All The Fails | Sarah Hoover

A year after I had my first kid I found myself sitting at my kitchen table, sipping an earl gray tea (cream and honey) and looking out of my window at the backside of a blocks’ worth of Nolita buildings. Dilapidated fences separated a patchwork of tiny backyards, none of them well-tended, a few with cheap BBQ grills, or the plastic pink remains of a summer-time baby pool; remnants of warmer, longer days. And I thought to myself— how bad would it be if i just walked off the sill and floated away?

I wanted out. I did not want to make a mess, or feel pain, or ruin my husband's life, or devastate my mother or cause a commotion. But I wanted to exit the world I had created. I had hated being a mother from day one, I had found no joy in it. After a labor that felt so traumatic to me and a birth that culminated with the baby being put on my body and feeling nothing when I first saw him, my brain so sad and scared and shut down that it was incapable of joy or even curiosity, I had continued down a slope of shock and surprise—how could anyone enjoy caring for a newborn? Why wasn’t everyone else complaining about how insane new motherhood is? Why don’t I get to go back to work right away like my husband? How do I get back to my old life?—so slippery and steep that I found myself consumed by a dark depression that manifested as not only sadness but frustration, the oppressive feeling of being stuck, and an incredible amount of rage.

But I didn’t walk off the windowsill. For some unknown reason, some divine intervention or moment of clarity or split second of my brain malfunctioning back to its normal state, I heard a little voice that said that’s not a normal response, Sarah, and you need to call a doctor. And I did, and in the weeks and months and years that followed, I got a better therapist and I went on meds and I did EMDR and Ketamine treatments and meditation and past life regression and I journaled every fucking morning, even when I was running late. And on August 23, 2019, I wrote down in the identical white Cartier notebook that I still write in (I fill two a year, and I live in fear of them being discontinued as Cartier’s cheapest product): Today is the first day of the rest of my life, and I’m going to write a book.

Why a book? Because I couldn’t not write a book. I knew that I absolutely had to write the story that would have helped me when I was in the thick of it. I had to tell everyone that you can speak up to your doctor, you can demand care that doesn’t traumatize you or make you think of the time you got sexually assaulted in a bar when you were 22 and stupid; you can admit you hate being a new mom, you’re not a monster if you don’t feel automatic love and connection to your kid. My stigma against meds was wrong—they saved my life. You can fire your therapist and find one you’re comfortable talking to. Your husband may fail you, his emotional capacity may never be as big as the one a mother has after the profound experience of pregnancy and birth, and you can still create a relationship that honors you and is worth everything to you. You will look at your own mom differently now that you know what it really means to be a mother. It may break your relationship to her, it may save it. I had to say all of that or it was going to explode out of me some other way, and though I’d never written anything aside from an academic essay or a press release about art, I decided I was going to start writing my book and not stop until I was done, because it may help one single other woman, and that would be enough.

The Motherload comes out January 14th, 2025. I wrote it because I had no other choice.

https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Motherload/Sarah-Hoover/9781668010136