I Struggled to Connect With My First Baby. My Second Birth Changed Everything.
10 min read
In 2025, art historian and cultural critic Sarah Hoover published a memoir, The Motherload: Episodes from the Brink of Motherhood.
The book is a candid, no-holds-barred account of her first experience with pregnancy, birth, and her resulting postpartum depression, during which she found it almost impossible to connect with her young son, Guy. As Hoover writes in The Motherload, “In [Guy’s] face I saw nothing to love, but I stared anyway, as if a sudden burst of maternal obsession might wash over me if I looked hard enough…I felt like a scraped-out shell. I remember my mother telling me how television stations used to sign off the air at midnight, that they would play the national anthem and then go static. That’s how my brain felt, like static nothingness, a void punctuated by terrifying flashes of memory I had to pinch myself to make go away.” She suffered enormous anxiety; she was filled with rage at her husband, the artist Tom Sachs; she felt distant from friends, family, and the rarefied art world she’d once inhabited so happily. Even with the many resources available to her, she felt she had no choice but to grin and bear her pain. It took her months to understand what she was experiencing was, in fact, severe depression—and that she could treat it.
Years later, after going through therapy and deciding to have another baby, she delivered a daughter, Fred, in 2024. Below, Hoover describes why her second birth was such a different experience—and why talking about her first has changed the way she relates to both her children and to women everywhere.
For the first two years after I had my son in 2017, I thought, I am done. I am not doing this again. I blew up my life. I can’t believe that people choose to do this multiple times. How are all women not rioting in the streets?
Becoming a mom was, to put it lightly, a real journey for me. Although my first birth was medically normal, it totally broke me. I felt zero sense of autonomy or control in the delivery room. I was sick and terrified. My doctor broke my water for me, ripping a hole through the amniotic sac—something I didn’t realize, at the time, I could object to. I can still remember the shock of it, the pain so deep inside my body. When my baby came out, I couldn’t connect to him at all. As I would go on to write in my memoir, “I felt like a parasite moved into my brain. It was like I was some helpless rodent. Someone else had the controls.” It would take me months to understand I was dealing with severe postpartum depression.
But once I was properly therapized—which took a while, and many different kinds of therapy—I finally started to think again about having another baby. I was so jealous of people who hadn’t had my experience with pregnancy and birth: people who were natural fits for motherhood; who, the minute their baby came out, fell in love; who had never been sexually assaulted and, therefore, perhaps had experienced birth as less traumatic. I realized, suddenly: I wished I was one of those people. During the pandemic, when I started writing my book and was well into my healing journey, I wondered if I could finally be one of them.
When I was recovering from postpartum depression after my first pregnancy, I tried ketamine therapy. I don’t like the feeling of being high on ketamine, so I wasn’t seduced by it, but I did do six treatments in 14 days, and in every single one of those treatments I had a vision of myself at my kitchen table with multiple kids. It was as if it were in my soul somewhere: I wanted more than one child.
So I tried, and I couldn’t get pregnant—or stay pregnant. I had an early miscarriage, and I remember being so cruel to myself. I thought, This doesn’t count. You barely even knew you were pregnant. And yet, it made me so sad. It showed me what I wanted—and what I was willing to go through to get it. I ached for another child.
Hoover with her children and husband.
The experts told me that, due to the nature of my miscarriage, it would be difficult for me to carry a baby to term on my own. You have to really want a baby to do IVF. It’s grueling. It’s a lot of money. It’s a lot of early mornings, blood work, testing, internal sonograms, and doctors prodding you. You feel like cattle. You sit in these rooms of woman after woman, all hollow-eyed and desperate because they all want a baby so badly that they’re willing to go through this. Everyone is sitting there together, quietly yearning, but nobody talks because—well, they’re strangers in a doctor’s office.
When I finally did get pregnant again, I was so sick. I ended up on medical bed rest for four months. I had a hematoma. I couldn’t stop bleeding. I got cholestasis of the liver, which could be fatal. But I was so determined to have this baby. I went back on antidepressants, especially when I was on bedrest, because it was isolating to not be able to move. I was allowed, at a certain point, one field trip a day: I chose the ballet, where I didn’t have to talk to anyone. I didn’t have to move. I could just sit and watch something beautiful. It was peaceful—and, honestly, one of the few things that kept me going.
But even on the worst days, after I’d thrown up a million times or couldn’t leave my bed, I kept thinking to myself, Birth might be scary and gruesome. The first three months might suck. The first year might suck. But I now have the perspective of what it’s like to have a kid I am obsessed and in love with. My son’s name is Guy, and I kept thinking, You’re making yourself another Guy. I tried to hold in my heart the magical love that I have for him, and not think about the dark places the birth and postpartum experience could go.
I wanted to do everything in my power to avoid getting postpartum depression again. I was worried that, if it didn’t kill me this time, I would likely murder my husband—and no one needed to die. So much of postpartum depression is out of your control, because it’s related to hormones. But there were some small things I could do: I could take antidepressants. And I could do what anyone in their right mind would do: find a feminist midwife on Instagram.
Her Instagram handle was literally @thefeministmidwife. I asked her to help me with a birth plan that would not leave me traumatized, and she told me the things that she thought were likely triggering for me, and she proposed how we might handle them differently during a second delivery. She made me a list of things I could talk to my doctor about: things that made me uncomfortable in a medical setting. She told me that, for instance, stirrups at the gynecologist’s office can often be a trigger for survivors of sexual assault. I absorbed all this information, wrote my own life, and took it around to different OBs in the city. Finally, I found a doctor who was like, “All right. I haven’t heard of half of this, but I’m very willing to try.”
I also, importantly, got a doula. Even though I went into this pregnancy and birth so much better equipped and with a better perspective, I was still scared of the unpredictability of a labor scenario. I didn’t want to have to only depend on myself and my husband to advocate for me. And, in the end, when I delivered my second child—a girl—my doctor did everything I could have ever wanted. My doula was amazing. My entire crew was female. My anesthesiologist had fake nails and fake lashes on, so I knew I was in good hands. I had the best birth ever and fell immediately in love with my daughter, Winifred “Fred” Sachs, born in April 2024.
I experienced no postpartum depression after her birth. Having this borderline spiritual experience, where I was in love with her and so happy being a mom, made me realize all the ways I had been set up for failure during my first pregnancy and birth. I lost a year of my life—and a year of my son’s life—when I had postpartum depression. I thought everyone was crazy, that they were lying to me when they told me everything could be different—that it was even possible to feel this good after having a baby. But here I was now, years later, feeling good. I realized I was sad for myself, and sorry for what I’d had to go through.
When I went on a book tour for The Motherload last year, I found myself meeting hundreds and hundreds of women all over the country. They would literally line up to tell me their birth stories; they would cry after I would do a book talk. I finally, really, understood all the ways that women in this country are not doing okay. I had women in their seventies coming up to me, saying, “Oh, my God. I didn’t realize until I read your book that I had postpartum depression when I had my firstborn kid, and I never connected to him. Now, he’s 35 and I’ve still never connected to him, and I think I need to get my depression treated.”
I kept seeing evidence of how so many women have been done this massive disservice. They’re filled with anxiety and intrusive thoughts but have no way of gauging if it’s rational. It’s so scary to be a mom. There’s so little space for our stories. When your birth traumatizes you, who do you tell? You’re lucky if you can afford a therapist. You’re lucky if your friend group isn’t completely culturally conditioned by patriarchy to allow you to complain about these things. It was hard for me to admit I’d even had postpartum depression, because all I could think was, You’re so fucking lucky. How dare you complain?
Hoover, Sachs, and their son, Guy, with a copy of The Motherload.
When I was writing the book, there was a part of me that was like, You’re alone. You should feel shame. You’re a total freak and a monster, and no one’s going to relate to this. I thought, Do you deserve to tell this story? Maybe you should shut up and be grateful. When I was first trying to find an agent for the memoir, one agent suggested I make the book fiction because I didn’t come across as likable. But I didn’t want to do that. I didn’t want anyone to deny the truth of this story. I knew that it might come off as unrelatable: a spoiled person with money complaining. But I thought to myself, Fuck it. I’m going to do it anyway. There’s not a gun to anyone’s head making them read this book, but there is a chance of building the world that I want my kids to live in.
Today is Mother’s Day, and I can tell you where I won’t be spending my time: in the comments, seeing who hates me. I don’t know what people say about me now. I’m sure there are plenty of people on the internet, writing, “I can’t believe she said this stuff out loud. How embarrassing for her.” But if I believe Mother’s Day exists for any purpose, it’s this: It’s a day to be empathetic toward other people’s journeys, and to pat ourselves on the back for the work we’ve done to get where we are. I have met hundreds and hundreds of women who come to me in tears, saying that because of what I wrote, they feel seen and comforted. They know they’re not alone. It feels worth it to me to endure any scrutiny or criticism necessary, if it means that these women feel moved in a way that makes them want to improve their status quo. I have never felt more like myself than when I have said what’s true. You’re only as sick as your secrets.
We’ve all been so trained to squash our inner voices; it makes us easier to control. We’re equipped to go along with what is already put out there for us and to be polite about it. But I want to encourage women to do everything they can to reconnect with their intuition and work through their traumas, so that they can say the hard parts out loud. You can’t manifest the world as you want it to be for yourself and your children without understanding, truly, what you want.
I know The Motherload is not an easy read. It’s not a self-help book. It’s not a guide. And I know the book might not be easy for my kids to read one day, either. I am sure that my son, who is 8 and has not read it yet—but he knows it’s about him and is very proud of it—will be horrified, disgusted, and annoyed as fuck when he finds out that his mom wrote about her sex life and her labor. I’m sure there will be moments where he’s annoyed by what I’ve put out into the world. But I hope my children will ultimately see this story as a testament to my love for them. I worked really hard and did everything in my power to make myself a better person, so that I could love them properly. I hope that, as adults, they will be able to understand the central message: that they are worthy of my love and devotion, and of all the work I can do so that I can be good enough for them.