The Dark Side of Motherhood in Helen Walsh’s ‘Go to Sleep’

I was chugging along in a state of grace where everything was in its right place and my world made sense to me; and then I got pregnant. (Go to Sleep by Helen Walsh,2011)

Guest blogger, Jennifer Orozco

I was 19 when I had my first daughter. The pain of labor was beyond my imagination, and the brutal back pain that accompanied it was my introduction to motherhood: the painful proliferation of things I hadn’t even considered.

I was young and probably never should have married at that age, but I considered myself mature and competent. I could do this. I’d sidestep the pitfalls my mother fell into; I’d keep an open mind and not sweat the small stuff and I’d take into account all the self-help headlines that flooded my local bookstore.

It went along relatively smoothly. I slept when she slept. If I wasn’t exhausted, I’d use the time to clean. And boy, could that baby girl sleep: she was knocked out at least 16 hours out of the day. I thanked my lucky stars and enjoyed being a mom.

And seven months after her birth, I was hit in the face with the force of a Mack truck when I learned I was carrying baby no. 2. Beside the terror that I wouldn’t be able to handle two daughters 14 months apart, were the crippling fears that I’d never love my second daughter as much as I did my first. Or that I’d suddenly love my second daughter and forget the first. The concerns were many, and illogical, and perpetually plaguing, but I shoved the thoughts out of my head as best as I could, and I soldiered on.

My second daughter was from a galaxy far, far away from her sister. She slept 6 hours out of the day. Perplexed, I thought she was hungry and overfed her. That didn’t work. I sang lilting lullabies that put my firstborn to sleep after five minutes. Didn’t work. Between the two of my girls, I was sleep deprived, dealing with a raging case of postpartum depression, and my marriage was nearly nonexistent. They would be the darkest days of parenthood. Of my life.  I had no family and no support system anywhere nearby. And I was angry. At everyone.

Even now, after all these years, I shudder when I think of those days. I careened between being numb and feeling every emotion under the sun. I alternated between zombie-hood and emotional bag-lady. I stopped answering the phone, not even caring enough to have five minutes of interaction with anyone I knew. My husband was in another realm, dealing his own adjustment to fatherhood and adulthood.

We were both learning the roles of gender we’d inherited and most times stared at each other in bewilderment, wondering what we had done. And why we had done it. And most importantly, why we had done it with each other.

Overshadowing the blind swell of love I should feel for my baby is a horrible stagnant nimbus that threatens to envelop and suffocate us both.

Helen Walsh has done an admirable job of deconstructing what happens in the moments after you’ve had your first child. Up until labor, you’re in a hormone induced euphoria, contemplating what your baby will look like, envisioning mother-child scenes that would tug at any onlooker’s heartstrings. You will be different from your mother. Better. Wiser. More patient.

And for some, these things come true.

For others, it is the emotional equivalent of a locomotive barreling right for our bodies, without the benefit of the blinking lights: we never see it coming.

I’m thinking now that all these women, the aunts, friends, second-and third-time mothers, must be part of some sisterly conspiracy to safeguard the human race because had I known anything of this barbarity, had they even hinted at its brutality, then I would never have gone near this.

In Go to Sleep, Helen Walsh writes about what happens when these visions don’t align with reality. We don’t feel an attachment to this wailing, needs-abounding creature. We’re tired and would sell our arm to get a moment of peace. Of sleep. We’re anxious and willing to leave our newborn with anyone who shows the slightest interest in holding him/her, in order to close our eyes. Just for a moment. We are in the middle of a war between the suddenly menacing World of Mothers, who feel it’s their duty to offer unsolicited advice and judgment. Women who insist on telling us the best way to raise our child.  Women who will follow up, to make sure we’re taking their advice.

Rachel is thrust into this shock of an existence—a young, single mother who makes plans to raise her child on her own after an unplanned pregnancy. The father of the child is an old boyfriend she ran into, someone she’d met many years ago, at a time when her own mother was dying of cancer. Her father had done everything in his power to keep the two teens apart, and Rachel spent the ensuing years recovering from the sudden loss of two people she loved.

Now working as a Youth Exclusion Officer with a local Community Center, Rachel’s job is to help hardened truants get their life into some semblance of order and normalcy. Every day she sees kids whose parents have absconded from their duties: parents who are addicted to drugs, gambling, and alcohol. She does her best to steer the teens back into mainstream education so they might have a decent shot at adulthood.

And so Rachel is unprepared for the moment when she will see her own howling infant as the enemy, as her captor, and as her punishment.  She will question her sanity when sleep-deprived, she is filled with terror and dread at the possibility of being left alone with her son. And when no one sees the anguish she experiences, she is filled with despair. Where can help be found? Who will pull her out of this deep well of darkness?

And for the love of God, why has no one made her aware of the bleakness of having a newborn?

Go To Sleep is a searing portrait of the dark side of Motherhood, of the possibilities that are seldom acknowledged outside of the psychology magazines and realm of therapy. It is a testimony of how the past comes full circle when we have our own children and suddenly understand the joy, the horror, the harrowing fear that our mothers once experienced.

Jennifer Orozco is an avid reader, reluctant writer, and mother of four daughters in a suburb of Houston, Texas. She blogs about all things bookish and feminist at Lit Endeavors: Notes of a Bibliomaniac and Scribbler. She is at work on her first novel, Anatomy of a Marriage.

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