Broken Open By Motherhood
I read an article about how a woman’s physiology changes in preparation for motherhood. The brain composition literally transforms so that she is able to be more hyper-vigilant of her baby and more attuned to his needs. While I can’t say that I am surprised to learn of this miraculous metamorphosis Mother Nature enables, going through the process was not always magical.
I grew up in a low-income household that included many adults who were either chronically depressed and disassociated, or escaped reality through drugs or alcohol. Several family members had prison records and few graduated high school. This reality combined with having no mother and father around meant that I usually figured things out on my own. Part of that meant “toughening” up so I could accomplish goals. I saw what (I interpreted as) being consumed by emotion did to people and I knew I didn’t want that. So I learned to swallow tears and it worked wonders for me.
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As a kid, I rarely cried. I never got very attached to people and friendships meant hanging out but never showing up vulnerably. This, coupled with my highly competitive and stubborn personality, enabled me to create opportunities like earning a full ride to a private boarding school for high school and gaining entrance into my top Ivy League choice for college. Mission accomplished, right?
Toward the end of my college years, I became more present to the ways that my now very advanced ability to remain disconnected from others and keep emotions in check had created a deep sense of emptiness in me. Through therapy and faith, I began to stretch underused muscles. It never felt natural, it made me uncomfortable, and given the fact that I had a large social circle and, for all intents and purposes, had a good life, it didn’t feel urgently necessary. But I’m tenacious so just like any of the other lofty goals I had set before, I excitedly took on a new challenge. I took personal development courses that rocked me to my core, I jumped head first into exploring spirituality and my purpose in the world, I created psychological exercises to be vulnerable with people I didn’t know well. Slowly, I began to chip away at a tough exterior that had caked around me like a cast over the course of twenty years. Mission accomplished again! I’m so good. Yay! I checked it off my list and told lots of people just how gratifying and eye-opening the process was for me.
Cue motherhood.
The week after I had my eldest son, I was watching TV on my living room couch. (My c-section recovery was pretty awful so this was my set up most days.) A commercial came on and as I watched it, my eyes began to well up with tears. They began to stream down my face when I stopped abruptly and gasped. I looked around the room in terror. “What the f*ck is wrong with me?” I literally had never cried while watching television in my entire life. I felt broken. Like my secret power had been taken away. Hopefully, it was only temporary.
After months of random bouts of tears during commercials, comedies, moments alone with my baby, and when my partner hurt my feelings, I started to get that this may just be the way things were now. I had to try on a new lens on emotion.
During my personal development path in my early twenties, I made some major breakthroughs in understanding when my hard shell developed and why. While that process was helpful, it was not until my brain naturally rewired itself in preparation for motherhood that I was able to really see just how deeply I had buried emotions. Like most things I’d tackled in life, I thought I’d successfully taught myself how to have emotions. After working and reading diligently for a few solid months, I was convinced I had “fixed” it. Turns out, it was a bit more complicated than that.
Taking on these new set of eyes was… uncomfortable, confusing. My emotions came up in areas of my life in which I never thought they belong. It happened more often than ever and the change didn’t always feel good. At times it felt impractical: when I was working with clients and suddenly felt unappreciated, when I was trying to communicate emotional needs to my partner in the middle of our children’s bedtime routine, and when I was trying to get a long ass list of to-dos done but the weight of life made me cave and do nothing.
But then there are new things… The moments when I am overtaken by a split second with my children in the darkness of their bedroom, when one is drooling on my shoulder fast asleep while the other holds my hand for just “one more minute.” When I recognize that a friend is in need of a different conversation than the one she has called to have so I take an extra 20 minutes to go deeper with her — without remembering how I used to say I hated being on the phone; When, for the first time, I can contribute something to a business meeting that factors in fiscal responsibility, growth strategy, efficiency and emotional impact; When I fully experience the turmoil and growing pains that come with nurturing a relationship, caring for a family and creating a home, and I don’t leave when it gets really-really hard. (That likely would have been my answer before.) Moments like these are when it hits me that this is no longer about checking boxes off a list or a personal development exercise; something bigger has very literally been born inside of me.
This new part of me enables me to see a new dimension of everyday existence I didn’t even know was there. While it isn’t necessarily better, the view does feel wider. I suspect that not all mothers have experienced a huge chasm between life before and after motherhood, and I know my background has colored my experience, but this feels insanely foreign. The experience of life has shifted. I see and feel things differently. A physiological evolution.
Now that I’m in the thick of mothering two children and I have fully embraced tears as an “ok” thing that occasionally (often) happens on my face, I think I am well on my way to figuring out how to live life with this new brain. Truthfully, I sometimes yearn for my old, safe, dry and “effective” way of operating but it is starting to become a distant memory while I get settled into this new journey.
Motherhood broke an old version of me that was scared and unwilling to be hurt. I could never have known to want this kind of change. While I continue to waver between resistance and surrender, I wish you all uncomfortable, confusing and broken transformation at some point in your life. I am starting to see that there is no fuller way to live.
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