How being a mother has changed me

I recently had to write a short essay on the above topic for an application I'm doing to become a post-natal leader and thought it would make a good blog entry.

I never anticipated when I was pregnant exactly how much being a mother would change me. I thought I knew. I had a couple friends with kids – I could see how it impacted on their lives, on their abilities to go out or go on holiday. I read Rachel Cusk’s book ‘A Life’s Work’. I thought that I was prepared, that I knew the reality of having kids.

But looking back now, I think that I thought that having a child would be like having an extra arm or a leg grafted on – it would change me, but only in so much as I would now have an extra part added on. I had visions of happily trundling around London, visiting art galleries, sitting in café’s reading the Sunday paper with a happy little bundle of joy cooling alongside me.

After the 1st two weeks when I sailed along on hormones and the high of giving birth, I hit rock bottom. I realised that instead of simply gaining an extra appendage, I had become the appendage! My baby was the body and I was the means to get him food/drink/love/cuddles. I now had to revolve around his world – like a moon tied by gravity to a very demanding planet.

This was very difficult for me. I had been someone who prided herself on being able to multi-task many difficult and complex tasks.

In desperation, I thought like other challenges I could resolve it by reading or researching the issue. I obsessively collected baby books – desperate to find the answer. I spend precious time while the baby was sleeping to trawl the Internet and discussion groups – hoping to find the key to managing my new life.

I rang a friend crying, saying I thought I had made the wrong choice – that I shouldn’t have had a baby, that I missed my old life – the life where I could sail out the door unencumbered, where I had no one dependent on me, where I could be the centre of my universe again. ‘When would it get better?’ I asked. He said wryly ‘When you realise you no longer have a choice – that your old life is gone as you knew it and there is no going back.’

So now, my boy is 2 and a half. I have slowly gotton old bits of my life back – returning to the world of work where I have control, going out with friends in the evening and even sitting in café’s occasionally reading the paper. What has changed is that I have a deep appreciation for those moments where I can be me, when I can walk along the river and think quiet thoughts. What has changed is that, after an initial 6 months of feeling widely off-centre and out of control, I now have a stronger focus and centre to my world – it is my son and I. Neither he nor I are simply appendages to each other – rather I feel like we are circles that intertwine – each with our own boundaries but also we come together sharing the space in the centre.