Changed Forever

I am not going to write about all the obvious ways motherhood changes us. We all know these. You have a baby. You feel the stress. You manage, but just barely. Your marriage is struggling. You somehow come out of it, or you don’t. You experience postpartum depression, or you don’t. Almost everyone I know has experienced postpartum anxiety - these hormones shake even the most grounded person.

I can go on.

But today I want to write about something quieter. The way motherhood catapults you into becoming a stronger, surer version of yourself by first almost bursting you open. A change that many of us would likely not have reached this fast, without the pressure of what it takes to raise tiny humans. Because just as you feel like you’re going to burst open, you stop. An invisible line gently marks its territory around you and soon you realize that this is what a boundary feels like.

My kids have taught me how to draw boundaries with others because they relied on me to do it for them. They have taught me worth. I knew they were worthy of protection, but slowly I learned that I was too.

Women, especially in brown cultures, are taught to put themselves last and wear that as a badge of honour. Then you have children. And immediately they make you the most important person in their world. Now you cannot imagine a future where you are not strong enough for them to rely on.

So you do the hard work. You put in the effort. You speak your mind. You draw boundaries for their sake. You think about the values you want to teach them and you start to eliminate the things that violate those values.

And in doing all the work, something unexpected happens.

You start to extend the same protection to yourself. You start to see yourself as worthy of protection - at first for them, but eventually for you. We spend entire lifetimes overriding that protective instinct for ourselves because we’ve been told by society that politeness, staying quiet, endurance and self erasure are the only ways to be loved.

That is completely and utterly untrue.

Self-erasure is not a virtue. And loving our children and family should never mean losing ourselves.

I choose to grow stronger for them instead.

- A Guest Blog