My first Mother’s Day with a child in the world was a glorious day of sunshine and picnic food and blanket naps and grass crawling. It was one of those days when I felt the vibrations of motherhood powering me like a golden light within. All felt right.
I thought, “Blessed be. Bless this child and the way he made me a mother. For some reason I was chosen for this job when others who long for it and breathe it and cry it are waiting to have a little of what I have this morning: A complex layering of skin and muscle and bones, with a beating heart and eyes that smile and a mouth that tugs at my breast. Even the teeth that sometimes feel like a cheese grater on my nipples. They would gladly have those teeth. This. This is wondrous life.”
But much of the time motherhood can feel a whole lot less wonder-full. Doubts, decisions, exhaustion, wanting space, wanting quiet, wanting conversation…Wanting, wanting, wanting, when the thing we’ve wanted the most is right in front of us: a sacred piece of the universe that didn’t exist before. A divine presence charged to our care.
It’s ok. We’re allowed to feel that this task is both wondrous and heavy.
I didn’t think motherhood would be easy. But it’s more difficult than I thought it would be in unexpected ways. It’s not difficult because of him; it’s difficult because of me. Any weaknesses, vulnerabilities, doubts, and effects of past trauma have floated to the surface. It need not be a negative thing; incredible growth has happened within me, but that doesn’t make it any easier. The cream has risen to the top. The most substantive questions and fears I have harbored have risen to the surface. I can’t avoid them if I want to drink any of this life.
When I doubt
I see all the sun-drenched mom posts saying, “I never knew my heart could love someone this much”, “I cherish every minute with him”,“Who knew I could love someone this much?”
I start the curiosity of comparison.
“I never knew my heart could love someone this much.” Umm…yes, I did. In fact, I think I could love even more.
“Who knew I could love someone this much?” Me. I knew. Should I feel more?
My rational mind says, I know I’m seeing one snapshot in the highlight reel of a family’s life, and I cannot see inside their hearts. Maybe she feels what I feel. Maybe those captions are just things we say. We say them because we don’t know what else to say. We say them because it feels good to say them. We fall back on the familiar narratives we’ve heard, and it’s comforting, reassuring. Those lines are so common that their refrain becomes aspirational. When we say them, we become part of a larger story of the immense wonder and gift of motherhood.
Despite my rational mind’s insights, my doubt-full and fearful heart pulls toward the questions, “Should I feel how they feel? Do they love more than I do? Is there something wrong? Do I not feel enough? Do I not love him enough?” and “Is this what postpartum depression feels like?”
Most of the time my heart feels the same size as it did before I met my son, which makes me feel like it’s three sizes too small. For me, being a mother hasn’t meant a tidal wave of all-consuming love.
Sometimes the worry we feel goes further than “mom guilt”. It is mom unworthiness. It is human unfitness. Like we’re just not made of the stuff that humans require. A mother’s love is the most fundamental and powerful connection. It is the steady, constant, life-giving force that plants and waters a generation of loving kindness and far-reaching emotional security. It is the main event. If I can’t do this most essential human thing, what else matters in my human life?
Sometimes I worry that my heart was broken irreparably from trauma I experienced. Invaded. Corrupted. Poisoned. Stolen. Wasted. Emptied. Like the part of me that feels and loves the way humans should was all squeezed out of me like an empty toothpaste tube, and that paste is not going back in the tube no matter how much I try.
I didn’t feel the love rush
When I was in the OR in the middle of my unplanned cesarean, I shook. I shook not just because it was cold, and I suddenly had powerful medication coursing through me but because I was about to meet my baby. When they pushed and pulled him out of me, I waited and stared at the blue drape, and I cried when he cried. That cry was the first sound of the human that I had grown within me. “It’s a boy!” “Wow, he’s a big one!” Warm tears started sliding down my cheeks and into my ears, and I didn’t try to hold them back or wipe them away.
When the nurse put him on my chest, and I could see his face for the first time, I was in awe. Hello, baby, flesh of my flesh. This is my family. This beautiful person has the feet and elbows that have been nudging from within; this back is what has been making mountains move across my belly. Unbelievable. You are mine. We made you.
I was overwhelmed, relieved, disoriented from the change of course in my birth. I was many things. But I expected the love rush when he was born. I expected an eruption of love, like my heart had been a dormant volcano and an unending stream of fierce fiery love would come spilling out, more love than I ever knew lived within me.
That’s not what I felt.
I felt a little numb
In the days afterward in the midst of the awe, I felt kind of neutral about him, like the blank space on a canvas with much potential but much pressured expectation. I thought the moment of his birth was supposed to feel like the best moment of my life. The days passed, and I didn’t feel anything more. Just motherly duty, curiosity, disbelief, and a reverence for his life. I didn’t worry too much because I knew love would grow; I couldn’t imagine a scenario in which I would not end up loving my child madly.
I loved him with my mind and my hands. I knew I would care for him the best I could and protect him fiercely. But the love I thought I would feel–the big wave of all-consuming love that I expected to wash over and envelop me and carry me away to somewhere I’ve never been–that has crested in my heart only in waves. I did not feel like my heart was pounding, glowing, radiating the kind of light that seeps out every pore and warms you from the inside out. I didn’t feel any different, any more alive.
The challenge of connection
I never doubt that at the root of it all, I love him, but sometimes I don’t feel him in my heart. He crawls so fast from electrical outlet to lamp cords to stairs that it’s all I can do to chase him and look 5 feet ahead to prevent disaster. I’m not thinking about how much I love him in those moments. I’m thinking about how I wish I could just sit down or fold the massive pile of laundry or cook the vegetables that are rotting in my fridge.
I get lonely in my days at home in babyland. Bonding with him is a different process than how I’ve bonded with anyone in my life. I connect with people so strongly through words. He can give none to me. He needs, he needs, he needs. And because of my experience with people asking for too much and abusing my willingness to give, I sometimes start to feel a little panicked in moments when I’m needed so desperately. A repulsion. An impulse to push away, to run.
Then other times I crave connection between us, and he will have no part in it. I try to hug him, and he wriggles away. He swings his body down toward the floor and gallops off on hands and knees toward the raised toilet seat. Once he started moving, he didn’t stop.
Now I can only rock him and snuggle him and press my lips to his forehead in the minutes when he is drifting away into the land of nod. The rest of the time it is like wrestling a sharp-crawled grizzly bear with opposable thumbs that he uses to pull my hair and jab up my nostrils. It is fight club. And in this club people don’t generally talk about not being sure if they love their baby enough.
This is what I know
I love my son. I will do anything for him without second thought. When I wake in the middle of the night to nurse him, I don’t mind being awoken. His cry pulls me toward him as if his lungs were attached by a string to my heart, and when I pick him up and put him on my breast, the peace of our connection fills me. The tension of the string relaxes. We are together. I watch his face that shows he needs nothing else in that moment but me, and I stroke his hair and tell him, “I’m here, darling. I have your milk. It’s ok. I love you.”
I know that when things didn’t go as planned as he entered the world, I changed my plans for him. The reality of his needs was always greater than any vision I dreamed or ideals I held high. I let myself be cut open to get him out. When my milk didn’t come in fast enough, I gave him formula, which I never wanted to do. When I had toe curling pain from nursing, I kept bringing him to my breast every two hours even when he fought me and pushed against me and wailed. When he fought me, I fought for him.
I know that when we brought him home from the hospital, I pulled his bassinet up to my bed. I rested my hand on his chest all night to feel him breathing. I hardly slept because I was worried about what could happen if I stopped keeping watch.
I know that when I open the front door to let him feel the breeze and hear the birds, he watches the world, and I watch him watching the world. The wonder I see in his eyes sparks my own wonder.
The love I have feels different than I thought it would, but that doesn’t mean it’s smaller.
My love is enough
Recently I’ve told myself these lines over and over:
Your love is enough. It lacks nothing. It is exactly as it should be, deficient in no way.
Imagine your love is enough moment after moment, and it becomes enough. If you fixate on the love you think you don’t feel, you will create a wall that imprisons the love that is there, and the wall will grow higher and higher until you can’t see over it.
I perpetually turn toward love. I turn toward who I want to be as his mother. I turn toward the feelings I want to cultivate. I try to not feel ashamed of the feelings that make me uncomfortable, but I try not to feed them. I feed the ones I want to grow.
This is how I love
I’ve changed the story of my love. I’ve started focusing on the outward signs of the love I have for him. Right now my love is an expression of doing, of being. It is love through care-taking, with stolen giggles and a side of watching him shake his booty to his favorite songs. It’s love through balanced meals and sharing my body when I am so, so tired and just want to be alone. This is how I love.
It’s not an ecstatic love in every moment. I don’t think anyone’s is. We could not sustain that intensity, and maybe even ecstatic love would start to feel like regular, everyday stuff if constant.
I love how I can. And something tells me that how I love is enough for my son. When I release myself of the expectation of a rapturous love, it is enough for me, too. It is human love. It is work. It is the building of a relationship. It is two people changing independently and in relation to one another.
Sometimes when I lie in bed before I fall asleep, I smile and speak his name into the night. Guider. Guider. A prayer, a poem, the memory that he exists in the world. His love is the bell that tolls in the silence. It makes me sing.
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