This is a piece of writing from several years ago when I was in my first year of motherhood. It expresses the phenomenal shift that is motherhood, yet how it's also just so ordinary - in that everyone does it. If you are a new mother, I hope you can resonate X
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I walk on the beach with old friends. We talk about how business is going, the housing market, and local products that have launched. We discuss new men on the scene, old men, and sexy men.
It is the same, but it is different.
I am different.
Eight months has passed since I became a mother.
I am so much more than I used to be. But I am also, so much less.
I am no longer busy schedules jammed with meetings. I am no longer lists of social events and continuous weekends away. I am no longer full of news about what has been happening, or full or sparkly ideas about events to go to and drinks to attend.
I am three loads of washing a day, three meal preparations and three times meal feeder. I am eight wiping benches and seven breast feeds. I am bather and dresser. I am never ending cleaning and putting away. I am day duty. I am night duty. I am storyteller. Singer. Entertainer. Teacher. I have learnt new nursery rhymes and followed development milestones. I have learnt how to breastfeed, what solids to feed, about sleep patterns, leaps and growth spurts. I have learnt more about new life than ever before. I spend my days devoted to someone else – so I can care for who has become, to me, the most precious little soul on earth. I am somebody’s new home. I am somebody’s whole world. I have never looked at something, or had someone look at me, with more love.
I have carried and birthed a new human being, and at the same time, I have also birthed a new me. A mother.
I am the same, but I am also different.
I am so much more than I used to be. But I am also, so much less.
I care less about things that used to matter. I now have something more meaningful to care about.
I have never been more purposeful, but also so blasé.
I have never been happier, but I have also never been so moody.
I have never felt so blessed, but I have also never been so easily agitated.
I have never been so content and so lonely at the same time. So connected yet so isolated. So proud and so dull. So spirited and so empty. So uplifted and so exhausted. So wholesome and so shell-like. So courageous and so completely vulnerable. So raw yet so warm. So perfectly embodied yet so imperfectly flawed.
I have never smiled more real smiles, and never cried truer tears.
I have never given so much of myself in my life.
My hands have never been so busy.
My heart has never been so full.
I have never felt so much in my life.
I have never been more ALIVE.
So, I continue to walk down the beach with old friends, and we continue to discuss topics at hand. The rainy weather that has been, work plans, and upcoming holidays.
I speak nothing of what I have been doing or how things are.
And nobody asks.
