The Softening, A Love Story

A mini personal essay about the gentle expansion of love I have felt after giving birth to my first child, from a woman who has never felt "soft."

Oct 10, 2024

I heard a lot about The Softening before becoming a mother.

The Softening — the promised phenomenon that occurs when mothers evolve to become puffy love clouds after their babies are born. That it is contrary to a mother’s essence to harden when a product of her own body and soul is clinging to her for comfort and vitality. That a mother and child ooze into each other, become one, become soft for each other.

I’ve read a lot of words about softness. About gentleness. About tenderness and serenity and all of the other silken words often synonymous with quiet and mild, none of which have ever described me.

I have never felt soft. Rather, I have always felt animated and dramatic and loud and determined to take up more and more space. Like clouds, but the thunderstorm kind, or the kind that put on a show when you’re laying on a blanket in the grass designing the sky, changing shape with the wind.

I am often confused with fire, but I am liquid — hot though, like molten. I can fill vases that are misshapen or symmetrical, and when I harden I look like fractal glass flowers in either base. I can be broken if dropped from only a few feet off of the ground. I sacrifice self-preservation for form, I can be what you need me to be, and still, I have never considered myself to be soft.

If I am not soft, then am I hard? Is to be hard to be flawed? Are we not all living through the same kinetic processes, like birth and discovery and growth, that all require combustion and strength and power?

Is this a world where softness can be power?

I didn’t think I was destined to become a beneficiary of The Softening — the will, drafted in midnight black ink and weathered quill, authored by the delicate fingers of a serene and composed mother born long before a series of infinite miracles gave me my own boisterous existence. She did not collapse under the weight of expectations and she did not fear imperfection. She had more important things to do, like survive a cold winter by candlelight. She would scoff at my anxieties, point to the solid roof over my head and the basket full of clean bottles that were delivered to my doorstep before I fell asleep and the husband who has woken up in the middle of the night for the millionth time to feed our daughter, and roll her ancient eyes.

Or did she, too, have these inner monologues clawing at her in the dark? About what it really means to be soft? If such softness could even be found in her circumstances?

Aren’t all of us who have birthed made of the same stuff, scarred wombs and stretch marks swimming against hormonal riptides, just hoping our babies love us back?

On Tuesday afternoon, my daughter started crying inconsolably, as babies do, they say. I felt like I fell through a wormhole — my almost four-month-old appeared to be six weeks old again, and the sudden illusion of feeling swollen and squirrelly and spinning out like the blurry weeks I thought were behind me appeared like an apparition in the mirror.

No, no, not this again — haven’t we made it past this?

Yes. Yes, we have, actually.

She is not six weeks old. I am not six weeks new. I know what this is.

So I don’t panic and I don’t breakdown and I don’t yell into my pillow and I don’t feel a surge of frustration or mysteriously uncontrollable anger rising up my throat that I choke on to stifle.

My daughter doesn’t know if her home is a mess or if it is tidy. She doesn’t know if there is an irrational simmering I cannot cool or if I remembered to eat today or if I’m wearing weeks’ old pajamas that drape off of my warping frame like a worn blanket.

I rocked her in my arms, shushing her big cries, and listened to her instead of me.

“Neh, neh, neh.”

She just wants more milk.

There is a need to be met. There is nothing else to do but meet this need. There is nothing to substitute for the time I need to take to meet this need. This is all this is.

She’s trying her best. She’s having a hard time. She’s just a little baby, and she’s just hungry!

I place her bottle in the warmer. I watch her eyes fixate on the light of the timer. I watch her watch me smile and suddenly her crying stops. She smiles back. She laughs, a new sound she found earlier this week. She drinks. She burps. She naps.

Somewhere in between the repetitive cycles of feeding and diapering and napping these past few months I have learned that softness is a strength for those we carry.

A pink receiving blanket. A cream sweater with her name embroidered in lavender yarn. My belly where she was pulled from. These items of comfort and creation, as soft as cotton candy and pillowy dream clouds.

The Softening is a patient understanding of needs that I promised I would give my daughter before she was even created. The Softening is a slowdown. The Softening is an unlearning of reactivity, replaced with reflection. The Softness simply coexists with everything I already am. Everything my daughter already loves. I am everything she knows. She is everything I have.

The Softening, after all, is just an expansion of love, freely given, made of tiny hands that hold mine and milk bottles.

Xo,

Violet Carol

Thank you for reading! If you enjoyed this post, please feel free to “like” it or leave a comment to connect.

Mother Love Letters

Discussion about this post