If you’re in the thick of it right now, I get it.
I remember.
I was smiling here but I felt lonely in this photo.
I remember the ointments scattered around me and the sheer overwhelm coursing through my veins.
I heard a lot of “just you wait and see’s”.
I didn’t open up much because I didn’t know my feelings were normal.
With my first I remember once hearing someone congratulating a pregnant woman and I remember thinking, have they simply forgotten?!
But I was still in the fog, it hadn’t cleared, I was still bleeding at my breast and stumbling into walls from lack of sleep.
I was still unsure what to do with my husbands touch.
I don’t need to sugar coat motherhood, because the proof is in the fact that the sun rises in their eyes and sets in ours, that our love for them is inside out and we feel it all. Some days we don’t know where we start and they begin.
And that tangle is perfectly imperfect.
Because of these things, I don’t put extra frills around the fabric of it, because they’re already there.
You can feel defeated and completed by it all at once.
You can find it hard while still being an amazing mother.
These babies of ours take us on a journey back to ourselves, so on those harder days it’s important to share how you feel knowing that the feeling won’t last.
It can be hard to know what to say to expectant mothers, but I didn’t need to hear, “just you wait and see”, and I didn’t need to hear “enjoy every minute”.
Because we see the magic for what it is, sometimes only once the fog has cleared.
But we’re mothers, we see it.
All I needed to hear was.
Some days will be beautiful
Others will be hard
I will listen
I will sit beside you.