What I know so far about motherhood
On my first Mother's Day
Hi!
It’s my first Mother’s Day as a mom and I have written and rewritten this newsletter so many times. There was the version where I reflected on how, this time last year, I was 20 weeks pregnant and seeing my friends and their babies and wondering when, exactly, the transformation from woman to mother occurred. There was the draft where I compared early motherhood to early sobriety and how they both start out feeling scary and then, one day, you realize you can’t imagine your life any other way. I wrote a pretty awkward paragraph about stumbling through darkness, both figuratively and literally, as a new mom (re: the months spent in a pitch black nursery, sound machine blasting, with my son napping on my body, because it was the only way he would sleep), and meeting a new version of myself on the other side. Etc. Every version felt fine, and also incomplete and untrue. Because the real version – the whole story – is messier.