I counted 26. No, 27. Wait, did that one fly away?
Several years ago, on a cold winter day, I sat on the stone steps of the American Museum of Natural History counting pigeons like it was the most important task in the world. Me. A grown woman with a master’s degree and a job at a major tech company. Mother to an adorable baby girl.
A mother.
The word still felt foreign in my mouth six months after giving birth. Mother. Mom. Mommy. They told me it would feel natural. That I would slip into it like a favorite hoodie, worn and familiar.
That I would fall in love instantly.
They lied.
Weeks before, I had stood on a subway platform wondering what it would take for someone to jump. Not me. Not exactly. But I wondered. And the wondering didn’t feel dramatic or urgent — it felt casual. Like choosing between iced or hot coffee. That’s what terrified me later, as I watched pigeon number 28 land beside the others. Not that I had the thought, but how ordinary it felt.
My hands grew numb from the cold as I popped another candied cashew from my pocket. One of those delicious, sugarcoated nuts you get from vendors on a Manhattan streetcorner. I had bought them near Rockefeller Center and clutched the warm paper bag in my palm as I made my way through Central Park to the museum, the heat fading with each step.
They were cold now as I sat on the steps. I should have gone home. My baby was there, laughing, starting to crawl.
My baby. Another phrase that didn’t quite fit. Like wearing someone else’s shoes.
They had pulled her from me months earlier. Emergency C-section. The fluorescent lights of the operating room burning my eyes. Shivering on the operating table like I was laid out in a freezer, an actual slab of meat being hacked into.
“She’s beautiful,” they said amid the clanking of metal instruments. I shivered, waiting for it to hit me. The rush of love. The overwhelming joy. The maternal instinct that’s supposedly encoded in my DNA.
A nurse placed her on my chest. So tiny. Five pounds 11 ounces.
I held her. Smiled through the morphine for that first picture, my eyes glazed. I looked happy. I should have been happy. But I was still waiting.
Nothing came.
I was still waiting six months later.
My husband watched me disappear. “You need help,” he’d say. Sometimes softly, sometimes desperately. Sometimes with tears in his eyes.
“I’m fine,” I’d say, my voice hollow. “Just tired.”
Just dying inside.
The Motherhood Center of New York. Even the name made me want to scream. Motherhood. As if it were a country club I had been desperate to join.
“Welcome to the Motherhood Center,” I imagined a hostess saying. “May I see your membership card? Oh, it says here you’re not sure if you love your baby. I’m afraid you’ll have to wait outside.”
But it wasn’t a country club. It was an outpatient psychiatric program. Five days a week, five hours a day.
During the intake call, I stared at the woman’s moving lips on my screen, convinced I was fooling her. After answering her questions, she would tell my husband that I was fine. Instead, she asked him if I could join the next day.
All I remember from those first six months are fragments, jagged pieces that don’t fit together. Digging through trash on a sidewalk during a heat wave, sobbing over a family heirloom accidentally thrown away. Calling a real estate agent in New Orleans to ask about studio apartments, just for me, while inside my head I screamed: “Don’t you know I’m falling apart? Can’t you tell I’m planning to abandon my baby?”
The time my husband finally said, “Either you get help, or I don’t know what happens next.” His voice breaking. The ultimatum hanging between us like a third person in the room.
Five hours a day in reclining chairs that were arranged in a circle like some twisted slumber party that no one wanted to be invited to.
The whole setup felt like a shrine to, if not an invitation for, emotional breakdown. A carefully constructed environment where falling apart wasn’t just acceptable but expected. Where the soft lighting, white noise machines humming in the corner, and voices kept deliberately gentle all seemed to whisper: “Go ahead. This is the place. Collapse.”
The recliners felt like an admission that none of us could be expected to remain upright under the weight of what we were feeling, of motherhood.
I sat in that circle the first day, body rigid, jaw clenched so tight that my teeth hurt. These women needed help. These women were struggling. Not me. I was fine. Fine!
I stormed up to the reception desk and said, “I’m leaving. I don’t belong here.”
The receptionist just nodded.
The city swallowed me the next day. I walked for hours. My mind elsewhere.
I stopped at store windows on Fifth Avenue. Pressed my hand against the cold glass. Watched people take photos near the Empire State Building. Where my office was. I sat on the ground in Herald Square until a police officer asked if I was OK.
“Fine,” I said. Always fine.
Then the museum steps. And the pigeons. Twenty-nine now.
I went back to the Motherhood Center the next day. Not because I wanted to. But because counting pigeons on museum steps in winter wasn’t something people who are “fine” do. Because I had nothing left and found myself on the floor of my apartment bathroom because the cold tiles were the only thing I could feel.
All my life, I had been capable. Independent. The one who always had it together. And now? I was spending my days doing therapy while my beautiful baby girl was with someone else. A summer camp for broken moms.
Those recliners felt like torture devices. It took a week for me to say, “I don’t feel anything when I look at her sometimes. My daughter. Nothing. Like I’m looking at a stranger’s baby. I fantasize about running away. Just packing a small bag and disappearing. I stood on a subway platform wondering what it would take for someone to jump. I don’t know if I love her.”
The words hung in the air as I waited for the judgment. The gasps. Instead, I got nods and knowing looks.
The journey wasn’t linear or clean. There were days when I felt almost normal, followed by crashes so deep I worried I was lost forever. The healing was as much about finding compassion for myself as it was about feeling love for my daughter. Forgiving the woman who wasn’t experiencing what she was “supposed” to.
Understanding that love isn’t always a lightning strike. Sometimes it’s a slow-growing plant that needs tending.
My body created life. It was cut open to bring that life into the world. And absolutely no one prepared me for what came after the congratulatory messages and presents stopped.
The cards with their flowery sentiments about maternal bliss. The onesies with “Mama’s Little Love” stamped across the chest — all these tokens marking an occasion of joy that I couldn’t access. None contained the love I was promised would arrive. None came with instructions for what to do when, after the visitors stopped coming and the messages slowed, I was left alone with a stranger who looked somewhat like me but who stirred nothing in my heart.
I wanted the motherhood they promised in the diaper commercials, with soft lighting and loving smiles. The ones where tired still looks beautiful and challenges are resolved in 30-second montages. Instead, I got months of this. Raw. Brutal. Transformative in ways I never asked for.
I still don’t know exactly when the fog began to lift. But I remember the first morning I woke up and didn’t immediately feel dread or the desire to run. The first time I heard my daughter laugh and felt something crack open in my chest. The first time someone asked, “How’s motherhood?” and I didn’t spout fake cheer.
Another baby and countless therapy sessions later, I still have days when I look at my children and feel a momentary disconnect: Who are these small humans, and how did they come from me? Like any mother, I get annoyed by the endless cries of “Mama!” I get impatient, frustrated and exhausted. But I also feel true joy and deep love.
These days, when I pass by the museum and see those pigeons on the steps, I sometimes count them silently as a reminder of where I’ve been and how far I’ve come. And where I’m going — home, to be with my family.
Alli Kushner, who lives in New York City, is the founder of BeeKyn, a play date matching and scheduling app for families.
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