Welcome to Motherhood, You Clueless Fool
About two years ago I got pregnant. I glowed, I never got sick, I craved fruit, I ate pounds of it, I got pampered, I got gifts. Then I had a baby. Blindsided by the intensity of the experience that those nine months led up to, I turned off my phone shortly after her birth.
Okay, so I didn’t turn it off, but I put in on silent and out of reach. My world had been condensed and concentrated to fit inside the walls of the hospital room, on this little being that my body had bizarrely produced, and I just had no mental space for anything coming from anywhere outside.
When I was ready to pick up my phone and face the world again weeks later, a strange thing happened. The Internet had changed. While I had been flooded with baby name suggestions, pregnant body positivity, and cute nursery decor just weeks before, there was now a marked shift in the content they were funneling at me. It was like the Internet found out the moment I transitioned from pregnant to “postpartum” and swiftly ordered all of the zeros and ones behind the scenes to curate my “new mom” material.
“Cancel the glow! Activate sleep deprivation sequence!” a little bot ordered.
“Alerting the mommy bloggers,” responded another, twiddling dials. “Scheduling posts in three, two, one…”
And just like that, with my tiny infant sleeping on my chest, I was now scrolling past posts in my feed with titles like:
TEN WAYS YOU’VE ALREADY RUINED YOUR CHILD’S SLEEP PATTERNS FOR LIFE
HOW TO SALVAGE YOUR MARRIAGE WITH YOUR WRECKED, POST-BABY BODY
THE TRUTH NO ONE WANTED TO TELL YOU WHILE YOU WERE PREGNANT
The shocking thing was this — these articles were written by other mothers. While they varied in topic and tone — some were humorous, others sincere — they went a touch beyond good natured commiseration. The intent behind all of them seemed to be to instill fear and validate despair in first time moms.
Yes, I had noticed that my social life had dissipated and No, it had not escaped my attention that I was averaging about three hours of sleep at night. Yes, I was leaking bodily fluids with reckless abandon and No, I did not particularly want to have sex any time in the foreseeable future. But I understood all of these things to be a transition period into my new life as a mom, a rite of passage even.
These other moms — moms with experience, moms with blogs — were leading me to believe that this was my new life. That’s when the panic set in. I began to see motherhood as less of a new identity and more of a complete robbing of my old identity. I grew anxious that the hormonal shifts in my body would irreversibly alter my personality. Would I develop the kind of manic “the show must go on” smile that you see moms wearing in the background of childhood birthday party photos, knowing the fragility of the thread that is holding together their sanity? Would the challenge of trying to set down a cake topped with actual flaming candles, sharp knife in hand, while kids chant and tug at your sleeve become a metaphor for my life as a mother?
It didn’t help that in conjunction to the doom and gloom blogs, other moms (the same moms?) were simultaneously posting glamorous photos of motherhood. A typical glam mom instagram post looks something like this: an expanse of bed fills the frame, covered in rustically expensive looking white linens that are tousled just so. The woman sitting on the bed has a tan, full makeup, and a messy bun atop her head that I’m convinced is not actually achievable. It’s the cute kind, with lots of volume and loose tendrils falling around her face. Her baby also has a tan. Everything else is white, including the soft glow of the lighting. There is no clutter on the nightstands, there are no poop stains in sight.
Mixed messages are confusing enough as is, but to a sleep deprived person who in one day tried to place a phone call on a calculator and accidentally kissed her mom on the lips after she delivered a casserole, they’re really quite problematic. My brain was having trouble reconciling the words I was reading and the images I was seeing. If motherhood is that awful, then how do these women have time for styled photoshoots? Am I supposed to hate it or love it? Is there an in between?
Let me be real with y’all. Motherhood is hard. Like…hard. At my daughter’s two week check-up, another mom saw me in the waiting room holding the baby carrier in the crook of my elbow in that awkward way that seems to be the only way. Without specifically knowing that I had staples and bandages holding together a six inch incision in my abdomen, balm on my chapped nipples, and a pounding headache from lack of sleep, she knew. Instead of oohing and ahhing over my infant, or saying “enjoy this time, it goes by so fast,” she smiled at my baby and then up at me and said what I really needed to hear: “it gets easier.”
In the age of the Internet, when people can put literally anything out there, women finally have a voice and a platform to say “HEY! THIS IS REALLY HARD!” That’s a beautiful thing. We’re expected to rise to the occasion of motherhood without complaint because we were made to do this, this is what we wanted. The truth is, it comes with profound challenges and those challenges deserve to be acknowledged.
But after a certain point, all of the negativity takes away from an even more beautiful thing…the experience of being a mom! Personally, I would gladly tolerate my own breast milk being regurgitated back into my mouth in exchange for the feeling of that little spewer’s warm peachfuzz head asleep on my chest. I would accept the fact that my boobs will never be as full or as perky as they once were with the knowledge that they alone kept a brand new, innocent, perfect human alive for months.
I don’t blame the mommy bloggers. They’re just blowing off steam. When they hit me with a headline like FACE IT- THAT GLASS OF WINE WITH A GIRLFRIEND IS NEVER GOING TO HAPPEN, I know it’s coming from a thought pattern along the lines of “I’d love to do something for myself but then people will think that I’m not handling this motherhood thing so well and must need an escape, plus I would feel guilty being away from my child and what if my husband gets overwhelmed? I better cancel with Becca.”
I blame instead a culture that values women when we can entice, arouse, and accommodate. When we don’t complain, when we make our job look easy. This is when women are lauded. This is when we get the spotlight. When we sacrifice our bodies for another, when we go without sleep, food or showering and rock a perpetual messy bun (not the cute instagram kind) the spotlight is maddeningly nowhere to be found. It’s shining on the girl with the intact abdominal wall and sturdy pelvic floor, with the free time and plans to do something later. But what that girl doesn’t know yet is that the sacrifice she makes when and if she chooses to become a mom will be the thing she is most proud of. She won’t need the attention or the praise or the abs or the glow. All she will need is to be needed. And she will be.
At present, my little one is down for a two hour nap and I am alternately writing, watching Netflix and eating tiramisu in half a set of pajamas, half a real outfit. I can’t wait to hear her raspy cooing as she wakes up in her crib and calls out to me. My phone has been on silent since 2016 and I don’t read the intimidating motherhood stories out there because we are too busy writing our own.
