Every day there had been a project for the baby that somehow consumed Brynn’s time—the crib needed to be assembled, curtains had to be put up, clothes had to be laundered with skin-sensitive baby detergent. There was always something, and then suddenly, Lucas was born.
But she’d told herself that she would have plenty of time to write during the newborn phase. “All they do is sleep and eat at first,” everyone had said. She didn’t need to send Lucas to daycare or hire any childcare, she thought, because she could just work from home with him, and that’s what she’d always wanted, anyway. And nearby, she had her mother-in-law, Margaux, who was a true baby whisperer and was always ready to help. Brynn would have all the time in the world for writing, she thought. And yet, now, there somehow wasn’t time for anything. The concept of free time no longer existed in Brynn’s world. If she had any time for herself, she had to use it to address her own basic hygiene or chores.
And even if Brynn did have time to write, she didn’t have the creative brain capacity that she used to have. During the few attempts she’d made at writing, she was embarrassed by what she produced: generic characters, flat storylines, and—worst of all—sex scenes as dull as watching paint dry. These days, her writing was the opposite of romantic. It was downright depressing.
She used to be able to write the most vivid and electric sex scenes in five minutes on a Post-it. Creativity was never something she had to work for. But now she couldn’t conjure up a steamy lovemaking scene no matter how hard she tried. It didn’t help that her own sex life was nonexistent. How could she describe a kiss when she hadn’t even had one herself in months? At least not a good one, anyway. Did she even remember what it was like to have an orgasm?
Maybe it was just the sleep deprivation that was causing her to lose her literary edge, or maybe, she thought, it was something more. She felt as if she’d had to remove the part of her brain that maintained her intellectualism, curiosity, and creativity so she could replace it with a deep knowledge of baby choking hazards, the risk of SIDS, the difference between swaddles and sleep sacks, the multitude of baby bottle styles. It was as though her brain couldn’t handle being both a mother and a writer. One or the other, it told her, though she refused to accept it, and she continued to try to do both. The result was that she couldn’t really do either.
“Good morning, honey,” her husband Ross said as he bounded into the kitchen, bright-eyed and well rested. Brynn had just sat down on one of the kitchen stools to pump. The plastic flanges were tucked into her nursing bra, the kind with little slits to hold the flanges steady. Her nipples engorged and retracted with the pump’s pulses, and she immediately started dripping milk into the bottles. She’d bought one of the portable pumps that she could carry around like a purse. It had been advertised to her as one that would allow her to be mobile while pumping. But it only ended up making her feel trapped. Anytime she tried to do anything while pumping, she’d forget that she was hooked up to the machine, or that the tubes from the flanges to the machine were only two feet long, so she’d accidentally disconnect them and cause everything to go haywire. The only thing she could do while she pumped was sit there and count the minutes, watching the milk drip down into the bottles until she reached her capacity.
The first time that Ross had seen her pumping, his eyes had widened with bewilderment and horror.
“Whoa,” he had said, cringing. “Does that hurt?” He’d watched Brynn’s nipples expand inside the clear plastic flanges as if she were some kind of animal in a lab.
“No,” she said. “It sort of feels good. Or at least, I feel better when it’s done.”
She stared out the window now as though the world outside was a foreign land that she’d never know again, full of freedom and sunshine and youthful people without any responsibilities.
Brynn had elbowed Ross a little past midnight, sometime after feeding Lucas. She had been furious at the sight of Ross in his deep sleep, and she had wanted him to be awake with her, if only for a moment. But the nudge hadn’t even stirred him.
He kissed her forehead now, so lightly that she barely felt his lips on her skin. He was obliviously happy as he went to make coffee. “How was the little man last night?” he asked.
“He was … he was fine.” The stupidity of the question confounded and enraged her. It was both infuriating and miraculous that Brynn’s fatigue was not shared by Ross, even though they slept in the same bed and were subjected to the exact same cries from their son, who slept in the bassinet right next to them.
It was as though Ross existed in another realm entirely, one where he only watched the changes happening around him since becoming a father, but he and his own life continued as before, relatively unchanged. Sometimes, Brynn felt like she and Lucas were animals in an observation room, with Ross waving to them from the other side of the glass while she cried out for help. It didn’t make sense that Ross was right there with her and yet he wasn’t there at all. He didn’t share even a shred of Brynn’s suffering. The only disappointment he ever seemed to show was in her disappointment with everything. And Brynn had started to hate him for it.
Yet she didn’t have the energy to tell Ross how she really felt, or that the night hadn’t been fine. It had been a disaster. All the nights were disasters.
“That’s great,” Ross said. Somewhere in the past few months, their conversations had devolved into meaningless, robotic words—great, good, okay.
It hadn’t always been like this. Everything changed when Lucas was born. Well, not really. What had actually changed, Brynn knew, was her. From the moment Lucas was born, Brynn had not become the soft, maternal, joyful mother she’d expected to become, the mother that Ross had told her he knew she’d be, the one she thought he wanted her to be. Instead, she had transformed into a stranger, as if she were playing a role, pretending. When she held Lucas for the first time, her entire body shaking, her eyelids fluttering and her throat burning for water, she did not look at him with the adoring eyes of a devoted mother. She’d looked at him with bewilderment, fear, and resentment. The resentment wasn’t for him, exactly, but for everyone around her expecting her to feel anything different. Brynn had been in labor for almost forty hours, become violently ill with a high fever and nausea, then had an emergency C-section when Lucas’s heartbeat started to drop and he turned sideways, throughout which she continued to vomit bile into a plastic bag held by a nurse, with the bright lights of the operating table blinding her eyes, her arms held down. And from the instant that Lucas was lifted from the swamps of her stomach, her guts pushed aside to create an exit for him, and then presented to her covered in white, creamy film, screaming with the anguish of someone who had indeed just been ripped from their home, Brynn was tasked with taking care of him, and not of herself.
So, while Brynn and everything in her life had permanently changed, the only thing that had really changed for Ross was the disposition of his wife.
“What’s your day look like?” he asked her. The question was a mockery. He knew exactly what her day looked like, because it was the same each day: try to survive. Brynn felt Ross’s eyes quickly glance over her bathrobe-clad body, with her gigantic, veiny breasts exposed. Was this his way of asking her if she was going to shower today? Or if this would be the day when he’d come home to a happy wife, who would greet him with a T-bone steak for dinner and a blowjob for dessert? Ross didn’t have to say it; Brynn could feel his disappointment in her all the time. His sadness was loud and physical, hanging heavy in his sighs, in the shrugs of his shoulders, in his slow and steady hand on her shoulder when he returned home from work to still find her on the couch, still in her bathrobe, another pizza ordered for dinner, another hamper of laundry to do. She perceived it to be the sadness of someone whose partner had turned out to be someone else entirely. A letdown.
But what Brynn wished Ross understood was that she didn’t want to be this way. She wanted to be his happy wife. She wanted to be a happy mom. She wanted to get back to her writing. She just didn’t know how. She didn’t know if it was possible.
“You’re looking at it,” she said. “I mean, we’ll get some fresh air, go to the playground to see everyone. Lucas has a doctor’s appointment in the afternoon. And I’m going to try to do some more writing if I can. I made some progress yesterday.” It was a lie, of course. She hadn’t made progress on her book yesterday. She hadn’t made progress in months.
“That’s great. Great.” He tightened the lid of his thermos. “Well, I love you. Try to have a good day today, okay? It’s so nice out.” He kissed her forehead again and headed for the door. “I have to play a round of golf tonight at the club after work. Clients. But it should be quick.”
“Again?” Last night, Ross had been out late with his father and brother, courting potential clients for a big job in Katama. Brynn couldn’t remember what time Ross had come home, but she knew that it was during one of the rare, brief windows when she had been sleeping. He’d briefly woken her up by accident and she’d been furious.
“Last night was Katama,” he responded, somewhat defensively. “Tonight is the North Water Street job.”
“Okay,” Brynn said. She couldn’t argue with him when it was work. But there was always a round of golf. Always a client dinner. Ross worked for his father, Henry, who was considered the island’s foremost builder and developer. If a home was being built by Nelson & Sons, it was going to be spectacular, with no expense spared. Still, Brynn had naively assumed that Ross’s hours could be flexible since he was the boss’s son. But it was the opposite. Ross put pressure on himself to work the hardest, to be the most available, to always say yes to his father no matter what the request. And having a new baby didn’t mean anything to Henry in terms of Ross’s work schedule. Paternity leave wasn’t something Henry even knew existed. Henry valued family above all else, but his view of it was traditional. As far as he was concerned, Brynn’s role was to take care of Lucas, just as Ross’s mother, Margaux, had done with Ross and his brother, Sawyer.
Before Ross left, he turned back toward her and gave her a funny look, one Brynn hadn’t seen in years. He smiled and his eyes locked with hers.
“Brynn,” he said, “I … I need to tell you something.”
What does he need now? Brynn thought to herself, already annoyed. Did he invite his friends over this weekend? Did he say yes to the guys’ fishing trip to the Bahamas, even though the two of us had discussed it already together and decided no? In what way is he going to make my life harder today?
“I…” he started to say. He paused. “You’re such a good mom.”
Brynn almost laughed. “Really? That’s what you wanted to tell me?”
“Yes,” Ross said, serious. “I should tell you more.”
“Well, thanks,” Brynn said. “I don’t feel that way.”
“You are. You’re an amazing mom.”
Brynn started to remove the flanges from her bra; she was done pumping.
“I want to be here more,” Ross continued. “For you, for Lucas. I do. I know it’s been hard. But I promise it won’t be like this forever. Things … things will change soon.”
Brynn carefully poured her new milk into freezer storage bags and labeled them with a marker. She knew that Ross had to go, but there was so much she wanted to say in return. She’d been waiting for a moment like this—a moment of connection. She hadn’t realized how much she needed to hear those words of affirmation from Ross until she heard them.
“I wish you and I could switch places and I could just hang out here with the little man all day,” Ross added before Brynn could say anything.
Almost instantly, the affection Brynn had felt for Ross a moment ago disappeared and was replaced with rage. She knew that Ross didn’t mean to insult her, but the implication that she just hung out with Lucas all day was hurtful. Except that when Ross did take care of Lucas—so that Brynn could shower, or work out, or cook dinner, or go to Cronig’s for groceries—his only job was to hang out with Lucas. He didn’t worry about prepping dinner or getting on the preschool wait lists or signing Lucas up for swim lessons. He wasn’t on hold with Lowe’s for forty-five minutes trying to track down a lost order of the filter to go on the fan above the kitchen stove while also wiggling Lucas out of a spit-up-covered onesie. He wasn’t debating whether Lucas was ready to go up a size in diapers or not, and what to do with the leftover ones they hadn’t used. He wasn’t photographing the mysterious bump on the inside of Lucas’s left ear and then searching the ends of the internet to find out what it was while waiting for a call back from the pediatrician. These tiny, sometimes stupid, but entirely necessary things that demanded Brynn’s time and mental capacity prevented her from just hanging out with Lucas all day. Rather, taking care of him often felt like another job on her to-do list, even though she felt terrible admitting that.
Ross kissed Brynn on the cheek, and then he was gone. Brynn squinted as she watched him go; she knew him well enough to know that something was on his mind that he wasn’t telling her.
Almost the moment Ross got into his car, Lucas’s cries pierced through the monitor. Brynn hurried to her room and threw on some stretchy shorts and an oversize tank top. She sniffed the nursing sports bra she wore yesterday and decided that she could wear it today, too. She threw her hair up in a bun, slathered on some tinted moisturizer and deodorant, and somehow remembered to take her birth control pills, which she’d just started back on last week, though they only seemed to ridicule her in their complete uselessness to her. She looked at herself in the mirror—just once, briefly—and tried hard not to cry. She didn’t even recognize herself. Her face was gray and sunken, marred by exhaustion, and the shape of her body had shifted into something unfamiliar, something she didn’t like. She wanted to celebrate her new body for all that it had accomplished, but the truth was that she hated her new stretch marks and wider hips, her elongated and cracked nipples, her displaced abdominal muscles and the pain she felt whenever she squatted.
Her phone buzzed with a text from her friend Ginny Bloch, asking if she’d see her at the playground that morning. Yes, Brynn thought to herself, and typed it out. Where else would I go? The West Tisbury playground, just a five-minute drive or a fifteen-minute stroller walk from home, had become Brynn’s go-to for when she needed to get out of the house. Now that it was summer, and school was out, the same group of parents always showed up there in the mornings. In the past few months, seeing them had become a comfort that Brynn needed each day. Lucas was still too little to do anything there but sleep and eat in Brynn’s arms, so the playground was more for her than it was for him. Something about being there, and being around other moms with their kids, made Brynn feel a kind of validation as a mother that she needed.
She found comfort in the other mothers not because she related to them, though. On the contrary, Brynn felt like a fraud among them, even among her own friends. None of the other moms seemed to be struggling. They somehow all looked like they’d slept and showered. They cooed over their babies, inhaling the sticky scent of their heads as if it were a revitalizing smelling salt. They didn’t hate their husbands (well, most of them didn’t, or at least they didn’t say so). Brynn had been to some of their houses, and they were all clean and tidy. She’d come to the conclusion, with absolute certainty, that her experience of motherhood was more difficult than theirs because of some innate deficit of hers. Everyone else at the playground was meant to be a mom, she thought, but not her.
That’s exactly why she went, though. Because being around these other moms—the ones who had their shit together—gave Brynn proof that she was at least attempting to have some semblance of normalcy in her life as a mom. It gave her the façade of belonging. Temporarily, it made her feel okay. And she thought that if she kept going through the motions of doing all the nice, happy things she was supposed to do as a mother—like go to the playground and hang out with other moms—she just might trick herself into actually enjoying motherhood. She might trick herself into being happy.
She might even, somehow, turn herself into a good mom, instead of the bad one she was sure she was.