After Infertility, I Found a Version of Motherhood I Could Claim As My Own

My identity took shape around the struggle for a child. Who was I now that I actually had one?

You May Feel a Bit of Pressure author Amy Gallo Ryan with her daughter

A heathered sweater dress gathered in a little heap at the crown of my belly and that, along with an old pair of riding boots, made up the entirety of my outfit. I don’t even think I wore earrings. But that was fine—it was only lunch. There was no need for bright, oversized florals, there’d be no games, no densely-perfumed older ladies, no lush centerpieces or cutesy favors. I wanted none of it. The suggestion of a baby shower was something I’d rejected emphatically over these nine months; to agree to it seemed unthinkable, given all the years in which motherhood had rejected me.

By the time I’d reached a sixth round of IVF, the ninth embryo to be released into my uterus, the shine of it all had worn off. Not off the baby itself, mind you—that remained the purest goodness this life had to offer. Likewise, the notion that I’d get to be another human’s mom, the fact that this person would shapeshift my husband and I into our own little family—all of it was beauty beyond comprehension. But motherhood—not the job but the construct, the way it took up tangible space in the world, a connective tissue binding women who had a proprietary knowledge of love itself—I’d come to see it all as a sort of exclusionary performance art. And the costume, I was sure, didn’t fit.

During infertility, The Mothers were everywhere, sorority sisters I idealized and resented and would’ve given anything to join. Down the street from my Brooklyn apartment they paraded around the playground, effortless in their unkempt way, their hastily looped top knots, pushing a toddler on a swing with one hand, caressing a cylindrical belly with the other. They whipped out their boobs at the coffee shop, motherhood positively spilling out of them, performed, it felt like, for my benefit alone, the embodiment of everything I wanted and couldn’t have. Now, though, I was being initiated, and I didn’t know who or how to be among them.

At my non-baby-shower shower, my childhood friends and I talked about my baby. It was quiet and normal—just lunch!—but everyone was excited for me, in the sort of way you can actually feel. I repeated a version of this lunch—same restaurant, same sweater dress—with another friend, then again with my mom and sister and grandma. Everyone genuinely wanted to celebrate this person none of us were sure would ever come, all the moms in my life extending such warmth, welcoming me into the club, which I accepted in the only stilted, mildly suspicious way I knew how.

In the weeks after she arrived, baby Hazel and I set off on never-ending walks through the park so she could sleep in a sweaty curl against my chest. I’d pass other women in whom I recognized a familiar bleariness, and watched as they convened at mom meet-ups, earnest and hungry for connection in this disorienting new phase of life. As they sat sprawled on blankets in the grass, their babies and their open hearts reaching for one another, comparing notes on the intimacies of yellow baby poop and the soul-crushing reality of the 20-minute nap cycle, Hazel and I walked on.

For months my sphere of motherhood remained remarkably narrow, encompassing only my daughter and me, alone together, every day. I’d prop her up against my thighs and we’d stare at each other, crinkling a book, chewing a rubber necklace. In the park, my favorite bench was planted within a grove of trees where I’d sit amidst the blooming branches, Hazel’s head tucked beneath my chin, lost in its little swirl of baby dreams. While she slept, I’d scroll through Instagram’s filtered portraits of motherhood, which were annotated in a romance language I did not speak. These mama bears with their kiddos and their babes. It was all so soft and warm and squishy, nothing that reflected the harder truths of how Hazel and I got here.

I found the role of being her mom easy to claim back then, even if the idea of being a mom continued to feel like a distant half-truth.

It wasn’t until my daughter started a two’s program at a nearby preschool that I found myself in regular, direct proximity to other mothers. Women for whom I was, before anything else, Hazel’s mom. By then we also had eight-month-old twins at home (infertility is wild that way), so to this new community of strangers I must have seemed a capital M sort of mother, embodying a motherhood of the highest order, juggling three children under three!!! There were no indicators of the motherhood denier I actually was.

From the “juice party” kicking off the school year all the way up until Thanksgiving break, I sat on a wooden bench outside the Yellow Room while the other parents adhered to the instructions we’d been given for an efficient, choreographed drop-off: Perhaps start a goodbye ritual such as giving three kisses and a hug. There was no tolerable goodbye ritual for Hazel, who came unglued at the point of separation, so I waited within her line of sight while she got to work washing dolls in soapy water and taking turns at the easel. The other moms would pass the bench, flashing me a smile, their eyes sympathetic, or offering up a funny aside about how comfortable I’d gotten in that spot. Little missives, across the void, stranger to stranger, mother to mother.

We weren’t yet familiar enough to laugh about the myriad absurdities and indignities of raising children: the toddler in full Elsa attire shoving her friend, a bowl of blueberries resting ominously between them. The small boy, apropos of nothing, biting the finger of a stranger one sweaty day on the playground. The airplane bottle of booze that somehow made it into someone’s backpack. We didn’t get into the weeds of it all in our small talk at birthday parties and Disney on Ice. But we said enough, exchanged sufficient glimmers of realness that I could feel something hard inside me start to soften.

At the end of the year there was a fancy event for the parents, and I wound up seated next to a mom from class named Annette. She replenished her glass of table wine as eagerly as I did, and I found just about every word out of her mouth hilarious and quick-witted, barely able to catch my breath when she missed her name being called as the big raffle winner of the night. The next morning, as my three babies woke me in the dark, the echo of alcohol refracting across my skull, it occurred to me that maybe I, too, was a winner, because I was pretty sure I’d just made my first mom friend.

The following year concluded with no such party because the pandemic had brought an end to real school and everything that came with it. What remained, though, was the people. We traversed vast stretches of loneliness to gather six feet from each other at the park. When school resumed, it seemed as if every parent was jockeying to do drop off, now a welcome opportunity for connection and conversation, an assortment of eyes above masks determined to find things to laugh about. We texted things overheard from our children in their little squares on Zoom school: “O is for Oreos and…orecchiette!” All these women whom I would have loved as a kid, or in high school, or college, or at work, but who happened to arrive at this specific phase of my life. Mothers, yes, but really, just friends.

Today, what began as the tightest of threads encircling Hazel and me has expanded into a vibrant tapestry of community. Countless circles of women stitched together by our children: a quilt offering comfort in some of the most vulnerable and joyful moments of my life. The connections feel deep and real, more meaningful than the term mom friends could ever possibly convey. We band together, forge a sort of collective, because there is power in numbers and that is precisely what moms need. We are frequently shit on, overlooked, underappreciated, the keepers of schedules, the knowers of details. If we don’t unite then what chance do we have?

Despite the richness of these relationships and close to a decade of motherhood, still the tug of longing, of being Other, is something I can summon in an instant. It surfaces every Mother’s Day, a phantom limb pain when I scroll through all the loving smiles and tender expressions flooding my feed. The woman in that sweater dress contained the baby that was coming as well as all the ones that never were. I will always be both people: a mother, as well as a woman clawing her way toward it. In a way the sides are at odds, foils with an existential tension between them, but they’re both me. I got what I so desperately wanted, but I won’t betray the person for whom it could have gone a different way. I’ll take care of her always. After all, I’m a mother.

Amy Gallo Ryan is a Brooklyn-based writer and former Condé Nast magazine editor whose personal essays have appeared in Vogue, Lit Hub, Hippocampus, Motherwell and Literary Mama, among other publications. Her infertility memoir, You May Feel a Bit of Pressure, was released last fall.