how the identity shift of motherhood impacts the inner world

reflections on the liminality of childbirth & the multi-dimensional messiness of becoming a mother

I became a mother recently and I feel fundamentally reconstituted.

As I write this on my iphone notes app, my son sleeps next to me in the stroller. I'm looking out a long floor-to-ceiling window pane at Whole Foods while my husband shops for groceries. The sky is pale gray with the threat of rainfall and I keep looking up like the weather will tell me something about what I’m supposed to think about all of these changes: my recovering-from-major-abdominal-surgery postpartum body, this dynamic shift between my husband as sole breadwinner and myself as stay-at-home mom, my mommy brain which struggles to form a coherent thought beyond what the baby needs or what i'm trying to remember, and of course my son, who stands out against the noise of stress and change as his own world, my new world, which I am still learning and mapping out by the hour.

Nothing could have prepared me for how new motherhood feels. Not nannying for five years, cohabitating with my sister and her newborn, having young nieces and nephews, or devouring books on motherhood and baby development. My son's birth left me emotionally raw and wide open, like I had no boundaries between myself, him, and all of the other stimuli that interrupted our mother-baby bonding cocoon in the hospital. I became sensitive to my son’s cues with an electric perceptiveness. Similarly, I became sensitive to everyone I interacted with. It was as if a primal part of my brain turned on in the hospital and I could only see people as predator or kin. This reorganization of relationships into black-and-white terms, with my son existing at the center of it all as the most important relationship worth protecting, is physiological and natural in the postpartum period, yet something I did not anticipate in my pregnancy. My son has become the dominant refrain of my life: morning to evening and through the evening, he dictates my routines, habits, and inner monologue. He touches everything I worry about and hope for now.

My midwife, making small talk at my two week postpartum visit, smiled and said, "Now your heart will live outside of your body the rest of your life."

This is the expansive humanity of mothering, I think. You love someone who is still growing into themselves, who requires everything from your physicality, all the time, and you give it, without question, because this love is not an ordinary love; it's an engulfment that ends and remakes you.

As I write this, my back is sore and hunched over from the long hours spent holding him at my breast, and I try to sit straighter, stretching the knots and enjoying the relief of a moment to collect my thoughts, remember that I have a body separate from his needs, and write. Yet I check on his breathing every few minutes and eagerly wait for him to open his eyes and be close to me again. As we settle into our new rhythm together, I perpetually hold this dual embodiment of fatigue alongside this longing to hold him in my arms, hear his nursing squeaks and coos, and enjoy more eye contact in his slowly expanding wake windows.

This identity shift, from what Sarah Durham calls making the journey from maiden to mother, has decimated all of my expectations of idyllic motherhood.

Before my child, I pictured motherhood in scenes of baby wearing and baking tahini cookies.

I pictured nighttime snuggles and rocking chair lullabies.

I pictured board books and tummy time and butterfly kisses.

In short, I pictured a fantasy, a unilateral rosy shade of motherhood that made sense to me in maiden consciousness where I enjoyed the privilege of independence and self-focus I didn't even know I had. I couldn't picture the multidimensionality of what new motherhood feels like in the postpartum period: the doubts and fears, the joy and awe, the guilt and anxiety, the weepy days, the moments of triumph, and the new instinctual drive to be a good mom and its singular mantra driving my days.

This drive is the biggest revelation of all , a psycho-spiritual initiation that has shaken up my inner world. Once, my son existed as a dream, and then, an unseen, growing fetus who was still an abstract concept for the future. And then in a flash, my son became tangible and all encompassing. His well-being is the most important thing now. Any sign of his distress echoes inside of my own pain body. Day by day, I embody a new love language as mother that is fundamental and total, where I give without question and orbit my mental activity around his planet-like presence.

Identity shifts function like initiations; we are catapulted into a new consciousness that requires parts of us to surrender to their own migrations. Parts of us must grieve their absence and other parts must step to the forefront to manage the upheaval. The part of me that luxuriates in the land of free-time with all her comforts of nightly gua sha, collagen masks, and abhyanga is gone. And oh, do I pine for that free time! But then another part picks up this task of caretaking like a football and points to the goal line. I will have to dig deep, be strong, and surrender to this new role of becoming who my son needs me to be.

Is the archetype of mother a "part?" Something that gets introduced into the system that wasn't there before? I don't think so. In the context of IFS and parts work, mothering, to me, is an awareness that turns on inside of my parts, a truth that they embody and orient around rather than a specific part or group of parts that steps up to “mother.” This awareness of motherhood asks them to tap into their gifts and skills in service of a new purpose. Some of these parts are more stereotypically maternal than others, but all of my parts go through a process of clarification and maturation in the wake of new motherhood, including the exiles and vulnerable ones.

When I first came home from the hospital, I felt like a baby. I felt completely helpless, like I was thrust into the hardest task I ever had to do without enough resources. This terrified me as someone who prided herself on being self-reliant and competent. I had to rely on others as I dealt with the aftermath of an unplanned C-section: I was barely able to hold my baby with my surgical incision, dealt with extreme fatigue after a 30-hour labor, and grappled with birth trauma from a surgical procedure I physically felt on the operating table. This experience brought up young parts that I hadn't made contact with in decades.

A part of me thought I was going to die on that operating table.

A part of me wanted her mom.

A part of me prayed that I live for my son (this is the moment I feel like I truly became a mother, when I was more scared of dying for my child’s sake than for my own, and wanted nothing more than simply to live for him).

Going through childbirth and becoming a mother acquainted me more intimately with the vulnerability buried at the bottom of my internal system. Seeing my son's helplessness as a newborn, and knowing I was his life-link, unlocked a portal to my own helplessness, and to the helplessness that we all experience as human beings. This cultivates compassion, and compassion keeps me connected to life. Motherhood is absolutely extraordinary in this way: it softens you to the suffering of the world, and simultaneously baptizes you into a new way of seeing the absolute preciousness of life.