It's Beautiful and it's Hard

t’s beautiful and it’s hard.

Early motherhood.

I remember crying and sometimes I didn’t even know why, like I was saving up the worlds sadness for a random moment over the kitchen sink.

In the evenings when silence filled the house, the messy and loud would rest at my feet and I would catch my breath, only for the night time dread to sink in shortly after.

No thought went uninterrupted.

No part of me not needed.

My entire being was wrapped up in them.

It’s beautiful and it’s hard.

I would say I am tired, but I didn’t want to hear about sleep training, or how I should stop contact napping, or when I should stop breastfeeding.

I didn’t want to hear that of course I’d be tired, I had two babies.

I just wanted to say, “I’m tired.”

To know I was seen, that I hadn’t faded into the background of my life completely since becoming the star of someone else’s.

They’d tell me the cuddles would stop in the night.

They haven’t.

And I’m grateful now.

It’s beautiful and it’s hard.

Hearing their cries in your dreams, in the shower, before they’ve happened.

Wondering, doubting while my hands instinctively knew their wriggles, my eyes, every inch of their face, embedded in my soul forever. And still I wondered, while my heart knew.

It just knew.

Some days I would drown, some I would win, some I would just surrender and wonder what having another might be like.

It’s beautiful and it’s hard.

It was the kind of busy chaos that was lonely at times, the days that stretched into nights. The lists that got longer and didn’t matter. That gummy smile, the perfect weight of them on my chest, the little noises in between their breathing, the warm puff of it, the smell of it.

How heavy my head felt on my husbands shoulder in the evenings.

I want to remember it all.

The beautiful and the hard.

There were cracks of light the whole way through that tunnel.

The way they soften when you scoop them up in the middle of the night.

The departure of a life you once knew and

the arrival of a love at your centre.

That’s the beauty that makes the hard, so easy.