Atheist Kailyn McCord felt suffocated by the worry of new motherhood. A serene Evangelical acquaintance offered a way out.
One month from my due date, gigantic and uncomfortable, I sit in a park with a bunch of other pregnant women and do what we do best: eat. You can tell our character by our snacks — turmeric cookies, nettle tea, high-protein vegan cheeses — if not by our birth plans. One way or another, everyone here is hoping to stay out of the hospital. A local midwife runs the group.
As we’re starting our check-ins, two women arrive whom I’ve not met before. They carry a wooden box filled with homemade donuts. A kerchief adorns the neck of the tiny baby with them — the smallest baby I have ever seen in real life.
As we go around the circle, I learn that the women are sisters. The midwife asks Lydia, mother of the baby, if she’d like to tell her birth story. It’s a kind of ritual we have, the newly anointed mothers conferring their experience unto the yet-to-birth. The circle stirs, collectively sits up straighter; birth stories are perhaps the only thing more interesting to pregnant women than food. Part prophecy, part data point, part annal from the other side, they promise wisdom, answers, information.
“Well,” Lydia says, just a hint of a southern accent in her voice, “it’s certainly a story.”
She describes the first contractions; of coming to the edge of her pain, the doubt she found there, her task at once impossible and unavoidable. Maybe it’s the baby in her lap, or my extra-sensitive late-pregnancy hormones, but whatever the reason, her narrative takes hold of me and does not let go. With every sentence she falls deeper into the story, given over more completely to its momentum. I have seen skilled poets do this when they read. I have seen priests do it.
“And then this song came on,” Lydia says, her eyes wet and bright. “It’s called ‘No One Ever Cared for Me Like Jesus.’ And you have to understand, this is my husband’s favorite song. He loves Jesus. I mean, we both love Jesus.” She laughs a little, looking up at the clear blue sky. “But this song, he cries every time he hears it. And he did cry. And I knew then. I knew that Grace — that’s what we knew we’d name her, Grace — was God’s gift to us. And she was coming, and He would bring her here.”
Next to Lydia, I sit quietly blubbering.
I have been an atheist my entire life. By this I do not mean lightly agnostic or casually anti-God, but absolutely staunch in my belief in plain, everyday humanity. When we die, I believe our consciousnesses cease to exist; when we are buried, our bodies are worm food. I do not believe this with heartbreak or sadness, but in the way that I believe in gravity or the four walls in the room in which I currently write this. I believe this so much that the word I should use is not belief but observation. Information, research, data: These are my mechanisms for understanding the world.
But over the course of Lydia’s story, I have gone from rueful, sarcastic, super-pregnant to deep-feeling, unapologetically sincere pregnant. Around the circle, all the other women look like some version of the Madonna: peaceful, serene, perfect. Especially Lydia. A feeling sneaks up on me that reminds me of being on a grade-school playground, a combination of off-put envy and an anxious desire to be a part of that which I’m coveting. As we gather ourselves to leave, Lydia’s sister picks up the empty box of donuts; of all the snacks, it’s the one we’ve demolished completely.
In the weeks leading up to the birth of my daughter, I think of Lydia often. We’re not friends, exactly, though when I see her at the farmers’ market, Grace swaddled to her chest, something drives me to try and tell her about it. I stop short of saying, “How did it work, exactly, the moment where you trusted Jesus before you pushed a human being out of your body?” but perhaps my desperation comes through, because we exchange phone numbers. When I get home, I have a text. “It was so good to see you! Will be praying for you,” a glossy red heart in lieu of punctuation.
On the countless instances I’ve heard this phrase before, I’ve translated it into the equivalent secular diminution, “I’ll be thinking of you.” This time, though, I understand that prayer is beyond thought, referring to something that Lydia, at least, believes is more. I find her sentiment overwhelmingly kind, but also thrilling in the particular way of possible new friendships. Lydia, in her Godliness and beauty and perfection, is thinking of me.
I give birth a few weeks later at half past noon. It is an excruciating, exquisite, life-altering experience. Afterward, my husband cradles our daughter on his chest, the three of us in bed together. We name her Joan.
If late pregnancy is an exercise in managing my anxiety, then postpartum is where it reaches its fevered peak. In the haze of very early motherhood, I become someone I do not recognize.
I was prepared for the logistics of taking care of a child (I worked as a nanny for a decade and consider myself someone who “knows babies”), but I was not prepared for the degree to which Joan would drive me to an obsessive, ever-present hyperbonded insanity. “Sleep when the baby sleeps,” they say, and instead I lie awake, watching her chest rise and fall, worried that if I sleep, she will somehow cease to breathe. I do not like when other people hold her, and even when I grit my teeth and let them, I ask them not to go too far away (they’re just across the table) or not to leave the room (they haven’t yet). When Joan cries, I am instantly at her side, rocking, humming, my face buried in the ear-splitting sobs so that she will know, even as she wails, that I am there with her, and so I will know this too. When I have done everything I can — held her, nursed her, rocked her, walked her outside, walked her back in again — and still she is crying, I cry also. I ask her in a whisper, “What do you need?”
There are moments when my anxiety turns ugly. In the newborn weeks, my husband can do nothing right. He is too slow and too fast, too gentle and too rough; he knows nothing about the baby, has no instinct for her, which I convince myself in my near-psychosis is somehow harming her deeply, never mind that it’s me who spends the days frantically weeping. My hypervigilance churns through every waking moment, chipping away at what was previously a stable, loving marriage.
A few weeks after Joan is born, Lydia texts. “Hi! Checking in to see how you are doing!” The sentiment is simple, but after weeks of people asking only about the baby, her singular “you” moves me to tears. We text back and forth; I send pictures; she tells me Joan looks beautiful. We talk about how hard postpartum is, how the focus when you’re pregnant can be so much on birth, and no one really talks about the hellstorm that comes after.
When an essay I wrote about Joan’s birth is published, Lydia reads it. “I feel so seen!” she tells me, and our talk turns to what we might choose for our births should we have more children. “I have faith that when the time comes to make those decisions, God will guide me,” she says.
I feel lost when Lydia brings up faith, not because I don’t understand it (although I don’t) but because it seems to be a magic ticket to places I am in desperate want of visiting, places off the island of postpartum distress. I’ve been trying out various mechanisms of relief from my anxiety: talking to a therapist; deep-breathing exercises; “me time,” during which my husband takes the baby on a walk while I watch YouTube videos of gentle early postpartum exercises. So far, nothing has worked.
On top of it all, my observational, data-based decision-making strategies are failing me spectacularly. I don’t have time for research or reading, let alone rational thought. I’ve been operating mostly on instinct. Is that something like when Lydia listens to God? I don’t know. As with every other time she and I have talked and she mentions God, I offer something bland in return, trying to affirm that I see the value in her methods without being disingenuous about the fact that I can’t quite find a way into them myself.
When Joan is 5 months old, Lydia hosts a “Galentine’s Day” party — an event where moms and moms-to-be eat, socialize, and craft. Everyone from the midwife’s group is there, as are a few women I don’t know, mostly from Lydia’s church. Her house is immaculate; the colors cheerful but stylishly muted, soft orange couches and hushed blue cabinets. On the counter, there’s a Crock Pot full of steaming hot chocolate and a perfectly tumbled mountain of large homemade marshmallows.
I sit in my stained, pilling sweater and wrinkled canvas pants. I sip tea, Joan fussing in my lap, and watch as Lydia makes a print of Grace’s foot in red paint. The volume of the room is low, the murmur of babies playing or nursing, napping against or still inside their mothers’ bodies. I try to settle in and can’t. I feel terribly anxious, out of place, wishing I were more like these other women — Godly, or graceful, or otherwise unbothered by the recent monumental upheaval common to our lives. Early motherhood has been a profoundly lonely place, and here is community, connection, the promise of friendship. But Joan is fussing, and then she’s fussing more, and I can’t seem to let my shoulders down from my ears, and when I change her cloth diaper, I find that I’ve forgotten an extra cover. I’ll have to reuse the one she’s wearing, blotting a spot of yellow poo from the elastic edge. I leave the party early, sure that everyone here will be much relieved once I’ve gone.
But some days after Galentine’s, I get brave and ask Lydia if she’d like to spend some time together and if she could tell me a little about her faith. I’ve been wondering if it’s Lydia’s particular way of connecting to God that’s standing in between me and peace. If I could only understand how her equation works, maybe I could get over this thing the books call postpartum.
Our daughters play on the floor of her living room. Grace is fantastically mobile, vocal with consonants and insistent tonal shifts — the promise of what Joan will be in a few short months. Lydia serves me tea, which I promptly spill on her carpet.
“Don’t worry,” she says, grimacing only a little. “It’s machine washable.”
I ask her whether she was raised in her faith. She talks about her family, about growing up devout. I ask her about her early motherhood, which I know was remarkably difficult; she developed a mysterious infection and had two unnecessary surgeries followed by a third during which doctors found a piece of retained placenta. I am unable to imagine someone going through what she went through without succumbing to complete psychological collapse, and yet here she is, a whole, functioning person.
Her answers are placid, reflective, calm. Finally, I get up the nerve to ask what I’ve come here to ask.
“Weren’t you scared?” I say, by which I mean: Weren’t you sure something terrible was going to happen? And didn’t that realization undo you as it continues to undo me? Didn’t it cut you off from everything you’d known of the world before you had a baby? I have no idea who I am, I think. Tell me how you still do.
She tilts her head to the side, looks up at the ceiling.
“No,” she says. “I mean, yes! I mean, of course I was scared. And it was hard. But here’s the thing. I knew that if I died, I would go to the kingdom of Heaven. I knew that Jesus would be waiting for me. And I knew that He would take care of Grace, too. I mean, losing your mother …” she starts, and then stops, tears up slightly. “Losing your mother would be incredibly hard. So hard. But when you believe what I believe, you know that Jesus loves your child more than you ever could. And He has a plan for her. And so I knew that He would be there for her, even if I wasn’t.”
For a hot, glimmering flash, I see Lydia’s life as she sees it. If I believed my daughter would be fine if I died — if I actually believed that — it would be a powerful enough notion to let me step peacefully into motherhood, to attend to Joan with a kind of serenity I long for.
On my way out, Lydia mentions that she’ll be leading worship at her church in a few weeks. “Could I …” I start to say, surprising myself. “Yes!” she says, before I can finish. “Absolutely. All are welcome.”
I imagine it with searing detail all the way home. I think of the women in floral dresses, of the singing, of little groups all around me and Joan and Ben, a family surrounded by more family. I think about how I could nod and smile, how people would coo at my daughter, admiring her, how I’d feel so seen. Church is a village — what modern motherhood tries to make up for with gadgets and money and apps.
Lying in bed that night, Joan snoring lightly between Ben and me, I get a text from Lydia. From the far side of the bed, Ben rolls over toward me.
“What’s that?” he asks.
“Directions to church,” I say. In the dim light of the phone, I watch Joan’s chest move up and down.
“Okay,” he says, then asks. “So you’re a convert?”
I think back across everything I imagined that day, across the months of pining for the kind of peace Lydia seems to find in their faith. Motherhood is the greatest upheaval of identity I have ever experienced — a wave of rapid-fire change in which every familiar thing vanished or became unrecognizable from what it once was. In the midst of that tumult, why couldn’t I become a woman of God? Things I was sure of — including atheism — were easily, gladly up for grabs.
And yet presented with the reality of actually going to church, I suddenly find the color isn’t in it anymore.
Maybe it’s because life has begun to stabilize a little (we’re sleeping longer than two hours at a stretch, eating regularly, starting to click into Joan’s daily rhythms), but when Ben asks his question, I recognize myself in it. I think about the conversations we had before Joan, how we always felt strongly about raising her with a secular moral center. I can see that my version of motherhood, while still wildly different from any life I had before Joan, must still be my version. For church to offer me peace, I’d have to believe, and I don’t. It’s not who I am, even now that I’m someone completely different.
I scootch Joan over in bed and crab-crawl my way across her so that we’re reconfigured, me now in the middle. Ben settles his hand on my hip. My belly is flaccid and gigantic, a part of my body that still feels unfamiliar, like it’s not quite me, but I draw Ben’s hand over it and hold it there. Joan stirs, whimpers a little, farts, and then goes back to sleep.
“So?” he asks.
“No,” I say. “No, I’m just me.”
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