Not too long after I pushed a six-pound, fourteen-ounce human out of my vagina came the questions. “How do you feel?” and “Do you feel different?” and “How does it feel to be a mom?” poured through texts and messages and phone calls. In the whirlwind of overwhelming adjustments that only parenthood can provide, I believe my answers were less than substantial.

I mean, I was still attempting to accept the realization that I had pooped in front of at least seven medical professionals.

But now that routines have been established and I’ve figured out the breast pump — which means I’m capable of enjoying a hearty alcoholic beverage or two — it’s time to adequately explain just how it feels to be a mother.

Being a mom feels like half your heart has been ripped from your chest. Not in the horrible, “I just broke up with someone who was inevitably horrible for me but I can’t see that now so I’m going to binge watch Grey’s Anatomy and drink whiskey straight from the bottle” kind of way.

No, this is much worse.

The entity you’ve tried so hard to protect through your late teens and twenties. The part of you that you’ve caged behind ribs and hid behind facades and barricaded for years on end. Well, it’s now outside of your body; breathing and crying and constantly pooping. And while that seems manageable now, you quickly realize that eventually that breathing, crying, pooping half of your once most protected organ will get hurt. Their feelings will fracture and their knees will skid and their eyes will sob. Oh, the other half of you heart will struggle to contain the magnified pain it will inevitably feel.

You realize you can’t protect your whole heart anymore. That is a terribly humbling and otherwise horrific feeling.

Being a mom feels like you’re Achille’s goddamn heel. You’ve accomplished nine months of growing and almost twenty-four hours, in my experience, of laboring and you’ve created a living, breathing human. It’s an overwhelmingly powerful feeling, creating life.

Until, of course, it isn’t.

The moment you feel like Hercules with tits, you start crying at a Pampers commercial because you haven’t slept for forty-eight hours and the babies on the television look so perfectly peaceful. You’re acutely aware of all your flaws — like your lack of patience or your exhausting self-doubt or your ridiculous need to get your pre-baby body back — and the immediate need to correct them. You can’t worry about losing weight when you’re still eating for two. You can’t become debilitatingly frustrated when your kid cries just to cry. You can’t continue to think you aren’t good enough when someone now depends on you to actually be good enough.

You’re a powerful woman who’s one sadistic Dove commercial away from a monumental break down.

Being a mom feels like you’ve met a stranger you’ve known forever. You learn something new and different and significant every moment of every day, the way only a mom who gets excited about bowel movements can. They look at you when you talk or they begin to grab at your shirt or they bury their head in your chest and you melt, knowing it’s all firsts you’re both experiencing together.

And yet, you could swear you’ve experienced them before.

It’s as if you knew them in another life. You must have held them and kissed them and loved them before, because these moments are natural. It’s all second nature and it’s all so inherent and it all feels like something you’re made to do. Every day you meet them for the very first time and every day you’re reminded that you knew them before they were born.

They weren’t some substantial entity missing from your life. You’ve always had them, it just took nine months and twenty-four hours of labor, in my experience, to meet them.

But most importantly, being a mom feels ineffable. Others tried to prepare you and attempted to explain but, while supportive in their intentions, failed miserably.

No one, not a friend who’s a mother or the mother who raised you or the mother to the mother who raised you, can explain exactly what it feels like to be a mom.

Especially a brand new mother who just figured out how to use her breast pump.

Read more from Danielle: A Twenty-Something Nothing.