Just One More
Do I have another metamorphosis in me?
Liz Sarb
Every mother eventually has her last baby. I’m pretty sure I’ve had mine, and so I’ve been engaging in a form of torture unique to modern motherhood: I’ve been watching videos of my girls as newborns. I’ll glance up from the images of their chubby baby bodies on my phone to see the unrecognizable giants who are now galloping around my home and think: We’re so lucky. They’re such wonderful girls. Wouldn’t another one be even more wonderful?
I’ve started framing this as the “one more drink” problem. Hi, my name is Liz, it’s been almost five years since my last drink, and what I remember very clearly is the feeling that fulfillment was always just one more drink away. Chasing that fulfillment would leave me with a punishing hangover, sunk into a morass of anxiety. So in these sober days, when I want more of something good, I’ve taken to investigating the impulse. And there is nothing more good than a baby.
I’m happy to be off the rollercoaster of alcohol abuse, but I can’t deny that it was an enlightening ride. After a hangover faded, I’d feel alive in a way I miss now amidst all this stasis. You (or at least I) have to wreck your life first in order to truly appreciate when it’s put back together.
My grandmother wanted desperately to have twelve babies; she got to eleven before her doctor made her quit. She was, also, an alcoholic who got sober at 75, an incredible achievement at that age. When she was younger, I imagine that each baby felt like a fresh start, and that’s a feeling you can get addicted to. In the wake of a newborn, life feels covered over with a thick coat of fresh snow, the world outside muffled, your life sparkling inside a snow globe. I know that snow is brutal, and snow globes can break, but I still crave that shaken-up-anew feeling. It’s the same way a bartender shakes up a martini then pours it out, ice-cold and full of promise.
I won’t stretch this metaphor any further; what I’m saying is that I long for another baby the way an alcoholic longs for another drink, knowing both its shortcut to joy and ability to harm. It might be a function of my “advanced maternal age”—the drinks went down much smoother in my teens and twenties—but my post-baby emotional cocktail sent me straight into the spins. A dash of postpartum anxiety, a jigger of the baby blues, a healthy pour of loss of control.
Of course the metaphor doesn’t really hold up, because the joy of a child outlasts the hangover. Now that the hormones have cleared my blood, I can look back and see how magical that time was, and how it changed me. I’ve always loved this quote by Sara Ruhl:
There were times when it felt as though my children were annihilating me [...] and finally I came to the thought: all right, then, annihilate me, that other self was a fiction anyhow.
It feels like a science experiment: how much annihilation can a person take? Do I have another metamorphosis in me? Or would just one more leave me fetal on the floor, vowing to never touch the stuff again?
Every mother eventually has her last baby. I will either accept that grief now, or I will order another round and pay the tab later. Either way, there should be somewhere we can gather to talk about it. Perhaps a church basement with coffee and pastries. Women of all ages sit on folding chairs. One walks up to the podium: “Hi, my name is Liz, and it’s been three years since my last baby.” The older women look back at her kindly. They know how much further she has to go, and how many more metamorphoses she has in store.
