In Motherhood the Good and Bad Don’t Compete, They Coexist
As mothers, we are marked by our striated bellies, our leaky and then deflated breasts, the dark bags under our eyes, the unidentifiable stains on our clothes — but it’s all worth it.
The time separating the fetus growing inside my abdomen and my newborn baby cradled in my arms was only a matter of seconds, but the chasm between them could fit an entire universe. The moment my baby was born, I was no longer me. My body, my mind, my priorities, my heart, my fears, my everything, shifted entirely.
“Raising a kid is really stressful,” an acquaintance said to me and my then-girlfriend at a party several years ago. “If I had to do it all over again, I wouldn’t have one.”
It was impossible to hide our astonished expressions at the punch of honesty from this person we had only met a handful of times. You weren’t supposed to say that out loud.
Still, we knew others probably felt that way.
At the time, we were against having kids and, as lesbians before marriage equality was the law of the land, didn’t see many couples like us creating their own families and so didn’t feel pressured to jump on that bandwagon.
Plus, we knew it would be hard. We saw opinionated little humans with chocolate-stained faces emitting sounds at a volume that seemed cranked well past 11. We saw moms ushering them through grocery stores and malls, out of restaurants and hair salons, tasks uncompleted. We saw the look of defeat on their faces.
We weren’t equipped to invite that kind of chaos into our lives.
Then something happened — call it hormones or legal equality or optimism bordering on foolishness — and the next thing we knew, we were getting hitched and ordering sperm on the internet. A short while later, I gave birth to our son.
I don’t regret becoming a mom. I wouldn’t trade all the sleep in the world, rock hard abs, or an all-expenses-paid trip to a glass-bottomed hut in Bora Bora with a personal butler who also happened to be a world-class masseuse. My son is, without question, the best thing that’s ever happened to me. He takes up my entire heart, and my happiness and fulfillment are inextricably linked to his well being.
But now I know firsthand that being a parent comes at a steep cost.
When we become mothers, we lose a lot of our former selves.
We are marked by our striated bellies, our leaky and then deflated breasts, the dark bags under our eyes, the unidentifiable stains on our clothes.
I don’t recognize or like my body anymore. I feel like a bounce house after 25 kids jumped around for three hours. Cocoa butter’s got nothing on my cavernous stretch marks. And my abdominal muscles look like they never quite contracted fully, so I still look about four-and-a-half months pregnant. (For context, my kid is two.)
We are no longer judged by our merits, our beauty or our wit, but by our behavior in public when our outer limits are tested by a three-foot-tall human whose only word for the day is, “no!”
We have little time for nourishing our interests or romance with our spouses. We lose those quiet moments of contemplation that help center us. Life is now stepping on Legos and, “please stop pulling the cat’s tail!”
We have given up our free time and our freedom from guilt when we do try to take a moment for ourselves. We risk compromising our career ambitions, our romantic pursuits, our self-care.
My mommy brain prevents me from remembering more than two things at one time. That includes my kid, so if I need more than one item from the supermarket, I need to write everything down. I carry a notepad like I’m some kind of roving reporter.
There are times when I feel like I am no longer an independent adult with agency — I am just a vessel.
We essentially forfeit everything we know and have come to expect for this tiny stranger who blasts into our lives.
But here I am painting a pretty bleak picture when, actually, being a mom is the most astounding rite of passage life can offer.
When I look at my beautiful little human, it baffles me that I grew him. I can’t even grow tomatoes properly in my six-foot garden plot, but I grew an actual human being who has a laugh that lights up a room.
I am amazed each and every day seeing the world through his eyes. It fills me with genuine joy to watch him learn a bit more about life in all its endless fascination. It doesn’t matter if I haven’t slept in two years and I have piles of work to do; when my tiny human smiles, my entire lumpy body pulses with such total and complete love, I feel like I could levitate.
The good doesn’t cancel out the bad, and they don’t compete. They simply co-exist in a swirl of heightened emotions that come with intense hormone fluctuations compounded by exhaustion and the deep love you feel for your child.
“Anything worth doing hurts a little,” someone wise once said.
Sitting on a beach worrying about no one but myself was easy. Nurturing my son as he grows — now that’s worth something.
