What I Didn't Know About Motherhood Is...

A poem on my motherhood journey, for all the new mamas <3

A new version of yourself will be born the day your child is born.

And just like they have to learn to roll, crawl, and walk, you too will learn a new embodiment.

You will grow into maternal instincts and your mama bear voice and a postpartum body that changes to care for your young.

You will learn to tend your heart outside your chest and suffer phantom organ pain: every time your child hurts, you hurt.

Your mind becomes simple and unilaterally directed toward their safety. Sometimes this shows up in a reel of intrusive thoughts that shows you all the dark and ugly of the world, and you wish you could swallow your child back up in your womb, or put them in a bubble away from the reaches of Murphy's Law, but then you wouldn't be able to smell their yeasty little head or wrap their tiny hand around your finger, so you retract the wish but the reel never stops playing.

You lose yourself completely but it's life-enriching and gives you perspective.

Your dreams and preferences come second and you're glad for it even as you grieve it. There's something delicious in thinking about yourself so little. In fact, you can't remember a single problem you had before having a child that you would lose sleep over now.

You lose yourself in daily acts of nurture and this kind of self-forgetting feels meaningful, even as you feel the ground of yourself slipping away by the diaper change.

You will have days where you feel like you did nothing except take care of the baby and then you will remember that you're keeping someone profoundly precious alive and this will feel like everything again.

You will feel proud for being so needed and you will feel lonely for being so needed.

You'll crave alone time and then you won't know what to do with yourself in your solitude.

You will have days when you feel like a bad mom because you couldn't check every box and then your child will do something remarkable like discover their hands for the first time and you'll forget yourself again.

Sometimes you will miss your marriage before the baby.

Sometimes you will miss the boundlessness of your energy when it wasn't wound up in someone depending on you so much.

Sometimes you will miss the feeling of your body belonging to itself.

You will hold your child while holding all of these things that you miss, your old life receding as you breathe their presence in, and you will be okay with every single loss.

You love them in the most natural, incomparable way. It's biological. It's spiritual. It's feral and beautiful all at the same time. This love will transform you and it will bring you closer to life.

Your days will be messy and lovely and long but they will be the best days of your life because they are the days you are learning your little one.

These are the days you emerge into motherhood.