My ovaries never screamed. I had a kid anyway.

Words by Carrie Crecca Maitoza

I wasn’t sure if I wanted to have kids. Even as I reached my early-to-mid thirties, I never felt the deep pang of desire that is promised to most women. I felt like I was waiting for some sudden, incomprehensible feeling that would randomly flip on like a light switch by age 35. I thought “baby fever” was coming for me. It didn’t. 

Don’t get me wrong; I liked kids. I admired their “unmediated authenticity” as one of the self-help gurus in my podcast rotation put it. Through that lens, I observed them with a bit of curiosity and felt endeared by their innocence and overall cuteness. 

I had several nieces and nephews. One time, I bought my young niece an oversized stuffed snake for her birthday and on any future visits I made to their apartment, she would toddle to her bedroom and reemerge hulking the snake over her shoulders to proudly show it to me–wordless–because she couldn’t talk yet. Her baby brain was firing and making connections. It was adorable.

Still, I wasn’t sure if motherhood was the path for me. After a long stretch of unsuccessful relationships as my thirties piled on, I began to lose hope that I would find a partner. I didn’t necessarily relate to “child free” but I was skeptical mostly because I lacked a love life mixed with the absence of a strong desire to make a baby happen no matter what. And to be honest, the idea of spending my future weekends at kids’ birthday parties instead of at hours-long brunches with friends sounded… not fun? At a certain point, I had accepted I would forever be the kooky aunt. I was good with that.

As the clichés go, once you make peace with being single forever, you then meet your soulmate out of nowhere—and that is exactly what happened to me. I ran into my high school sweetheart, my first love, on the street in Manhattan. I was 35 at the time. We had broken up 17 years prior. We chatted and immediately fell back in love, getting engaged exactly one year later. We were married ten months after that. I was 37. He wanted to have a family. I initially felt tepid but my unwavering trust of him was the deciding factor. I knew we’d be able to figure this out together.

I found out I was pregnant in January 2022. It was all happening. My pregnancy was healthy but garish. I had severe morning (all-day and all-night) sickness—the kind where I was puking so much that I couldn’t catch my breath in between heaves. My body had turned on me. The nausea was unbearable. My analytical brain went into overdrive, desperately reaching for comparisons to process it all. Was it like a hangover? No. Norovirus? No. Car sickness? No. I am not religious. I began to pray. It finally dawned on me that this type of sickness isn’t comparable because it is HUMAN-MAKING SICKNESS. You don’t get a human being on the other side of a jolty cab ride. Human-making sickness is something much more extreme and much more sinister. 

Through my misery people would suggest, Just wait, it’s worth it!

What an annoying comment.

I wondered if I had made a mistake. I couldn’t comprehend or understand what part would be “worth it” through the destruction I felt each day. All I had heard about the postpartum phase was that it meant grueling days and sleepless nights, the potential for postpartum depression, and an upheaval of identity—all mixed with an enormous loss of personal time and space. I was really scared.

As an antidote to my immense fears, I tried to take control. I hired a doula. I ramped up the frequency of my therapy sessions. I read every progressive pregnancy book.  The phrase: “my pelvic floor therapist said…” rolled off my tongue in normal, everyday conversations. I switched to a midwife. I took a baby sleep course at eight months pregnant because I was not going to be one of those chumps who “prepared for the pregnancy and birth but not postpartum!” I knew what a mucus plug was and I read up on the aftercare for a third-degree tear so far ahead of giving birth that it was weird (not recommended—no need to get anxiety over something that might not happen to you). I was determined to be in what felt like the driver’s seat of the situation–all of this was a false sense of having control of course. In reality, I had none.

My labor pains started during the night of a bulbous, glowing full moon. My son was born on his due date. I was 38 years old.

The image of my slippery newborn son hanging over me with outstretched limbs is an image I think of every day since it happened. I screeched at his arrival and sobbed uncontrollably as he burrowed onto my chest. I felt as if we were being reunited. I recognized him. I had officially cracked open.

I felt as if I had gone through a portal myself. I was on the other side of all my fears. The clouds had parted. There was relief. None of the obsessive research I conducted could prepare me for the overwhelming love and intensity I felt for my son following his birth. 

I couldn’t stop thinking about him like he was the biggest crush I had ever had in my life. I was high as a kite on oxytocin and adrenaline. I couldn’t sleep–not because he was keeping me awake–but because of my excitement for him. 

It wasn’t all perfect of course. In the early weeks postpartum, I noticed that having a very fragile human being who needs you can cause your brain to catastrophize as part of some torturous coping mechanism. I dreamt about accidentally dropping my baby on the cement porch of my childhood home. I woke in a fury, making sure he was there, safely asleep next to me in his bassinet. He was. Through the bouts of intrusive thoughts, I was in a thick, warm ball dripping with love that thankfully for me, was the more prominent emotion. 

I found unexpected joy in changing diapers and breastfeeding, approaching all of his baby care with a level of focus I had never felt for any job that paid me. It was all hard and painful, but I never enjoyed any type of work more than this, ever.

As I read my tiny newborn The Runaway Bunny through gratitude-induced sobs, I reckoned with the idea that this was what my life was about rather than participating in the unrelenting grind of capitalism, tbh. 

If you become a bird and fly away from me, says the Mommy bunny in The Runaway Bunny, I will be a tree that you can come home to. Yes. Exactly! I had never understood anything more.

Rather than the narratives around identity loss I had heard a lot about, I felt closer to my authentic self than ever before. I was always sensitive and sentimental. Emotional and nurturing. These were lifelong qualities that had been lying dormant for decades to give way to living and “making it” in New York City for over 20 years. I was like everyone else: climbing the corporate ladder and desperately trying to compete for male acceptance and love throughout my 20’s and 30’s. When my son was born, these ~uncool~ traits reemerged to serve both of us. It was a rattling epiphany: I was meant to be a Mom. 

My new normal wasn’t a loss. Surprisingly, it felt more like freedom. It felt like permission. I didn’t want to “bounce back” or feel “normal” ever again, actually. I wanted to be abnormal forever in my postpartum cocoon with my baby and luxuriate in what felt like the truest existence I had ever known. 

I lapped up the intoxicating dose of new perspective and ruminated on the sham that is maternity leave in the United States of America. I felt invigorated to plot with a sense of newfound rage. Holding my baby close, my intuition and cells screamed about this over and over. It felt like a secret and untapped wisdom that more than half of the population would never get to touch and a type of resistance all at the same time.

I ordered fine jewelry with my son’s name on it. I blubbered into his baby book, writing him earnest letters professing my love and committing to evolving as a human being to be the best parent I could be for him, always. I made an illustration from The Runaway Bunny the cover photo on my Facebook page, leaning into my new role, shamelessly. Hard launch. I don’t even use Facebook.

Fast forward to my current life as a toddler Mom. In this new iteration, it’s fun to just “be” without policing your level of ~coolness~ as we naturally do among peers. Professional and social circles require you to be “on” or “guarded” in a way that being a parent doesn’t. You can slow down, zoom in. If you show your kid a weird knot in the wood grain on the floor and tell them that it looks like a little bug, they’ll come closer and want to hear more. Then you find yourself giving the little wood grain bug a voice. A voice you wouldn’t let your friends or boss ever hear you do. (Mortifying!) A voice you didn’t know lived inside of you. And then you give another knick in the wood nearby another voice and now they’re having a full blown conversation like two bug grandpas chatting over coffee at the Waverly Diner while your kid belly laughs in your face. Then he’ll collapse both sets of fingers into little dimply pyramids and knock them together at the points, signing: “MORE!” Suddenly you're a comedian with a very loyal audience. And now you and your kid have a thing together. You have an inside joke. You’ll show your partner your inside joke and they’ll be delighted by it too; that’s just more layers of love. And your baby will ask for “more” emphatically with his hands each time you pass the special spot on the floor until he moves onto the next fascination that you introduce him to. It’s these moments that bring levity and meaning to our sleep deprivation and sink-fulls of dirty dishes. 

Yes, it is all worth it.

I never got baby fever. But I got the baby. And it turns out, it was more than enough.

Carrie Crecca Maitoza is a longtime fashion industry publicist, meme creator, and writer. She is the brainchild behind @miss_pr_piggy on Instagram which sheds light on the realities of working in PR through her original memes. Carrie also writes a weekly newsletter on Substack called RePressed where she grapples with the current state of the PR industry mixed with some thoughts on working and motherhood. Carrie has been featured in PAPER, ELLE, CAP 74204, The Impression, and on the Fat Mascara podcast.