motherhood

A friend of mine is waiting for her daughter to arrive and she, like every first time mother, is marinating in fear. And I get it. OH MY GOD do I get it. The promise of it is so damn scary, but being now what I feared becoming then ie a MOTHER, it is honestly like every other mother has already ever said. You hold your baby and the fear melts away.

When I had Daniel, it was like I'd gained access to a world I knew existed, that ran alongside The Rest Of The World, that didn't have a secret handshake or anything, and that we all knew about anyway. Suddenly I BELONGED there though, and what no one had told me was that in this parallel world, the light was different. Everything glimmered under that light, so prettily, I wish I could describe it, and under that light, the world I'd always lived in suddenly made sense.

THIS is what my life was about. This child was who I'd been waiting for.

I don't know when the fear left. Sometime between "I'm not ready to have this baby" and "Well, HI!!".

And the world still shines more brightly today. I'm used to it now, but when I look again, it's still like diamonds have been finely crushed and sprinkled over everything.

All experience motherhood differently, but each experience will have such depth of feeling, and each will be no less profound than another.

Motherhood is all I ever imagined, and an infinite, ever changing amount more. We're told so often about how hard it is, how the sleepless nights get to you, how hard THAT is, how the crying and the always being on duty and the this and the that and the everything else is SO HARD. Man, I remember CRYING when one of my friends tried to "prepare" me for The Task Ahead Of Me. Then I got here and found out this is the EASIEST job I've ever done.

No one ever mentioned it could be easy.

Maybe because we all (we being the alreadymothers) don't want anyone else knowing our lives consist of Judge Judy and an obscene amount of chocolate and pedicures, and that raising an infant under these circumstances largely consists of tossing a teething rusk over your shoulder whenever the baby starts grousing.

Oh, I JEST.

But, the point being is that this job isn't necessarily difficult. It sure as shit is DIFFERENT from anything else I'd ever done. I wonder then if for those who find the transition hard, if it's adjusting to the changes rather than the new way of life that is hard?

We're literally born to do this, so if a bird with a brain the size of a lentil can make an engineering nightmare work out of a mess of fluff and twigs...and...I've lost my train of thought. YOU GET THE IDEA THOUGH.

To summarise, yes it is scary, but it's not.

SO DEEP.