It took me 4 hours to push my first daughter out. (Not 4 hours of labor, 4 hours of pushing.)
Somewhere early on in that time, I decided I was not becoming a mother. I started searching frantically for the undo button. I truly believe I held that baby inside me as long as humanly possible, delaying the moment when I expected my life to change forever.
I was wicked scared.
I wasn’t scared of the physical act of pushing the baby out, because I know moms do that every hour of every day. (Yes, somewhere in the world right now, a mom is pushing out her baby. Let’s send her a vibe of strength.)
I was scared of what this new human being would do to my life. And what would happen to the me I knew and loved so well.
So I held on with every cell in my body when I really needed to let go with every breathe of my soul.
Eventually the physical reality of being a women in labor took over and my body did what my mind could not – it made me a mother.
As I sit here nearly 4 years later looking back on that moment, I’m struck at how naive I was. Not because I actually thought there was an undo button, but because I sincerely believed that who I was would somehow go away. That I’d be whisked away in this thing we call motherhood without giving a second glance back at my first 34 years of life.
Instead, what I have experienced is that motherhood etches away at my soul. And over time, I’ve been able to guide the etching so the experience is more like a statue emerging out of marble than fingernails scratching on a chalkboard.
For me, that’s meant ~
- Doing creative work that energizes me.
- Becoming a mother from the inside out. (I recently donated every parenting book I ever bought and unsubscribed to all parenting information sources.)
- Learning, always learning.
- Allowing my daughters to re-teach me what it’s like to experience raw emotion.
Of course, I’ve also had my experiences of listening too much to what other people said about what moms should and should not do, feeling guilty about working as much as I do, and feeling like I my only “non-mom” time should make a direct and immediate contribution to our family’s bottom line.
But really, becoming a mother has been about clarifying my own desires and going for what I want because now I must make them a priority, or they get lost in the day-to-day life of being a mom.
And this is really what building a momstyle business is all about. It’s about doing the work that you love. Being the mom that you want to be. And taking care of yourself all along the way.
I’m more me now than I ever was before my daughters were born because my responsibility for these other beings has forced me to clarify what I want and go for it.
And I’m thankful that I didn’t find that undo button.