30 Time June 20/June 27, 2022
iT’s impossible To gauge The depTh of a hole you’re in
until you begin to climb out. I’ve felt this way in the most chal-
lenging times of my life, usually when suffering loss.
I remember the worst moments in flashes—sobbing in a closet,
inhaling a scarf; gin and curvy roads; lying beside my bulldog,
whispering, “I’m sorry” in his ear. Moments of despair whose
dimensions I didn’t fully understand until they lifted.
I feel this way now, more than two years after the U.S. suf-
fered its first surge of COVID-19. Our daughter is now 4 and
our son nearly 2, half her life and all of his living in a pan-
demic world, and both still too young to be vaccinated. Our
family was until recently in the minority: none of us had got-
ten the virus that has killed more than 1 million Americans.
But trying to protect ourselves came at great personal cost.
We chose to be parents, but we did not choose to parent in
isolation, and I can see now that beneath the weight of pan-
demic motherhood, I lost myself.
Pregnancy and birthing have always had a way of oblit-
erating the self. Many of us emerge with shifted bones, dys-
functional organs, stitches, and scars, all of which can change
our relationship with physicality. From 6% to 20% of new
mothers suffer from postpartum depression, while up to
1 in 3 feel high anxiety levels either during pregnancy or in
the postpartum period. Sleeplessness clouds our intellectual
faculties, blunts our creativity, and whittles our patience.
My second pregnancy, like my first, was debilitatingly
painful, and I bled for three months after having our son.
He didn’t sleep through the night for 15 months, a sentence
so banal it can’t possibly convey the despair of being awo-
ken to screams every few hours for more than a year. He is
also prone to respiratory infections, so until Omicron cases
started falling in our city this March, we mostly stayed home.
The reprieve parents might normally get from babysitting
or a return to the office simply did not exist for us.
There I was, screaming into a pil-
low at 3 a.m. because the baby was
crying again. There I was, smothering
frustration that felt too close to rage
as my daughter refused to eat dinner
but asked for a snack the moment I sat
down to work. Meanwhile, new quali-
ties emerged: a deep fear of the world
outside our doors, rage at the politi-
cized approach to public health, a well
of cynicism in my formerly open heart.
All of it left me feeling like a stranger to
myself. I yelled, then apologized, sick
with shame. What’s wrong with me?
I often thought. Who am I?
I was a mother. My body was theirs
to feed from and climb on, my mind
consumed with keeping them safe,
healthy, and loved, and consumed
with anger at myself every time I failed.
I may have been a full-time mother,
but without the ability to live into the
self I’d created apart from motherhood,
I was not the one they deserve.Now that our daughter is in
school, our son sleeps through the
night, and we’re venturing out more,
I’m slowly carving a path back into my
mind and body. As I do, I see flashes
of the mom I want to be. But this isn’t
a happy ending. Because the past
two years, in which mothers left the
workforce in record numbers to han-
dle childcare and are now suffering a
mental- health crisis, are a damning pre-
view of what’s to come if Roe v. Wade is
overturned: people with uteri forced
to sacrifice themselves to a role the U.S.
deems more important than our auton-
omy, our ambition, our own actual lives,
yet will not support at any point.
I live in Texas, which has effec-
tively already banned abortion, and
from where I sit, it’s easy to see the
worst-case scenarios: an increase in
America’s abominable maternal death
rate, women criminalized not just for
self-managing abortions but for mis-
carriages and stillbirths, cycles of
trauma and poverty and abuse continu-
ing unabated. The best-case scenario?
What I, and so many others, have lived
through: a complete loss of selfhood.
I can’t help thinking that’s the point.Gutierrez is the author of the novel
More Than You’ll Ever KnowSOCIETY
How I lost myself
to motherhood
BY KATIE GUTIERREZ
What’s
wrong
with me?
I often
thought.
Who am I?