Uninformed consent

Reckoning with my own expectations for early motherhood

spring is objectively the best time to have a baby

“Informed consent” is a foundational tenet of research ethics. It’s not enough for someone to sign a form saying they agree to participate in your study. They also need to really understand what they’re saying yes to. What the risks might be, whether they’ll see any benefits, what participation will mean for them in terms of activities completed and hours spent. Sure, there’s always the possibility for things to go awry in unexpected ways, but all reasonably foreseeable risks and benefits need to be enumerated—in plain English, rather than legalese—on the consent form.

Alas, or perhaps thank goodness, real life (particularly real interpersonal life) doesn’t work like research. When you start a romantic relationship, no one sits you down to go over the parameters of your commitment. (Major risk: heartbreak. Possible benefit: lifetime love and companionship.) When you adopt a puppy, the shelter likely requires you to sign paperwork. But I haven’t heard of any shelters that warn prospective owners about the hours they’ll likely spend vacuuming up furballs or the pounds of poop they’ll pick up, some of them from the floor of their home.

I knew this. After all, among the many, many cliches of parenting discourse is that nothing prepares you for it. And yet, on some level I entered parenthood believing I was about as informed a consenter as one could get. I’d done hundreds of interviews and read thousands of pages about parenting. I wrote a whole book about it! So I figured I knew more or less what I was getting into. I congratulated myself for making a “mindful choice” to have a child rather than merely stumbling into parenthood.

I expected the early days of parenthood to be challenging. I expected to be forced onto what therapists euphemistically label my “growth edge.” I expected that despite the hardships, the experience would somehow also be transcendent.

And you know what? I was right. My expectations have so far been more or less spot-on.

And yet somehow the last two months have still left me feeling gobsmacked by motherhood and all it’s entailed.

Partly that’s a function of the large gap between theoretical understanding and visceral, lived experience: knowing about, versus living through. Understanding the mechanics of labor contractions did not take away their pain. Expecting to be sleep-deprived did little to relieve the agony of getting back into bed after an hour of rocking, only to hear the cries start up again within minutes. Reading about mom guilt and resolving to cut myself slack did not keep the self-doubt at bay. Knowing the hormonal shifts that accompany birth and postpartum left me unprepared for the euphoria of holding my child for the first time, or for the engulfing sadness that would hit a few days later.

Part of the disconnect also stems from the fact that most parents—even close friends—tend to speak in vague terms about their own experiences (particularly the challenging ones), perhaps because they are struggling to summarize un-summarizable arcs.

That meant I (realistically) expected breastfeeding to be “really hard” yet had only the vaguest sense of all the ways it could be hard, or all the emotional reactions this difficulty would provoke in me. It meant I knew the newborn phase was “intense” and “all-consuming” but never really understood why new moms struggled to find time to shower. I took them at their word but always wondered: why didn’t they just do it while the baby was sleeping? (Big lol)

The flip side was also true. I expected to feel a “powerful bond” with my daughter, but I never imagined I’d happily spend hours just staring at her face as she cycled through expressions, each more delightful than the last. I never expected I’d have to bite my tongue to keep from telling everyone I meet about her latest skill acquisition—or that I’d feel annoyed when they didn’t acknowledge her clear indicators of genius with as much enthusiasm as her accomplishments warranted.

As I’ve reflected on the paradox of more or less knowing what to expect yet somehow feeling totally unprepared for what’s happening, I’ve sometimes chastised myself for not preparing more. I should have been reading books about infant sleep in my third trimester, rather than panic-buying seven a few weeks postpartum. I should’ve taken a breastfeeding class, rather than lurking on subreddits in the middle of the night.

Most days, though, I doubt that would’ve changed much. How much advanced learning would I have retained through the postpartum haze? How could I have foreseen which tactics would be relevant for me and my daughter? After all, no one has ever parented this particular child, with this particular partner, with this particular psyche, in this particular cultural moment.

More to the point, if I had somehow, against the odds, found a way to fully prepare myself for motherhood, it probably wouldn’t be as transformative an experience. Perhaps parenthood, like some books or movies—and decidedly unlike ethical research—is better when you go in blind.

---

Speaking of the unexpected, I intended to return to Substack last Friday with a bang, just in time for Mother’s Day. I did not expect that it would take some time to reactivate the parts of my brain that have been rendered mushy by sleep deprivation since late March. Nor did I expect to get mastitis, or anticipate how terrible that would feel. I suspect life will continue to be rather-less-expected than usual for the foreseeable future; apologies in advance if that means I become a somewhat more erratic poster from time to time. I’ll do my best!