When I became pregnant I told myself that I would see birth as the ultimate writing exercise. I would try and capture the elusive pain of it (it’s like squeezing a lemon out of a nostril, said one famous woman I can’t recall) and the infamous love I’d heard would fill me the moment the pain left.
Unfortunately, I had a c-section, so I didn’t get to fulfill my plan of capturing the details I so longed to record. I was so focused on what the experience of actual childbirth would feel like I hadn’t thought of what would come after. And the after came on with an intense and sudden force, I am still reckoning with the jumble of emotions at the center of it all. What does motherhood feel like? How is it? These are the questions my expecting, single and curious girlfriends ask me. My first response is always, it’s surreal. But what is so surreal?
I guess the first thing is the new label. I am not just writer, daughter, wife. I am mother. And like any new definer, it’s still taking time to sink in. Hell, by the time I got used to saying my fiancé I had to transition to my husband. And motherhood is no different. The words ‘my daughter’ still feel strange and foreign in my mouth. But slowly, I am becoming used to it. Just like I am becoming used to the idea that I am now never alone. There is always someone there, waiting for me.
The other night I found myself alone with my two-month-old daughter while my husband saw the new Batman film (another thing I’m getting used to are things as simple as going to the movies now require planning, or splitting up). After quelling her cries, we found ourselves staring at each other. Then she cooed and laughed and the fear and anxiety I felt moments earlier blossomed into a love I had never felt before. Suddenly the pain from earlier vanished and I felt nothing but adoration for this tiny human. So this is how it is, I thought. A constant morphing of emotions. Fear sliding into pride. Panic transitioning to calm. Pain twisting into love. They say that time changes when you have kids. I think time changes because we experience it differently as mothers. We slide into another dimension where emotions override logic. We no longer live on a schedule. We wake when the baby wakes. We cry when the baby cries. We eat when the children eat. We don’t focus on tomorrow, just today. What does my child need? In a way I feel more present than I ever have been.
Yet with my baby only being two months old, I still feel unequipped to explain motherhood to those asking. I need more time to experience it, understand it, work with it. So for now, I look to other writers who have tried to describe the indescribable experience.
“There was something so valuable about what happened when one became a mother. For me it was the most liberating thing that ever happened to me. Liberating because the demands that children make are not the demands of a normal ‘other.’ The children’s demands on me were things that nobody ever asked me to do. To be a good manager. To have a sense of humor. To deliver something that somebody could use. And they were not interested in all the things that other people were interested in, like what I was wearing or if I were sensual. Somehow all of the baggage that I had accumulated as a person about what was valuable just fell away. I could not only be me—whatever that was—but somebody actually needed me to be that. If you listen to [your children], somehow you are able to free yourself from baggage and vanity and all sorts of things, and deliver a better self, one that you like. The person that was in me that I liked best was the one my children seemed to want.”
― From Toni Morrison and Motherhood: A Politics of the Heart
It is often said that the first sound we hear in the womb is our mother’s heartbeat. Actually, the first sound to vibrate our newly developed hearing apparatus is the pulse of our mother’s blood through her veins and arteries. We vibrate to that primordial rhythm even before we have ears to hear. Before we were conceived, we existed in part as an egg in our mother’s ovary. All the eggs a woman will ever carry form in her ovaries while she is a four-month-old fetus in the womb of her mother. This means our cellular life as an egg begins in the womb of our grandmother. Each of us spent five months in our grandmother’s womb and she in turn formed within the womb of her grandmother. We vibrate to the rhythms of our mother’s blood before she herself is born.
― Audrey Audrain, The Push
It came, over and over, down to this: What made someone a mother? Was it biology alone, or was it love?
― Celeste Ng, Little Fires Everywhere
Sometimes when you pick up your child you can feel the map of your own bones beneath your hands, or smell the scent of your skin in the nape of his neck. This is the most extraordinary thing about motherhood – finding a piece of yourself separate and apart that all the same you could not live without.
― Jodi Picoult, Perfect Match
Motherhood is a choice you make everyday, to put someone else’s happiness and well-being ahead of your own, to teach the hard lessons, to do the right thing even when you’re not sure what the right thing is…and to forgive yourself, over and over again, for doing everything wrong.
― Donna Ball, At Home on Ladybug Farm
You don’t have favourites among your children, but you do have allies.
― Zadie Smith, On Beauty
In the book Soldiers on the Home Front, I was greatly struck by the fact that in childbirth alone, women commonly suffer more pain, illness and misery than any war hero ever does. And what’s her reward for enduring all that pain? She gets pushed aside when she’s disfigured by birth, her children soon leave, her beauty is gone. Women, who struggle and suffer pain to ensure the continuation of the human race, make much tougher and more courageous soldiers than all those big-mouthed freedom-fighting heroes put together.
― Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl
It’s sad if people think that’s (homemaking) a dull existence, [but] you can’t just buy an apartment and furnish it and walk away. It’s the flowers you choose, the music you play, the smile you have waiting. I want it to be gay and cheerful, a haven in this troubled world. I don’t want my husband and children to come home and find a rattled woman. Our era is already rattled enough, isn’t it?
― Audrey Hepburn
The great motherhood friendships are the ones in which two women can admit [how difficult mothering is] quietly to each other, over cups of tea at a table sticky with spilled apple juice and littered with markers without tops.
― Anna Quindlen
…moms, even good ones, sometimes lose it a little so as not to lose it all.
― Susan Squire
It seems to me that since I’ve had children, I’ve grown richer and deeper. They may have slowed down my writing for a while, but when I did write, I had more of a self to speak from.
― Anne Tyler
You know what they say – sleep is the mother’s drug of choice, but like heroin, only the very rich and the very poor can afford it.
― Elissa Schappell
