So, I've been slowly chipping away at this post since Mother's Day this year. For some reason, I just felt like I needed to write it, not for anyone really, but for me to read in the years to come, or to look back on when I wondered how I felt. It is personal, overly dramatic and selfish, and who knows, maybe something I shouldn't post, but f*ck it.
Every year around Mother's Day I get emotional thinking about my children and how drastically my life has changed since becoming a mother. You have no idea how your life is going to change. Not just once you see that positive sign on the pregnancy test, but when you hear their first cry after surgery or delivery. With each child, the feeling was the same but very different. With Gavin, I remember this overwhelming emotion, literally every single feeling you could possibly have all at once and it was intoxicating and almost suffocating at the same time; all I could do was cry, in fact I still do simply thinking about it. When Kjerstin was born, obviously the same amount of love and those emotions were there but there wasn't quite as much as the fear and the unknown, it was more...peaceful I guess would be the best way to describe it, and maybe more relief because I had just pushed her out, where as with Gavin I was strapped to a table (maybe that was the suffocating part). But that love that you feel, that feeling of without-a-blink-of-an-eye-or-second-thought-would-go-to-the-ends-of-the-world-to-make-your-child-happy feeling is like a high you get every time you look into their eyes.
Not only with Mother's Day coming, but just with being an exhausted stay at home mom, I have been thinking A LOT of what it is to be a mom for me right here and now. Some days I am ripping at the seams with love and happiness and other days I feel like Golum from Lord of the Rings and want to hiss at the daylight and hide away in my cave. I was trying to explain how I felt to Ryan the other day, and I just couldn't come up with the words to express how utterly frustrating it can me sometimes.
What you don't know, when you become a mom, is that you, as you remember yourself, and how you used to view yourself, and who you used to think you were, doesn't exist anymore. She is gone. And they don't tell you that sometimes that it feels like you, as a person, don't matter. They don't tell you that you forget you had hopes and dreams unrelated to your children, or your spouse. They don't tell you that it is
lonely. You are building this family, this home and sometimes you feel completely alone. Sometimes, you feel trapped, and you know that your soul is in there somewhere screaming to be let free, but you can't. Sometimes you want to scream, "WHAT ABOUT ME?!" But then, you immediately feel guilty for even having had that thought. I know that it is easy to fall into those traps because that is where I find myself a lot in my current fork of the road in motherhood. One day I feel elated like I am right where I belong in life, and the next I feel like I have let myself down that I haven't done enough.
Everything you do revolves around everyone else but yourself. You wake up when the kids wake up, if not before to do things to prepare for them waking up, you cook/eat what they eat. You watch and play what they watch and play. You focus on what they need, what they are supposed to be learning. You worry. Oh you worry, about EVERYTHING. Are they healthy, are they smart, are they safe, are they breathing (newborn moms know) are they happy, are they normal, are they sad, are they hurt, are they...it goes on and on and on. The worry itself is exhausting enough to feel spent for the entire day, but that is just one sliver. It is so hard to find balance, to make any kind of time for yourself. And that is why I am here, at 12:01am when I am exhausted and should be sleeping.
Another really difficult part of becoming a mom is the transition from creating a miracle and feeling like "wonder woman" to being "just a mom." When you literally grow a human using nothing but your own body, you feel it growing and moving inside you, and then deliver this baby, this miracle, and witness its first breath, its first cry, everything else in the world seems insignificant, and minute. How can you ever have an appropriate perspective to anything anymore? It's hard to relate after that. It's hard to relate to anyone who doesn't have children, not because you are all of a sudden "better" than them, or because you do not want to, but because you struggle to find anything in common anymore. Everything changes.
So, this post is depressing, and that's okay. And maybe that's why I didn't post this on Mother's Day; but it is a part of motherhood that does deserve to be acknowledged. Maybe on the days when I am feeling digustingly elated and full of love, I will write about how amazing it is and I can express to the world how bipolar I feel when it comes to parenting.
