Five (Brutally Honest) Things I Wish I Knew About Becoming a Mom
Becoming a mom is a big decision. Motherhood is rife with challenges: exhaustion, online mom culture, being touched out, strains on relationships with friends and your partner, trying to balance work and being a mom — just the name a few.
I’ve been having conversations lately with women who are considering having kids. In these conversations, I have tried to be as fair and honest as possible, while being supportive of their desire to potentially become mothers. They’ve asked me my opinion on being a mom in the world today… and I don’t want to scare them off. Instead: I’ve tried to offer them a few things, good and bad, that I wish I was a bit more prepared for when deciding to become a parent.
Before I dive into it, I have found one very, over-arching, interesting thing to be true: Millennial moms are a lot more truthful about the dark sides of becoming a mom. Beyond the obvious things like sleep deprivation and becoming a human cow, writers like Amil Niazi and Amanda Montei are lifting the belly (no pun intended) to reveal the darker aspects of what it is to be a mom in our modern world.
When asking for advice from the generations before, you seem to get the ‘just you wait’s’ and the ‘it gets easier’ blanket statements that don’t prepare you for the emotional, physical, spiritual, and mental impact of what it is to mother in this current world (When does it get easier?! PLEASE someone just tell me!).
Perhaps they never experienced motherhood like we are experiencing it today (think: inflation, social media, terrorism, climate crisis, etc.).
Perhaps they never experienced motherhood like we are experiencing it today (think: inflation, social media, terrorism, climate crisis, etc.). There is an important truth-telling that some of these amazing writers are doing and it makes being a mom seem like an insane choice… but that’s because being a modern mom in a modern, post-Covid world, is actually completely insane.
Luckily for my daughter, I am bat-shit crazy.
Here are five things, good and bad, that I wish I knew before becoming a mom…
1. You will feel incredibly alone.
The first few days of being a mom, I was stuck in a NICU ward in downtown Halifax. I was holed up there with my husband (my then-fiancée), and our sweet, days-old babe hooked up to a bunch of tubes and tech to make sure her ticker and lungs were functional.
In that time, while I was terrified about the health of my baby (and my own), I desperately just wanted to be seen. I wanted a nurse to come in and hold my hand and say, ‘I know this is hard’. I wanted my husband to look at me and say, ‘you’re already an amazing mom’. I wanted someone to hold me or bring me a cup of tea and say ‘you’ve been through hell mama, but we are here to help’. But none of that happened. No one was able to witness me in my most raw, vulnerable, and needy self. Not even my husband who was right beside me.
At times, I felt like screaming at the top of my lungs ‘can’t anybody see me?!’. I felt so entirely and intimately invisible. I didn’t even see myself. You hear stories of women saying they didn’t recognize themselves once they became moms – but this. This I wasn’t expecting. I detested who I saw in the mirror. I felt betrayed by my birth experience. I just wanted my baby to sleep so I could sleep. I yearned for the ability to turn my brain off because now it was going full throttle and jumped at any coo or hiccup my baby produced. I felt constitutionally unseen – and waiting for the moment that the stain of motherhood would be wiped from my face where everyone could, obviously, see it and make the decision to look away hastily.
I wish I had been slightly more prepared for this magnanimous shift: to go from a barely visible woman to an altogether invisible mother in this world.
It does eventually shift, sure. But the first few months of feeling like a vessel rather than a human is incredibly challenging. I know moms who coast through that period with grace and ease. Then there’s me: who screamed, shouted, and kicked the whole time (internally of course because I was exhausted externally).
2. You will love your child so much that your heart will explode.
Things started to get better around the ten, eleven months mark. I have been crazy about my baby since day one. And the craziness over her has grown and grown. I did not think that was possible.
I am asked often, now, that my daughter is over a year old, if I am considering a second child. To be honest, I don’t think my heart could handle it. It is an intense rapture to love a child, one that is cruel and all-encompassing. She is above all else, before all else, the only thing that exists in the world. My heart has become a wildly expansive organ. It altogether feels wonderful and dangerous: to be a beating, open wound in a world that can be so unfeeling. I am not sure if I will ever get used to the feeling of my heart wanted to explode out of my chest simply because I love her so much.
Even now, at 15 months, most evenings when I sing to her and rock her to sleep, I tear up only because my heart cannot hold all the love that I have for her. She rests her head on my shoulder as I lull her to sleep, and my soul cries out in gratitude. My heart explodes everywhere, onto everything around us, into the world, into the universe, and into the void.
3. You will hate your husband/partner/co-parent (not forever, but it’ll suck when you do).
Before our baby girl, my husband was my best friend. He was my rock. He was my provider. He held me steady in uncalm waters and held me through my worst moments. Then suddenly: we became parents. I didn’t see him for months, it felt like. With an intense NICU stay after an even more intense birth, and then a baby who refused to sleep longer than 20 minutes day and night, we lost sight of each other.
It was terrifying. He was my compass. And suddenly, here I was in the treacherous waters of early motherhood, without a compass. We engaged in a few really fun games together over the first year of my daughters life: '“tit-for-tat”, “who can be more defensive”, “how selfish can I appear'“, and my all-time favourite, “I’m more tired than you”.
We engaged in a few really fun games together over the first year of my daughter’s life: “tit-for-tat”, “who can be more defensive”, “how selfish can I appear”, and my all-time favourite, “I’m more tired than you”.
Things have gotten better, of course, with both of us working on these unkind and unfun patterns we’ve developed since becoming parents. But it’s taken work as individuals and as a unit, and it’s taken time. No one really warns you that you will despise your partner or feel like they just want to hurt you (meanwhile they don’t, they are likely just as fucking tired as you are). But no one also told us that it would get better. That we would both feel categorially unseen and unappreciated. And that we would both, eventually, find each other on the other side. I can say now, after some focus on our relationship once we had some breathing room (shoutout daycare!!!!) that we are closer than we were before. But holy hell, is it terrifying to not be on the same page as your forever soulmate for that first bit, or more.
Sometimes it can take a year (lucky for us), or it can take a decade to re-find each other. It just depends. But chances are, at some point in early parenthood, you are going to look up the cost of living in Mexico and the price of a divorce.
Stay chill and find a couples therapist.
4. You thought misogyny in the medical system was bad? It actually gets worse.
Sometimes I feel like this is one of the worst and most un-discussed aspects of becoming a mom. As a woman, you get used to being ignored and gaslit by doctors. As a mom, it never ceases to amaze me that some ailment or pain can be chalked up to ‘well you’re a mom now’, and ‘as long as your baby is okay.’ Sure, I guess it’s hard to differentiate post-partum fatigue from Lyme disease, but I would expect a professional to maybe go one or two steps further into investigating…
Not only are you invisible to all of your old friends (shout out to people I haven’t heard from in months), to your colleagues (yes I have to leave on time to get to daycare pick-up but that doesn’t make me less valuable), you are now invisible to every single person in the medical system – doctors, nurses, administrators, paramedics and the like.
I don’t have any advice on how to navigate this to be honest, because it sucks and it’s a shitty mystery. Harass your doctor, I guess. Keep going in for the same issue until they take it seriously. Don’t let them push anti-depressants on you (a fave with my doctor).
I won’t get into much detail all I will say is that no, Dr. X, it wasn’t a weak pelvic floor, it was advanced stage Lyme disease, but thank you for being so thorough and sorry to bother you with this infectious disease. What an inconvenience. Those damn moms!
5. You will form some of the strongest bonds in your life. You might even find some real ride-or-die’s.
While all this shit happens, you are prob going to meet some rockstars.
I was lucky enough to find some moms in my prenatal yoga class and truly, just walking down the street pushing a stroller (you really get familiar with the deer-in-the-headlights look). I have clung to these women like life preservers (because that’s what they are). Sometimes you need to build the village that you crave. And truly, the one that you deserve. Fairweather friends be gone, if you can’t handle me at my leaky breasts and unshowered armpit stink, then you don’t deserve me at my… whatever comes next?
If none of this is true, then one thing must be:
Becoming a mom is an absolutely insane idea. Insanely good. Insanely hard. Insanely awful. Insanely beautiful.
If I had known all this, I still would have done it anyway. Just to meet my daughter for even one day. That’s pretty fucking insane.
