What I've Learned One Year Into Motherhood
I wrote my way through pregnancy and postpartum and now I'm left with written evidence of preemptive nostalgia.
My baby turned one last weekend.
I scroll through thousands of photographs I snapped of newborn toes and spiky hair and wonder how it is that I could stare at my daughter every day for months and still, she looks the same to me as the day she was born.
I have also finally started to feel like a real person again.
The cool fog in my brain is rolling out as the heat of the summer rolls in. My new face that has replaced my old face feels like my old face but with enhancements, signs of life, proof of mothering.
I open the manic postpartum journal in my Notes app comprised of offbeat brain dumps and find over 70 entries that say things like:
July 7, 2024: I have lived 9,228 lives since last October.
October 11, 2024: the way she circles her arm up in the air when she drinks a good bottle and slams it back down because that morning milk hits different.
December 10, 2024: time is passing like I knew it would but there is gray mater in my brain and I hope when it shrinks and grows my memory doesn’t get lost in it.
December 13, 2024: she stiff-armed the crab in her book and then beat her chest like King Kong.
Of all the things I have learned one year into motherhood, my most cherished emerald of knowledge mined is that while my own first postpartum experience was unique to my body, my circumstances, my baby — I know that someone, somewhere, has a Notes app frenzy that looks just like mine.
Everything really is temporary.
Once overstimulating noise will one day become a celebration of a loud and joyful life, and quiet will settle in again in the evening hours like it once did in The Before. Sundown will mark cozy bedtime stories, a boisterous bath, a splishy splashy of bubbles all over the floor instead of sleepless dread. The baby will be laying in the crib after a nap ready to be picked up, and then she will be sitting, and then she will be standing, and then you will be crying.
I have learned that you can stop time by preserving it. In words, photographs, music. And it is often wasted time to wish it moved faster when it also pulls along everything new and beautiful like first words, first books, and first baths.
I have learned to cope with a heavy amount of discomfort. The monotony is not necessarily enjoyable, but what it brings is. It is part of the sacrifice.
The hardest parts about my first year of motherhood had nothing to do with motherhood.
The demands of daily life. The demands of sustenance. The demands of being human. How do I work? How do I eat? How do I sleep? Fitting everything else around mothering has been harder than the mothering itself.
Motherhood is always demanding because it requires your whole attention no matter what your other obligations are, no matter your circumstances, and you cannot say no. You have to show up every single time for every single thing, big or small. It is the total relinquishment of desires for another’s needs, and while hard can be fulfilling and rewarding and a necessary diligence for a lifetime of gratitude, it is still hard in all its iterations.
I am not a “leave the house to feel better” mother.
I have preferred being inside my sparkly baby bubble, wrapped in discovery like shiny crinkle paper. Leaving my house never made me feel better. Having a moment to myself in my own bed made me feel better.
Outside is loud, inconvenient, disruptive.
Inside is comfort, rooting, soft.
We don’t all need to escape our homes to feel human in early motherhood. Sometimes we just need to lie on the bathroom floor wrapped in a towel for 30 minutes watching Doechii’s Tiny Desk concert to feel sort of alive.
My motherhood does not compete against another’s.
I do not see a mother working outside of the home and wonder if her life as a mother is harder or easier than mine. I just see a mother. I do not know, as an outsider, if she is doing so by choice or by necessity, and it’s really none of my business.
I do not see a mother working inside of the home and wonder if she has dreams beyond her role as a homemaker. I just see a mother. I do not know, as an outsider, if she is doing so by choice or by necessity, and it’s really none of my business.
Motherhood is not a thing that competes.
My head is down, face deep in baby kisses, cheeks decorated in invisible hearts, where I belong.
The body will tell you when it’s ready to heal.
Healing is rest.
It is clambering back into the CrossFit gym four months postpartum but leaving halfway through the workout to cancel your membership because you just can’t handle the RAH RAH RAH anymore.
Healing is stopping your first run six months postpartum because you still haven’t found a good bra to hoist your postpartum boobs in place without pain so you cry all the way home thinking that you’ll never be a runner again because yes, your body shape and size absolutely impacts your ability to recover.
Healing is trying to run again ten months postpartum but feeling like your legs don’t remember how to run, so you stop because you know it’s still not time and you’re not going to force yourself to feel miserable when you know the difference between pointless and necessary suffering.
Healing takes time. There is no such thing as “bouncing back.” There is no secret workout or meal plan. There is just intuition, trial and error, and grace.
What I’ve learned in my first year of motherhood is that motherhood is not an identity that can be tried on and discarded. It has become me for the sake of my child that was brought into the world.
But I am also a thousand other things.
There is this pervasive, generalized fear that women may lose their selves to motherhood, and we do, to some extent, lose our personhood in those early months (and years, as I’m still learning), but the self is fractioned when she is talked about in that way without nuance. She is not reminded enough that the baby years are only baby years for a few years. That even in the baby years, there are glimmers of innocence and purity and hilarity that cannot be replicated in any other era. That performing a seemingly endless show of monotonous tasks while balancing everything else is not reflective of the vibrant, restless years beyond babyhood that are to come. That motherhood is constantly changing shape within us, and in time, other parts of ourselves will emerge, in familiar shapes and in new ones like they always do.
Identities learn to coexist with each other so long as we remember that no intangible thing can singularly define who we are. Different versions of ourselves will emerge over and over again. What was once thought to be a loss of self is really just a reinvention — sometimes bloodied and bruised and screaming at the sky, other times in perfect contentment with what is new and blooming.
I am a mother, and in my first year of motherhood, I have learned that I am still allowed to be more than one thing.
In perpetuity.
With love,
Violet Carol
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Intimate and confessional writings on motherhood, womanhood, and identity.
My little just turned one in June and I felt so much of this! Thank you for putting my jumbled up inner most thoughts and feelings into words 💕
I love this SO much. My baby is 8 months on Saturday and I’ve had all of these thoughts as well. Simultaneously excited for and dreading the 1 year mark for all these reasons.