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Rebecca

When you have kids you’re never truly alone, but it’s still possible to be painfully lonely.

Once I became a mother my loneliest moments came in the middle of the night, after I’d gotten a colicky baby to bed, after I’d rocked them for hours and hours, bounced up and down on my toes until my calves burned because the babies liked the vertical sensation better than the side to side.

I’d crawl back into my bed, next to a sweaty toddler who refused to sleep alone, and stare up at the ceiling fan as Gray snored blissfully next to me. Even though he didn’t drink he took prescription pills to sleep. Not that I think he would have gotten up with the babies anyway.

“I’m terrible with them,” he said any time he tried to do anything. Pure weaponized incompetence.

Sleep always eluded me, and I felt more alone than I ever had in my entire life.

Back then our church leaders encouraged us new mothers to keep journals and even start blogs where we wrote about our life with our children.

“Show the world your joy. Connect with other women going through what you are bearing,” the pastor said.

It was easy to start pretty soon after I had my first, Alice.

Took about five minutes in the dead of night to create a blog on WordPress and the confessional nature of it was addicting at first. I kept going when the others came along.

I couldn’t tell the truth exactly, but I could write a version of it that made what I was doing as a mother feel right and good.

I was serving out my purpose. I could complain about the colic, but I could also post pictures of my gorgeous babies, and other women would comment and tell me I was doing a good job, that the kids were perfect, that I was perfect.

It was the validation I didn’t know I needed.

My first truly viral post was about natural birth. I delivered Alice in the hospital, which made sense given everything we had been through to get pregnant with her. I wasn’t taking any chances.

I even had an epidural, which Gray thought was unnecessary, but I’d insisted after being in labor for forty-seven excruciating hours.

I’ll always remember that gauzy, hazy tingle in my lower half, the way I was completely present for Alice’s birth, but not in agony.

I’ll always remember it because it never happened again.

Gray told me I was weak for not doing it the natural way. As weak as you are when you can’t fall asleep without an Ambien? I wanted to snap, but I didn’t.

“Drugs don’t agree with you. Remember how hard it was for you to wean off them back in San Francisco?” Gray had said. It was the only time he ever mentioned the incident from back then. And it felt like a warning of sorts.

Our ranch was quite far from the hospital, and when Willow came along, Gray insisted we could manage just as well at home with the same midwife who had delivered him and maybe some help from Dr. Carmichael if we needed it.

Who was I to disagree? I had been blessed again, or so I believed. Our lives were filled with abundance.

Gray filmed the birth on my phone. I don’t even remember him doing it.

I didn’t ask him to. I don’t remember anything.

I became a wild animal in those moments as Willow began to rip her way through my unmedicated body.

I howled like a beast and scratched at the wooden floor so hard that I will always be able to see the marks.

I barely made it into the water where I had planned to give birth.

“It’s normal,” the midwife assured me. This was the pain of the sacrificial mother, the pain all women must go through in order to be purified for motherhood. But I had already been “purified.” I had Alice. I had been a mother for two years.

In the midst of it all Gray filmed me as I screamed in horror.

Then out came the baby. Everything went black.

I didn’t find the video until much, much later.

We took so many pictures of Willow, and of Alice holding her, that the video of the birth was buried deep in my photo stream.

I only discovered it when I was pregnant again.

I was looking for the last picture I’d taken when Willow was still in my belly.

I wanted to show it to her to prepare her for the new baby.

By that point I had been blogging regularly about our life on the ranch.

I didn’t think I would love it as much as I did.

And for all Gray’s swagger about how he wanted to get back to the land and get his hands dirty he never seemed entirely comfortable with the hard work of farm life.

He liked it when things went right, but 90 percent of things go wrong on a farm.

And that’s if you’re lucky. I was always stepping in to find solutions to our problems. When the bison broke out of the paddock I found us steel fencing.

When all of the chickens caught a virus and stopped laying, I figured out how to get them inoculated.

You would hardly know that Gray grew up on the ranch.

The more time we spent there the more he seemed like a bumbling city boy.

But I didn’t write about that. I would never.

I blogged about the beauty of it all. I wrote about mothering the babies, about my devotion to our church and our community.

Though I remained skeptical of God, I did believe that it was the power of prayer that ultimately delivered my children to me.

I watched the video of me screaming in pain and thought, Wow, other mothers should see this. Until I had babies, I hadn’t seen a woman give birth.

I edited the video slightly. I didn’t include the worst of it—no one needed to see that—and I added some soothing music.

I simply put a shine on it. It would be easier to digest that way.

I also wanted to pretend that the next birth would be simple and beautiful because Gray again forbade me from going to the hospital.

He told me I would be a failure as a mother if I couldn’t make it through childbirth without drugs.

He said so many things to me, and I began to believe them.

I convinced myself I was doing a service by sharing the video, but I also wanted that same thrill I always got when I showed off my work of mothering.

I wanted people to tell me I was strong.

That I was capable. I wanted the assurance that I could do this again.

I hit Post .

It had millions of views within days. And most of the commenters seemed to love what I was doing.

They wrote that they longed for a life like mine, that living on a ranch was their fantasy while they toiled away at their desks from nine to five.

When the next babies came the attention only amplified.

My audience loved babies. They loved me.

I wasn’t lonely anymore. I had all these new friends.

That feeling didn’t last, but it was a high for a long time.

I started baking again. It had always been my salvation, but now it was more than that.

It was almost an addiction. éclairs, croissants, peasant bread.

I made Oreos from scratch one day and then ketchup the next.

The attention was addicting, but it was also lucrative.

Sponsors reached out to me by sliding into my DMs. They wanted to know if I would wear their dresses, use their frying pans, try their natural nipple balms. I said yes, yes, and yes.

Gray didn’t need to know. By then he was on the road so much.

He had a couple of start-ups going, had invested in real estate in the dodgy part of the city, and was already considering a run for office.

The ranch bled money. My husband was by no means a real cowboy.

He could ride a horse, but he passed out the first time he had to castrate a bull calf.

And having a staff was expensive. By the time Gray realized what I was doing he was grateful for the infusion of cash.

He even agreed to be in some of my posts and reels, but only if he got approval of them first. He was so vain.

He did like doing workout videos together because he had invested in a bunch of fitness and creatine supplements. He was fine doing anything he considered “manly.”

That’s when Olivia showed up on my doorstep. Out of the blue.

She grinned like a wolf when I opened the door. “I’m gonna change your life.”