Being Mother to a baby feels a little like existing in two realities.

I felt like a full and complete human being before I had a child, and in the one reality, I still feel like me, that full and complete human being.

Like most healthy humans, I am the central figure in my life story. I am the only one who is in every scene that plays, and for me, every scene is in my POV. 

I have a husband who is my favorite person to build and chill with. I have friends to whom I tell secrets and send memes. I have family with whom I share lifelong, complex relationships. I have work which fulfills me and causes me to feel valuable in the world, and which connects me to people in a way that still surprises me. 

I like to eat when I am hungry. I like to sleep when I am tired. I like plans and I like routines, and I like to follow them with few interruptions. I like choosing growth and challenges and becoming a better person, a little at a time.  

I enjoy collecting old books and dried roses. I enjoy cultivating a personal style for my body and for my home that lets my eyes rest in beauty on ordinary days. I enjoy stories in any form – reading them, watching them, writing them. I enjoy brain games and whiskey and obscure humor and sex and organization and the kind of conversations that happen on long walks and sitting in the dark around a fire. 

These things were true before I was a mother and they are still true today. But now there is also another reality.

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In the other reality, I am both more than human, and less than human.

From my body I have created life, and although I could not tell you how I did it, the fact that I was capable of choosing to bring a whole new person into this world feels more than human.

I have a frightening amount of power and influence over this tiny person. It feels like too much for one human to have over another. And because she was created within my body, I love her in a way that I have never loved anyone else, and I have a responsibility for her that I do not have for anyone else. This also feels beyond human.

But I am also less than human in this reality. As Mother, I am first a vessel. Both in pregnancy and in breastfeeding, my body will prioritize my child’s sustenance and health over my own. There’s a part of motherhood where I don’t exist except as my child needs me. Maybe because I can only be Mother because she exists. 

Before I became Mother, I discovered I held an unconscious belief that I could not be Mother and also be a full human being. That after I became Mother, I would become a secondary character, a supporting role. My life, my entire being, would only exist for and revolve around my child. 

I chose to release that belief before I became pregnant, and instead, chose to believe that I could be both. That my child would be best served by a mother who was also a full human being.

I still choose that belief, but I understand better why people get swallowed up and disappear into Mother. It is work that matters, deeply, and we know this in our bones, even when our culture wants to tell us it does not. It’s also work that requires much from us, time and energy and heart. So much that it is easy to be consumed by it, easy to feel less than human ourselves as we care for our little humans. 

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The thing is, with these two realities, it’s not like I spend twelve hours in one and twelve hours in the other. They’re splintered throughout each other, twisted and tangled so that in the space of an hour I can pass between them sixty times.

Right now I am writing, and I’ve stopped so often to talk to and respond to my baby, to feed her and hold her til she took a nap, to make sure she isn’t chewing on anything that will kill her to death, to watch her playing because she’s incredible. And then I come back and try to pick up my thoughts where I dropped them and keep going.

It is not easy.

It is worth it.