Postpartum Made Me Stupid

After having my first baby, the only thing I was completely sure of was that pregnancy and postpartum had rendered me stupid. Yes, my brain was stimulated to the nth degree, but I was only thinking about breakfasts, lunches, dinners; nap schedules, teething, toddler colds, rotaviruses, Covid, pink eyes, ear infections, and bulbous medieval diaper rashes. It felt important, and it was important but it wasn’t actually all that deep. Or satisfying.

I identified as a writer and reader, curious about books, ideas, and people. Now like my pelvic floor, my attention span had turned into jelly. From Twilight to Tolstoy, I used to read pretty much anything, now I was unable to finish an article, let alone a novel. Instead, I was ingesting message boards about my many baby-related obsessions, mainlining TikTok, and completing my degree at the University of the Real Housewives.

The pandemic and motherhood, rather than “opening me up” as many Instagram spiritualists promised, made me more narrow-minded than ever. On one hand, I was more delicate—more peculiar and particular; one the other, something in me hardened during that year of isolation. I increasingly held onto judgments of myself and others. My approach to other moms was to either look down on them or assume they were too good for me. There was no middle ground. I spent so much time in my head and on my phone that dismissing other people entirely became second nature. I knew this was a narcissistic trait – not thanks to therapy, but some woman on Tiktok.

And boy could I spend hours on TikTok. I would spend any free time at night catching up with a Mormon group of moms who for some reason lived in Hawaii. I’d hate their politics (probably), but fall in love with how they looked (so at ease!) and wish so deeply I could look like them. (How could I? They started making babies in their early 20s and seemed to exist in a parallel universe where the pandemic hadn’t happened.) They named their kids things like Buddy and Sunny. They all knew each other, experiencing a highly-aestheticized communal parenting utopia. Documenting and commodifying their everyday lives, they were also making infinitely more money than me and almost anyone I knew.

Because of course.

It wasn’t just other people I judged: Every single thing I did, I second guessed. I never felt less certain of myself in my life but more certain that I should be feeling sure of myself. I was a mother! I was so afraid this shakiness would spill over, like a toxic river, onto my baby.

If I had a girl, would I also dress her as a Dimes Square Jon Benet?

Then, after a year of near-total real-world isolation and the proliferation of the vaccine, we reentered the world and moved to the Upper West Side, a pocket of the city where time stood still.

One never quite knew whom they would encounter at the Tots Playground in Central Park, right off West 69th Street. Each neighborhood in New York City seemed to have its own mom culture, but here, there was a smattering of types: The startup mom, the bone-thin but somehow rock hard lamented hair mom, the crunchy Patagonia mom, the professor mom, the wife of a minor celebrity mom, the still-wearing-a-mask mom. No one really wore The Row, but many wore the derivative version of things the brand sought to elevate.

There, I could obsess about the 17-pound frame of my sweet son, Joshua, then move seamlessly to judging the outsides of the other women at the park. I wondered how that one mom got so skinny. Wondered what she was like in her 20s. Wondered if I had a girl, would I also dress her as a Dimes Square Jon Benet? I likely would. I smile nervously and wave at the mom from music class.

When I re-remember my son, I do a circus dance to try to make him laugh on the swings. I take a million pictures. I feel my phone in my hand and think about what I could post later, to offer up my child’s one-year-old identity to the Chinese or to the Russians, in exchange for some likes and hearts thrown in my direction. Look at him! Look at me! I’m doing it!

Next to me on one of these days is another mom, also swinging her kid, no hand clutching a phone in sight. Instead she’s buried in a book. Vanity Fair (720 pages). She’s in the middle of it. Her auburn hair was long long long, scraping the tip of her backside. It was thick but stringy, thinning at the end, suggesting that she hadn’t had a haircut in a very long while. She wore purple mismatched pajamas and beat up brogues. The boy she was with had the same reddish hair and was also in pajamas. It was neither pajama weather nor time of day.

He didn’t seem to mind that her nose was in a book. While my stroller was teeming with shit, there was nothing — zilch! — at the bottom of hers’. I liked to make up stories about people but I couldn’t decide on hers. Was something very wrong here or was something very right?

It wasn’t just other people I judged: Every single thing I did, I second guessed.

The next time I saw her at the same playground, she was in the middle of The Count of Monte Crisco (544 pages) while pushing him on the same damn swing. Like her copy of Vanity Fair, this book was beat up, as if culled from the used section or someone’s dads wooden den. Everything was ratty. Another time I noticed the tattoo on her bicep. Another time I noticed her in a more dressed up outfit, still wearing purple, but this time in beat up ballet flats, in a sort of Amy Winehouse way.

Was she punk? An artist? The living embodiment of New York City? Or was there something very wrong? I never introduced myself, but thought of her often. Another day I saw her chasing the child down Riverside Drive, something out of a Wes Anderson movie.

Should I help her? I didn’t.

After that first afternoon at the playground, I remembered how I used to love nothing more than a big book. I loved lugging it around. Now I lugged around Wet Wipes and berries and pouches and a spare change of clothes. I clutched my child and/or phone, not literature. My pile of unread New Yorkers sat sadly by my bed, watching me consume my phone after the baby fell asleep.

I ask myself why I never introduced myself to that mom. There were so many unknowable things about motherhood, what was one more mystery? There were so many decisions to make, and if they were correct, my kid would turn out okay; I would be okay; it wouldn’t always be so hard.

The truth was I got pregnant and gave birth during a global pandemic. I had postpartum anxiety that convinced me I was in survival mode and I needed an escape that was quick and didn’t require brain power. I forgot about tending to my own pleasure and didn’t know “how to be” anymore so I compensated by lobbing judgment on others. Maybe the judgment, in her case, was warranted. Or perhaps she had unlocked the key to motherhood or happiness writ large: truly not giving a fuck.

I never saw her again. But sometime after that, I logged out of message boards and deleted TikTok. I still gleefully watch reality T.V. but got back into reading. Sometimes I even bring a newspaper to the playground, though, mostly I just chat with the other moms.

Emily Barasch is a writer who lives in Connecticut with her husband and two kids. You can read more of her writing here.