Today’s guest shares her experience of pregnancy, birth and motherhood, none of which conformed to her expectation. She walked into pregnancy ambivalently ….and to her surprise loved many of the aspects of the experience that people often find difficult; because of a lifelong struggle with insomnia, the nine month hormone bath of pregnancy gave her luxurious periods of long sought-after sleep; she approached the pain of delivery as a unique experience between herself and her future daughter, and those early sleepless months with a newborn, which so many find challenging, turned out to be a period she’d been trained by her insomnia to manage better than most. I’ve spoken to hundreds of women about their experiences, and I’ve never heard this perspective….what follows is the first part of our conversation.
Find Courtney’s Book, The Year of the Horses, here
Find Courtney’s other writing, here
Audio Transcript
Paulette kamenecka : Hi, thanks so much for coming on the show today we are lucky to have Courtney Maum who has written a number of books, the most recent of which is a memoir called The Year of the Horses, which is a beautifully written book that I totally enjoyed. And if I had to summarize it in one sentence, I’d say it’s the story of your reconnection with horses, a childhood passion that leads you back to a deeper understanding of yourself in the midst of some significant midlife challenges.
Courtney: absolutely nailed it.
P: Which I feel like doesn’t isn’t loving enough. about horses but I am going to be honest right from the beginning and say that I’m kind of afraid of horses so while your book challenge that view, and I
C: I’m glad you brought that up because this is a book I really think it’s more for non horse people than horse I mean a horse people will. Inevitably I think feel connected to it, but I really I wanted to write this for the type of person who, you know, love to swim as a young person or dance or make up songs on the piano or wear funny hats and for whatever reason, you know, being an adult and a responsible person who has to you know, pay the rent or whatever it is, they’ve lost access to that part of joy and fantasy that was in their youth. So it was horses for me, but it you know, could have been something else.
P: Usually when I talk to people, I think childhood can shape your view of family what family is what you expect it to look like, if you want a family if you grew up with a sibling. I know from your book that you grew up with a brother. And I’m wondering if you can tell us how did you growing up with a brother are other aspects of your young life impact your ideas about kids having kids?
C: Let’s see I Oh, that’s a really interesting question. My brother Brendan is five years younger than I am so I spent the first five years of my life you know, it was like a fairy tale Princess childhood. My dad at that time was a big wig on Wall Street. This was the 1980s in Connecticut. You know, stay at home mom who had cocktail parties every night. You know, it was a it was a scene it was it was a very fortunate childhood. And then my brother was born and my dad hadn’t actually wanted a second child. I didn’t know that, you know, I mean, I something was wrong because they were fighting all the time, but I didn’t know that until later. And as it turned out, my brother had a lot of learning developmental issues that made parenting him different than parenting me. You know, he had to have special schooling and lots of medical treatment. And things like that.
So I will say that as a young person, I staunchly did not want kids. And I think it probably has to do with the fact that when the dynamic of our family was changed, for many reasons, it drove my parents apart. I love my brother. You know, our relationship is a complicated one, because everything that I value about myself and I think the way in which I communicate with people, fundamentally is through writing. Even when I speak to people I see the world as a writer. And my brother can…he can barely read. You know, so our love language really comes down to just spending time in each other’s physical space, which doesn’t get to happen very often. He lives in Florida, and you know, we’re at our best when we’re fishing off a dock together and eating pizza such simple simple things, but you know, that means that I am thus burying a lot of parts of myself that are vital, like my reading and writing life and that you know, he’s too he’s quite religious. I’m not you know, I think it’s a it’s a work in progress. But definitely, if for nothing else, just the cost and effort that I saw in parenting the way it was modeled for me because my brother was so sick. He spent a great wafts of time I’m talking months and months in the Yale New Haven Children’s Hospital and watching my mom, first of all, not be able to be there for me, you know, physically and the cost of the hotel room and at that point, they were already divorced and money. Things had changed. You know, financial pressure was back on just I thought, Oh, my God, I already knew I wanted to be a writer. And so it seemed to me that the way forward was to support myself and get to a place where I could support myself financially and just not have kids and then there’s no one competing with myself for my time. You know, and, and to be honest, I hadn’t really wavered from that mindset what happened and I married a man who felt pretty similar. You know, he’s a filmmaker and was really keen to just have our schedule, be our own and travel the world and whatnot, and it wasn’t until I was around 33 years old. That he changed his mind and decided he actually did want to try out and I really didn’t I really didn’t we it was two years of have come to Jesus you know, disagreements it I mean, I’m, I love my daughter had the perfect daughter for me. And she’s amazing, but it could very easily it could have could have gone a different way because I still I didn’t have that change apart. He did.
P: So that’s particularly interesting because you know, you’re the one with all the hard labor of pregnancy and all that stuff. So I’m hoping that it was easy to get pregnant.
C: Oh, well, it was so easy that I didn’t even know I was pregnant. I was practicing abstinence because I actively did not want a child. And we you know, hopefully this isn’t too much TMI, that’s what we’re here for. But it was a Christmas Eve conception where my husband and I we’ve long since stopped traveling to relatives for the winter holidays. It’s sort of nice and calm to just do it with friends or be be alone and I love champagne, and I love good champagne and I think I you know mostly drank the entire bottle and I didn’t we both forgot that you know, we had sex basically. And it wasn’t until two months later, I was just a wreck. I thought I had Lyme disease. I didn’t I thought I had mono. And I had forgotten to you know, and I went to the doctor, I didn’t even have health insurance so I had to pay out of pocket. This trashy clinic. And the female doctor told me that I had she highly suspected I had diabetes. I went through all these expensive tests.
P: Wow.
C: Yeah, it was a lot of nonsense. So by the time I mean it was so silly. I thought I finally got it because $7 CVS kit and I was I was more than two months along. When I thought I had Lyme disease, you know
P: wow, what were you what were your symptoms really throwing up or you just didn’t feel wasn’t throwing up?
C: But I felt carsick all the time. I mean, I now know that it was nausea. And I mean, it just sounds ludicrous. You know, I’m a well educated person. This sounds so dumb, but I things were tasting different. My husband, he’s French, so we often have wine at dinner, and I kept telling him like, you, where are you getting this wine? It’s off, you know, and he’s like, No, yeah, so it’s just tastes weird. I don’t want it. And then I remember, I like baking soda, toothpaste. That’s my brand of choice. And that I was like, Oh, they changed their logo, which is something I noticed because I work in Marketing. And I said and they must have changed their formula and I wrote a no like, I so type A I wrote a note to their customer service something saying like, you know your taste is I mean, just Hello. And ultimately what happened was, we often celebrate Christmas Eve with a with friends who were Jewish, and they messed up and they thought it was Christmas Day. And my my girlfriend reminded me after the fact she’s like, you told me on Christmas Eve like Oh, it’s good that you got the dates wrong because we’re gonna have sexy time we like got a bottle of champagne. All of a sudden that came back to me. We did consummate the relationship that night and I made a kid so it was a one time one time was stop and shop.
P: That sounds pretty easy to be fair to you. It is all of those symptoms are if you’re not anticipating them and looking for wacky and you know, all hail pregnancy chemistry that’s keeping you from wine without you knowing it. Right, like
C: totally and we at that point, we lived in the southern Berkshires, which is just an area laden with ticks. So many of my friends have struggled horribly from Lyme disease. So it wasn’t that nonsensical that I thought that that’s what I was struggling with. And you know, again, not having health insurance at that time. I was always really slow to go to a doctor something was up so you know, but it was a it was a baby.
P: And how was the pregnancy?
C: Oh my gosh. I loved it. I mean, funnily enough, was some of the most healthy and delightful moments of my life because I’ve struggled with chronic insomnia from a very, very young age had horrible sleeping problems, which really affects my mental health. And oh my gosh, should I say I was able to nap for the first time since being you know, in the single digits of life. I napped, I felt benevolent all the time. It was glorious. To be honest. I had a really nice pregnancy.
P: Well, that’s an amazing gift for someone who walks into it. ambivalently
C: Yeah,
P: and actually, why don’t you tell us about the birth first and then I want to read one quote from your book about your experience with pregnancy and motherhood going into the birth What were you anticipating what were you hoping for?
C: I did enlist a doula. I didn’t necessarily have strong you know, I did not like I wanted to do a home birth but I did try to I wanted to go without medication. Because I’m someone whether it’s recreational drugs or medication, I tend to have the reverse effect you know, of whatever’s supposed to happen. And I wanted to just handle whatever pain and sensations were coming my way. First of all, I wanted to be present. But also I thought I just handled it better without anything and I did a lot of prepping for the birth thinking about pain management. And when I was 16 maybe about to turn 16 I had a horrible accident where I was biking and I was hit and run over and dragged by a car.
P: Oh my god.
C: And I often would think about, I bet it can’t hurt more than that. You know, and I would think I think that I’ve already dealt with a level of physical pain that probably, I hope can’t be revisited. And so I just thought mostly about pain management, which was great because I was super calm through the contractractions. So calm that the nurses said it was a problem because I was resting through my contractions. But then, but then when it came to the pushing, I hadn’t given any thought to the pushing. I didn’t go to any classes. No one people don’t talk that much about pushing. They may sound like oh, it’s like a bowel movement when it needs to come out. It comes out and it didn’t. That was not how it was for me. My baby was in a normal position and everything that I could not. I couldn’t get her out. I had been laboring for a long time and I was really exhausted, but I also just had given no, it was like I’d been asked to all sudden do an advanced ballet move that I’d done no training. I was astonished how ill prepared I was for the pushing. Ultimately, I ended up having to have an episiotomy, which I didn’t know a doctor had ever even told me.
P: Oh,
C: and I didn’t know until two days later I tried to get up and go to the bathroom by myself and I almost fainted and a nurse came in and said you know you’ve had an a Pz on me and I said no one no one told me that. So, you know, other than the kind of the final moments. I loved the birth as well. I mean, I It wasn’t possible because of my age but I had you know I was thinking about surrogacy I just I really enjoyed being pregnant. I thought I the birth thing. I have so much affection for that experience because it was so visceral. I’m someone who’s always in my mind and I overthink things. And my mind is always in 100 different places and the brute physicality of birth. You couldn’t there was nothing to focus on. But the task at hand. And I loved that I found that peaceful. You know, I mean, I was fortunate that I was I made it to the doctors right I had that point I did health health insurance and, you know, wasn’t worried about what it would cost because I have health insurance. So I was fortunate enough to be able to focus on the good things, but I just loved the sheer presence that that was required by my mind and my body in order to do this thing and I also thought like, how amazing that my body can create these feelings that have not been hit by a car that this is feeling the way it does. Because of what’s inside my body that I’ve created myself. I thought that was like wild.
P: That is pretty amazing. And then it sounds like you didn’t do an epidural
is what that sounds like
C: they did. They did a spinal tap right before the piece what they they came in and they said you’ve been laboring for too long and honestly everyone needs to was changing shifts. And the doctor who’s coming on now he’s gonna give you a C section is what they said. So they were like, You got two choices. Either we go straight to C section, or you do spinal tap and we give it like a half hour or more. And so I thought okay, that’s not so they did the spinal tap and then without telling me they did the episiotomy and then off we were off then I had a baby.
P: Wow. Well that’s a that’s an interesting and obviously not predicted route for that but amazing that you’re appreciating that physical experience and that you can use your past experience to call me with a present because I think most people go into it with a fair amount of panic about the pain they may suffer and pain is one of those things that you I think you don’t you can’t have a visceral memory of it anymore. Like it is kind of exists only in a moment and although you remember the bike thing as being really painful, probably you can’t recall, like the pain you can’t recall
C: I can unfortunately, I actually have pretty good recall of pain and I remember the physical sensations of birth very well. I find it really interesting. I can really call them up I mean, you know part of it is that I wrote I write about these things. You know they are they are somewhere but no I can access them. I feel like I cannot access them and I have a friend who she just gave birth but we were talking this summer and she was so worried about pain. really freaked out about it. And you know she’s she’s an incredibly accomplished writer herself. She’s also a polo player. And I said you know what it feels like when a horse scallops away with you and you then you’re not in your mind anymore. You just have to deal with the sensation at hand. And it’s also kind of thrilling, it’s thrilling and scary. And there’s nothing else to think about and you should start building up almost some excitement and respect for the sensations that are come coming your way because they’re going to be completely yours for the rest of your life. And you’re going to be overwhelming in a way that it’s it’s it’s just you and this thing you know you’re gonna have to overcome this and and even if you have a great support system, you know, but it’s this is a once in a lifetime thing even if you have multiple pregnancies. I think that each each is different and it’s it is special and something that only us women for better or for worse can experience it’s it’s a not everyone wants to and not everyone should you know but if if, for whatever reason you are going to give birth, you know, you might as well practice some form of gratitude, just recognize what’s happening. You know,
P: that’s super interesting, and I usually think it’s very hard to prepare someone else for birth because you can’t find the words that will help them feel what’s coming in can’t translate that experience in a way that that will make someone else understand it and it is entirely experiential.
C: You know, I mean, I you know, I can talk about how it was for me, but that doesn’t mean that it will be that way. For other people. But I mean, to me, I just, I always told people I was at sea during this horrible storm, and I could see each wave coming at me almost like the movie The Perfect Storm when the waves you know, 100 stories high. And I knew that when the wave hit that it would hurt but that there was 15 seconds between each wave where there was some fear, but I knew I would get through the wave because I’d gotten through it before and then you just get into this rhythm on the ship. That’s how I felt it and that’s how I you know if people wanted to know I didn’t go willy nilly telling people this, but that’s, you know, I just kept reminding myself that after each crest, there’s there’s a moment of peace. Right.
P: So the other thing that’s interesting about that is I think you have this analogous experience with horses where when I was getting the contractions it was for me a really scary sensation of my you know, having no control over the body. I’m in like, I’m in this thing, but I can’t, I can’t turn it off. There’s only one way forward. But it sounds like with your with your horse experience. You have kind of felt that in a different context and maybe not necessarily pain, but the sense that you don’t have control about what’s going to happen to your body in the next three minutes because the horse is that we’re just controlling that.
C: Right? I mean, we like to pretend that we have control but we lose control. Every horse person is going to lose control even on the ground. You know, I have a horse right now who’s so dangerous on the ground. You know, if I’m going to be injured, probably it’s going to be on the ground while I’m just walking her somewhere and something scares her and she rears or kicks, you know. So when you’re those horrible, horrible moment when you know you’re about to have a car crash, that’s not really a lack of control you want to celebrate, right?
P: right, for sure
C: No, I would never say that. But I remember when my contractions first started coming. I thought, Okay, well, you very well might never live these sensations again, and we can’t go backwards. So, you know, let’s stay present and just think through this as like an artistic experiment. And I remember very well, when my contractions hit, we had a little log cabin and my husband had a film studio, a place where he worked out of in the back it was not at all connected to the house and I didn’t have my phone. I had been sitting with him that day because I was feeling a little weird. And I was listless and I had no idea what to do with my energy. And I left and I gone to the house, and I weirdly started I’ll never forget this. He started watching this French movie, based off of real facts about a group of like 17 teenagers that all get pregnant at the same time. I was watching this movie, this beautiful pregnant female bodies. And all of a sudden I was like, that is hard to describe this weird, something’s happening. I drew a bath and then I had all these contractions in the bath but the problem was I left my phone in a place with my husband and I at that point, I couldn’t get out of the bath but I also didn’t know how long it would take. You know, he disappeared into work. I was there forever. I pulled towels down and blankets and I think it was an hour and a half he finally came in and I was like oh my god. Call the doula but I remember even in the bath I just thought this is amazing. I’m in a dream of my own making like those sensations you have when you’re dreaming or having a nightmare and you know that sometimes you wake yourself up because you’re about to fall, but I I was awake and I had that falling sensation into my own body.
P: Yeah.
C: And I really did think like, this is incredible. It’s not like, you know, necessarily like I don’t love nausea, you know, but it was like an irrevocable sensation. And I just, I learned that I was like my daughter and myself creating this experience. It was very exciting. I think
P: this is an amazing way to talk about it and and I’m sure you will be surprised like not the view that a lot of people share but it is it’s moving right it is if only I could have other kids that would walk into it that way.
So I’m going to read a little section of your book here to kick us off with the next question you write you write the people most shocked by the fact that I had a baby or in order my mother then myself. But I loved it. Love the everything on early motherhood, my changing body the shifting of priorities even though once in a lifetime ravages of birth. I was at my healthiest and most productive as a pregnant woman. I felt beautiful and vital. After his birth those positive feelings didn’t go away. I was anchored I felt necessary as a food source. I was all I could think of during my last year was that I wanted all that back to Easy sleep, the focus mind the permanent anchor.
So what’s interesting to me about this is that you So reluctantly are drawn into this, but it is wonderful in ways you couldn’t anticipate and it sounds like you really like that newborn period, which most of us find, so challenging, and taxing and for someone who didn’t want necessarily a draw on her time. I mean, you have no time and that period, right?
C: Well, a couple of things like my child when she was a baby and of course everyone counseled us against this, but very early on, she started this routine where she would breastfeed for an hour at a time. But then she would sleep for five hours. Oh wow. Right. So instead of every 20 minutes, every whatever it is, that’s what we ran with for quite a long time and I am not joking. I understand five hours sometimes for but long periods of time where she was just napping and then and the breastfeeding sessions were I mean, I write about them in the book. They were never deeply and I looked forward to them because they were so long. And I had a comfy chair and a book and I’d read by you know it was just beautiful. Now of course, I didn’t get to do that for long because it my body didn’t get the signal to produce a lot of milk. Your body produces more breast milk when it’s there’s frequent smaller feeds so inevitably, she wasn’t getting enough weight because I wasn’t producing enough milk and we had to go to a formula. But in the first couple of months, I think I held out for three months it was really, it was really blissful. But ultimately I mean, I was well prepared for that period of motherhood because of my chronic insomnia. So functioning pretty well. on very little sleep was sort of a baseline thing, kind of where I was already coming from, and whatever hormones were going through my body unlike all the times before where I thought, oh my god, how am I going to face my day on three or four hours of sleep? How am I going to do this like whatever? book tour give a talk host dinner party without cracking in half I was buttressed by just oxytocin. You know, I didn’t feel stressed out about it also didn’t know it’s very lucky I was self employed. It’s important to point out that I wasn’t stressed right like I could, if I felt really sleepy, well then maybe my writing that day or whatever it was I was doing the emails were going to be a little wacky, but it’s not like I was going to lose a client at an office so the stakes were lower and then just for Virgo type A type person like me, ticking off boxes, just identifying what my child or infants needs. Were they were so easy to meet again, if she was healthy, right. I’m not talking about being an ICU or something. But it is just this checklist. Is she hot? Is she cold? She’s hungry. Is she tired? Is there a tag that’s scratching at her neck? Did we forget her favorite blanket? And honestly, I think there weren’t even there were less than 10 things and normally if you check those boxes, and we’re always prepared. I like people people who know me well can tell you on like a masterful picnic prep you know, I’m the one who always at a moment’s notice. You want to pick them I’ve had little salt packets in my purse. I have like a Swiss Army and I’m just always ready for anything. And and so that’s how I operated you know whether in the house or driving around, just had everything on hand all the time. I was very prepared. And thus I felt very successful and very happy about the ways in which I was meeting your needs and then you know, for me the the dark stuff came and I started to really unravel and feel that I was failing as a mother when she turned two and instead of, oh, she’s crying because she’s hungry. She’s crying because she wants attention. She’s crying because she wants to be played with and I’m like, Oh, that’s not something I can put in a car or in a bag or order. You know, that has to come from me. And a place of play. And time and attention and and then everything came apart. i That’s That’s for me. Like where the real mothering came in and it’s beyond survival. It’s about emotional nourishment, and I succeeded less, let’s say
P: Well it’s interesting that early motherhood so clearly suited a lot of your native skills, and it’s like a kind of an experience. You wouldn’t have known that those two matchups so well, and once they become real people at about two become significantly harder, right that’s I think that is true across the board. And that is kind of a spot where your own experience as a child, I think plays in really strongly in many ways that we’re totally blind to, like we
C: Yeah, I think that’s true. And I think I think that some people that’s when they start to shine as parents you know that for instance, my husband really suffered with type stuff because he’s the type of person he’ll go to the grocery list and forget the list. Yeah, you know, he’s, he’s not terribly forgetful, but he’s not he’ll drive somewhere and not realize that we’re driving through lunch and not think to pack sandwiches, you know, whatever the heck it is. And that stuff matters a lot. That level of organization matters a lot when you have an infant, but it matters less. That’s yeah, that’s when he really rose rose to the challenge was dropping everything to play or come up with a funny game, or throw a ball who makes the sounds and I just, I could do that for like five or 10 minutes, but then I had my own stuff I wanted to move on to I just didn’t have that. I guess I could put this in the present. I still don’t really have that emotional generosity, you know and that I could have guessed but the other stuff that I would love early stuff so much. Yeah, I didn’t see that.
P: And when you’re you say your mother was surprised is that because she thought you would focus solely on career?
C: Because I made it clear to her from a transit of teenager. My mom loves kids. She loves being a caretaker and I’d always said Don’t Don’t count on me, you know, and then she was just it was always there because my brother you know had been counseled not to have kids and just his was taking medication that a certain point I you know, rendered him incapable of having kids. And so my mom’s just really identified as someone who wasn’t going to have grandchildren and she was deeply upset about that. And it had gotten to a point where she called our cat giant man who had you know, to be like, how’s my grandson and had really come around. So just accepting that she probably wasn’t going to have grandchildren’s. So she was, I mean, beyond like, I can’t it was incredibly moving to see how excited and invested she was. And it was a really beautiful time in our relationship to because I don’t think I’ve ever needed my mom like that. You know, and all of her characteristics that sometimes makes me frustrated with her which is selflessness, her ability to self efface space and time and you know that time in my life when when I really needed someone to drop everything and be there for me and she she was wonderful that way.
P: Yeah, a lot is forgiven for good grandparenting
C: Yes, Absolutely. That’s well said,
P: I wanted to read this quote because I as I loved it, it sounds like you went to your first pregnancy appointment in France and I want to roll out my very dusty French accent. So I hope you’re sitting October. I said, I’m interested in natural childbirth, you know, laboring without any medicine. Do you have any thoughts on that really low, closed her ledger my checks for appointments functioning as a bookmark that she said is a question for a therapist, not a gynecologist. I love that because no gynecologist here would say that.
C: Absolutely not. No. Oh my god. She’s. I wrote an essay about her recently. If you Google my name and letter to a stranger, this is a wonderful special thing and a literary magazine, where people write letters to strangers. She’s not really a stranger, but this was a long time ago. And I wrote a whole essay about my obsession with my French gynecologist, and she was hardcore. She’s very hardcore. And you know, that section goes on where I ask questions about breastfeeding and she says if you want to ruin your breasts, you know Knock yourself out and just Oh, and then drinking. She said, Only drink two drinks a day. Just completely flew in the face of everything that we tend to say in America.
P:
