Motherhood didn’t make you more wonderful.
Motherhood is beautiful & really messy. Messy emotions, physical changes to yourself and your home. Messy schedules and conversations setting boundaries, making decisions, and creating spaces for your child/children to bloom.
Motherhood is nothing about you, but but everything about you. It’s figuring it out and then tossing it all out. It’s realizing your limits and the limits of your offspring. It’s observing emerging personalities and glimpses into the future people your little folks will become. It’s honoring their autonomy, choices and individuality especially when it doesn’t fit into your personal narrative. It’s a seeking to understand.
Motherhood is having your heart broken a million times a year, only to be rebuilt, forgiven and restored through the voices and generous kindness of tiny humans. It’s realizing you are infinitely more wonderful and capable than you believed. (Motherhood didn’t make you more wonderful, it just made you more aware.) It’s a poem, a punk/puke rock song, and a melodious symphony of babbling braided together.
It’s unfair chemical changes that rattle your being, that then make way for increased empathy for yourself and others. It’s realizing your abundance, abilities, and options are limitless. It’s realizing *you are limitless* while stuck in a chair rocking feeding your baby… dreaming of all things you will do, knowing you’re a superhero and hoping that others realize the truly unstoppable, incredible woman you are.
Can I be candid? Motherhood has been a personal kind of messy to me. Two children with rare gastrointestinal disorders, still waking 3 times a night. (No Ms Suzy Sleep-Coach, sleep training can’t fix this.) My heart expanded. My awareness expanded. My dreams of my future and the world they would grow into all expanded. Everything grew but I couldn’t step into the expansion. I’m held back by physical limitations of 4 hours of broken sleep per night, extensive medical costs, horrific events at my children’s preschool. Motherhood has me tending to details I was never prepared for. (There was definitely never a mention that you should train to live severely sleep deprived for 4+ years!)
I’ve been meditating today on the thought that maybe those details that feel unfair are small opportunities for me to extend into a space I wouldn’t have seen if my motherhood experience was “normal” ? If my kids weren’t sick, would I see the struggling new moms? If my kids slept, could I empathize when my friends have rough all nighters? If I didn’t struggle with perinatal depression and PPD&A, would I have know the right questions to ask when I saw a fellow mom’s light begin to dim?
The messiness of Motherhood for me is the dreams and plans that I had for my life being flipped on their head. And in their place grew two small souls, with more curiosity and creativity than I knew came in human form. It’s the moment when the toddler finally figures out how to wrap their legs around you and you realize they are choosing you as their anchor & companion, and you begin to believe again that you are more than a utility.
