“Nobody objects to a woman being a good writer or sculptor or geneticist if at the same she manages to be a good wife, good mother, good-looking, good-tempered, well-groomed, and unaggressive,” Leslie M McIntyre said, clear as day in the margins of The Artist’s Way, and something in me broke.

I’d been reading the book to fix something in me that I’d missed losing. I’d lost it somewhere around month eight of my son’s life inside me, when his movements beneath my belly skin became visible to others, when he became real to someone besides just me. It’d happened last time, too, with Baby Girl. I hadn’t expected it to, that first time. This time, I’d known what was coming. 

“I’m not a real person right now,” I pleaded with my husband, “but I need to be again, sooner than I was last time.” He raised his eyebrows at me, smiled indulgently, kind of bemused, and I tried to smile back as I handed him and Baby Girl their dinner before waddling back into the kitchen to not-clean.

I am not a good woman. I’m not even a woman, I insist, yet this matters very little on all fronts when I’m out here making babies. The house accumulates dust and scattered objects, picked up and abandoned. My husband cringes at the dishes, forgotten by my side, ketchup drying to a matte finish. 

I am a good writer, though.

Making my son, growing him, having him, sacrificed that from the get-go. Incubator then living bottle and cradle. He slept only on me at first, and I didn’t complain. He was so soft and sweet in my arms. His birth story had been incredible—two pushes and out he slid, into the arms of an unprepared intern. Right at the start it was me who’d done that incredible, but quickly it was becoming his story, and he couldn’t even talk. His birth was something he did, some signifier of his personality or something. That was fine.

“I’m your Mama,” I said softly, when it was dark in the maternity ward and my husband had gone home to watch Baby Girl and it was just me and this new life that had only recently swan dived out of me and left me bloody and broken. 

He blinked up at me with that slow newborn blink. “I really am,” I said quietly, “I’m your Mama. Remember me?”

His Mama. Her Mama. His wife. I am reduced, often, to the parts of myself that belong to others. That’s fine.

Fighting it makes it not-ok, though. It brings to light the ugliness of these beloved children who own me, a man who stands by my side, who’s a good husband, who is confused as to why I don’t clean even the bare minimum I used to. Why I haven’t bathed in days, and I flinch back when Baby Girl reaches for me, flinch back into the soft glow of the monitor, to Lilith and Hannah and the hopeless rage of grief, to a story about being unsatisfied, it’s not about me, it’s just–

I hit 50,000 words this morning. I predict it’ll finish at 80,000. That’s fitting, for Science Fiction. Odd how I am only really myself when I’m peering in at them.