It was one of those sticky, unfairly hot January Los Angeles mornings. I was 32 years old, enormously pregnant with my first child, and crying in the driver’s seat of our badly air-conditioned Ford Explorer.
My daughter’s birth was fast approaching, and for me that meant the clock on my own goals was running out. In my mind, I had only a few months to prove to myself that I was still a creative, useful, functioning member of society before the waves of motherhood pulled me under.
I had called my best friend, a new mother herself, to try and wrangle my feelings. I wanted her to tell me I wasn’t going to lose myself, that I wasn’t failing before I’d even begun.
“I haven’t accomplished anything yet,” I wept. “I have no time left!”
She clucked, chiding me gently, “Your body is currently engaged in the biggest creative project of your life.” She paused for effect, “Making a human.”
I knew she was right, yet still…I felt behind.
After having spent my formative and early adult years in the professional theater, both in New York and then, like a traveling salesman, bouncing rootless from one regional theater gig to another, I had yet to settle into anything resembling a “real career.” My husband and I had moved to LA to escape the din of Brooklyn and to try and make some television money. But the money and all that goes along with it had not yet arrived.
We both worked “day jobs,” while pursuing larger goals. We rented a sweet little mother-in-law apartment above the double garage of a duplex. I loved our set-up, but it was hard to ignore the fact that our friends owned houses. Our friends had retirement plans. Our friends picked out drapes and crib skirts and paint colors for the enormous rooms entirely dedicated to their babies. We painted the wall opposite our queen bed and lovingly adorned it with decals, calling it a “nursery.”
We all get shown a similar picture of what a successful life looks like, and in what order it’s supposed to occur. You get married, you build careers, you buy a house, you have kids. For all the shell-breaking and glass-shattering that’s happened in the last fifty-odd years, somehow the formula for domestic life has remained the same. I knew what was expected of me.
I was a modern woman. I was supposed to be in the middle of a thriving career, which I would hit pause on to take a respectable maternity leave before seamlessly jumping back in. I wasn’t supposed to still be sorting through my creative dreams and waiting for one to take hold. The guidebook for how to have kids when you’re still building and figuring things out for yourself just didn’t seem to exist.
I remember madly googling “pregnancy anxiety, career” and only finding well-meaning articles about maternity leave and pumping and remembering to take deep breaths so as not to worry your silently developing fetus. I couldn’t find a single thing about how to talk to yourself when you’re worried having a baby means you’ll never be a successful actress.
All I wanted was for someone to tell me what I’d like to tell you now: if you’re pregnant with your first child, or you’re thinking of getting pregnant, and you are not yet where you want to be in your work or larger aspirations—do not despair.
You can still get where you want to go. The path may change. It may twist and turn in ways you didn’t expect, but you’ll get there.
Yes, it is true that with motherhood comes a natural and necessary slowing. After the birth of my daughter my husband and I chose to keep scraping by so that I could stay home with her. Then we had a son. Then another son. During those years, I wrote and wrote. I won small accolades, sent out scripts, and realized that I wanted to write more than anything else. But beyond that, my own progress was quiet.
Before I had kids, I had heard other creative women—writers, actresses, artists—talk about how their ambition had dulled and quieted after motherhood. They repeated this fact calmly, as if it was entirely natural, but at the time I had so much judgment. I won’t be like that, I thought.
To surrender your own ambitions to motherhood seemed like some antiquated pill I was going to be asked to swallow. A comedian I follow, Rosebud Baker, had a bit recently that summed it up. She’s young and successful, a writer on SNL, and has a new baby. The bit went something like this: “I didn’t expect to love my kid this much. I mean, I knew she’d be amazing, I just thought that loving your kid this much was for people whose dreams had gone away.”
This is how most of us think motherhood will trap us.
It turned out, I was one of those women whose ambition had quieted after children, or at least gone into gentle hibernation. I watched my peers zoom right past me. Women whose careers were further along when they had kids, women who had only one kid, women who went right back into the full-time workforce after kids—they all moved further and faster than I did. But I discovered a secret, something I wished I’d known early: there is no surrendering of your dreams for your children. There is just a replacement of one priority for the other.
You don’t fall in love with your babies and forget that you had goals. You don’t have to resentfully shove them to the side for eighteen years until you’re set free. (Your goals that is.) For most of us, we just get clearer about what matters.
One of my old friends used to say to me with every pregnancy: “babies bring bread.” She said it like a blessing, touching me lightly on the shoulder. I used to think she meant, “babies bring money,” but eventually I realized that what she meant was babies inspire. Their arrival instantly and immediately reorders every priority you ever thought you had. Fantasies, aspirations that spark your ego but not your heart, old ideas that you thought made you, you slip away and are replaced by a love that burns a hell of a lot brighter than ambition.
Having babies, staying dormant, watching, and waiting, these things didn’t strip me of who I was. They made me. It was because of my children that I began to devote myself to my work with a kind of steady fire that I had never experienced before becoming a mother.
So, if you’re worried that you’re going to lose yourself, you will—for a bit. You’ll lose yourself in the bliss and the chaos and the needs of early motherhood. You’ll lose yourself in the sleeping, waking, squalling hours and days of your babies. But then, little by little, you’ll rediscover yourself. And when you do, you’ll find out that you’ve been reshaped, like a piece of metal sent to the smelter. What was dull is burnished. What was craggy is smooth. The confusion and maybes you had before having kids will get buffed away, and clarity will be left in its place.
For years I had toyed with the idea of stepping away from my acting career and into writing, but it was frightening. Acting was my entire identity—I thought I might disappear without it. It wasn’t until I had kids that I was able to discover how much of me still existed, even in the absence of my career, and dropping the banner of “actress” became as simple as stepping out of an ill-fitting pair of shoes.
My older kids play a lot of Minecraft, and the other day I watched them building “portals” between worlds. They stacked blocks up, down, and across to make an empty vertical rectangle, then did some Minecraft magic so that the space between blocks filled with a liquid purple. The portal hung there, in the air, pulsing. What lay beyond: a mystery.
Motherhood is like that.
It’s a door between worlds, and you can’t know how it feels on the other side until you get there. I don’t blame myself for being scared all those years ago, crying onto my enormous belly, wondering if I would ever get back after I stepped through the liquid purple.
But today, as I’m writing this, on the eve of my daughter’s eleventh birthday, I am on the other side in the middle of a thriving career as a writer. I am closer to my dreams than I’ve ever been. I have work that I love, opportunities in abundance, even a television project in the slow but ever-turning wheels of development.
Did it take me longer to get here than I might have imagined a dozen years ago? Yes. Was it more complicated, carving out time and space to consider my own path while refereeing toddlers and comforting babies? Yes. Did it require faith in myself as I quietly grew beneath the ground with no fanfare as other women sprouted into full bloom in front of me? Abso-freaking-lutely.
But I got there. And if you decide to take the winding path that is motherhood, you’ll get there, too. There is no right order. There is no right way to balance the care of your dreams and the care of your babies. If you must sit in sweet repose for a while as other women zoom past you, that’s okay. If you are the rocketship and you just wave from the sky at the rest of us, that’s good too.
You have all the time that you need.
Step on through.
