Katie Roiphe: My Newborn Is Like a Narcotic

In the six weeks since my baby was born, I seem to have lost all worldly ambition. I can think about September, when I am supposed to go back to work, only with dread. I have a class to teach. I have to start writing again. But the idea of talking about ideas in front of students or typing a coherent sentence (i.e., my normal life) seems totally implausible. Even now, the prospect of writing a few paragraphs about this problem seems almost out of reach. Taking care of the baby—physical, draining, exhilarating—is more like farming: following the rhythms of the earth, getting up at dawn, watching the corn flush in the sunrise. It is not at all like writing.

Some of my fear of returning to work may just be an accurate assessment of my capabilities. The other day it emerged that I lack the intellectual wherewithal to set a table: It was just a little too challenging to hold the number of people at dinner in my head on the walk from the kitchen to the deck. Some of this may be hormones; some is certainly sleep deprivation. I know from my days suffering from insomnia that sleep deprivation is tricky; it makes you sloppy, nervy, and fogged. But you also start to take a kind of perverse satisfaction in the jangly feeling of total exhaustion; you begin to thrive on the physical crisis, the special adrenaline of it.

When the baby was four weeks old, I had to do a reading at Barnes and Noble. I had written the introduction to Gay Talese's Thy Neighbor's Wife, and I was scheduled to do a reading with Talese. On the night of the reading, I left the baby with someone I trust completely and absolutely. I managed to put on a dress and look something like the person who gave readings who I used to be. But when I walked out onto the street, I felt like I was missing a limb. Even though Talese was riveting by any objective standard, my concentration faltered. During the reading I thought about the baby. As people asked questions, I calculated how long the taxi ride home would take. Afterward, there were people who wanted to buy one of my books. The manager of the bookstore held out a pen, and I apologized and told him that I couldn’t sign books, that I had to run home. The manager looked a little bewildered. This was, after all, a book signing at which the authors traditionally sign books.

On the escalator I panicked slightly because the person in front of me wasn’t moving, and I couldn’t pass her to get out of the store quickly enough. During the taxi ride down the FDR highway, I looked out at the water and cried. It was insane, sentimental, out of proportion, and I was aware that it was insane, sentimental, and out of proportion. But only when the baby was back in my arms did I feel OK again.

I remember visiting one of my closest friends on her maternity leave last summer. We sat on a wooden bench in her garden and drank iced coffees, and gazed at her second baby. She is a writer, and we talked about how the women writers we most admired had no children, or have had one child, at the absolute most, but never two. (Edith Wharton, Virginia Woolf and Jane Austen had no children; Mary McCarthy, Rebecca West, Joan Didion, and Janet Malcolm all had one.) My friend looked down at her newborn and her tiny eyelashes. She could entertain this conversation in an academic way, but as she adjusted the baby’s hat I could see how far removed it was from anything that mattered to her. Here, sitting in the garden, looking at the eyelashes, would you trade the baby for the possibility of writing The House of Mirth [2]? You would not.

People often compare having a new baby to the early days of a love affair, which is true as far as it goes, but one’s physical fixation on, and craving for, a newborn is much stronger and more intense that that. How often in a love affair can you literally find yourself in tears because you were away from a man for three hours?

I imagine a better metaphor would be addiction. There is an opium-den quality to maternity leave. The high of a love that obliterates everything. A need so consuming that it is threatening to everything you are and care about. Where did your day go? Did you stare blankly at the baby for hours? And was that staring blankly more fiercely pleasurable, more compelling than nearly anything you have ever done?

One of the minor dishonesties of the feminist movement has been to underestimate the passion of this time, to try for a rational, politically expedient assessment. Historically, feminists have emphasized the difficulty, the drudgery of new motherhood. They have tried to analogize childcare to the work of men; and so for a long time, women have called motherhood a "vocation." The act of caring for a baby is demanding, and arduous, of course, but it is wilder and more narcotic than any kind of work I have ever done.

Some of the pressing tasks I do—say, running to the drugstore to buy more pacifiers—are just excuses to think about the baby, to obsess and dwell upon every little thing about him. Here again is the singular fixation that characterizes addiction rather than calm productivity. The new mother will say, “Look how tiny his fingernails are,” or “What I love are his ears.” But these comments are just socially acceptable ways of musing over and over on the basic miracle: This entirely formed human being just emerged from my body. I imagine to the normally intelligent and unaddled this kind of conversation is quite boring. I notice that when I try to force myself to converse about something other than the baby, I have to think to myself, “Now it’s time to talk about something other than the baby.” I recognize dimly that this is what is annoying about parents, and certainly about our current parenting culture: that subterranean stream of self-congratulation. One did, after all, do nothing more than millions of drunken teenagers on an average Saturday night to make that baby, which is not technically an achievement.

But then part of the allure of maternity leave is precisely this: You give up everything you are and care about. The books on your shelves are not your books; the clothes hanging in the closet are not your clothes. You are the vague, slow, exhausted animal nursing its young. Anything graceful, original, sharp, intelligent about you is gone. And it is that sacrifice of self, that total denial of the outside world, that uncompromising violence done to your everyday life, that is this period’s appeal. You are transported in a way you will never be transported again; this is the vacation to end all vacations.

Of course, in my drugged baby haze I do occasionally recognize that the baby will not always be six weeks old, that I will one day sleep more than two hours at a stretch. I also recognize that if you had a newborn every day of your life you would die. But for now, I feel like closing the shades and staying in the opium den. I know somewhere out there is a great world where people talk and think and write, but I am not interested in going there yet.

For more, read Alison Gopnik's response to this article here [3] or view the whole conversation [4].