To bring a child into the world, you
must explode.
Doctors and midwives claim you bear
down, pushing with all your might until the baby slides from your body in a
glistening and screaming triumph.
This is a lie.
In reality you will explode,
suddenly and shockingly.
You can attempt to be ready. Attend
classes, read bestsellers, pepper friends with questions if you will - but you
cannot prepare for how thoroughly becoming a mother will destroy you. A
building can't comprehend what it's like to be razed.
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| Photo by Bruno Pires |
I knew being a parent would be challenging in ways I had little concept of. The sleeplessness, the inexperience of holding another person's survival entirely in my small hands, the million decisions I would have to make every single day - I expected those unexpecteds. But I did not imagine that motherhood would take so much of me.
Before, I moved about the world with independence. Before, I had important views on politics and stray dogs, cable TV programs and popular restaurants. I enjoyed a vivid life outside of my home, a job and hobbies and friends. I was a formidable woman, a steel skyscraper with ornate details and glittering glass.
But in the months after becoming a mother, everything in the before was obliterated, pieces hurled for miles. Dust and confusion clouded every blink. The air took on a texture that was difficult to swallow. And somehow, I stood last in all the relief lines. The children's needs must be met first, and then sometimes the husband's, and then sometimes the dog's. I learned to exist in the left over, occasionally catching glimpses of my tired face in what shards of old life I could find.
They call this love.
Once the skies cleared, once it got a bit easier, I began trying to put myself back together in new and different ways. I ached to be me again, not just a laundress and cook and slave to the call of mama. But my pieces no longer looked the same. The fasteners didn't hold. All my shines had dulled, and I couldn't find anything of me that wasn't smeared with mother.
There are parts of me I swore kids would never overrun - this is mine and only mine - but that's proved futile. My ability to devour a book, my need for time alone to re-center and decompress – both reluctantly squandered. Even my relationships, which I naively insisted would not revolve around my ever-shifting children, are no longer mine. Conversations with other women inevitably drift toward kids and housework. Rooms we can't stay out of even if the floors are dirty.
Parenting takes from me more than it gives. Each morning I am forced to rebuild my own legs and move forward, even while I am no carpenter, even while my children pick at the glue. Sharing these struggles is often challenged with "you chose this, being a mother is what you wanted." But who can truly know for sure, until it is too late to change your mind?
I promised I would remain myself, a complete person, with children an addition rather than a total renovation. I couldn't have known how far away my pieces would fly in that explosion. I couldn't have seen I'd be too tired and too lost in monotony or noise to know where I should start rebuilding. And I didn't know I'd be continually interrupted once I began.
Nearly nine years after blowing wide open in a hospital bed, my sticky blood pooling on the floor, I foolishly expected to have more of my self back together by now.
I am wrong, but still trying.
Some facets of my identity in the before I still work to reclaim; others are permanently lost to memory and longing. Perhaps I can rebuild a majority of who I was, but this life will never be just mine. In all of my spaces are reminders that I belong to others first, and forever.
I stand amid repurposed women - structures suggesting all of us can rise again after demolition if we try hard enough - but I can't see through the windows.
God bless the women who can become whole again after giving birth. I'm not sure I can.
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