My kind of crazy big love

Photo credit: Milk Magazine

I am a young mum living in London. Most of my friends were shocked when I told them I was having a baby. Not because it was me - they all know I have wanted a baby since I was a baby - but because of the misalignment with where they are in their life and what they want. I am at an age where most women I know living in cities are still focusing on building their careers, themselves, and travelling or saving for life’s material milestones. They see motherhood as the final step. Something that must come following everything else they want to do or achieve. Motherhood needs to be held off until the last minute.

The reason for this context is that how I feel about mothering my son actually feels like a secret.

Motherhood has a bad reputation for disrupting your career, finances, relationships, hobbies, life, but I don’t think that’s the fault of the child or the parents; it’s the fault of the system and our expectations of what life should be. This drive to say “we can have it all” and for “it all” to be the best at literally everything in your life, by never dropping the ball, and thus, never even just enjoying your life or even just your motherhood, sounds pretty exhausting to me. So, I do understand the desire to have children later in life, but that just didn’t do it for me, and I am so glad it didn’t.

For me, motherhood is my priority. Don’t get me wrong, I work a full four days a week. One-hour commute both ways. I am a working mum. But that doesn’t change the fact that when I wake up in the morning, it’s motherhood I am striving to be the best at. I work hard in my job but following having a child, I can quite easily put my job back in a box at the end of the day until I start work again. I don’t find that as easy with motherhood.

But, that’s the thing…I don’t want to ever put it in a box. Motherhood feels like I have been let in on the biggest secret I will ever be told. Like I have reached a level of richness only God could understand. Motherhood feels so private, like no one else knows about it, or gets to experience it. Which is perhaps why even the mothers who have a lot of mothers in their circles and have access to groups may still feel somewhat lonely. When I have conversations with my friends about how much they love their children, it doesn’t connect with me on a soul level. I understand it; I can rationalise it, but it’s like I can’t quite understand that anyone could ever feel the level of love I feel for my child. Yet, I know that all of my friends do.

Right now, in this moment, I know my son intimately. I love my son wholeheartedly, like nothing I have ever experienced before. He is me. He is uncomfortably all of me, and yet somehow, I haven’t lost myself; I have found myself instead.

I hate the phrase that I would run into a house on fire to save my child, because I like to think I would do that for my family, my friends and even strangers, but I understand the intent behind the saying. The thing is, it’s trying to do the impossible. It’s trying to put into words the unexplainable.

To see someone discover the world is a privilege, to shape them and to watch the world shape them. To foster their curiosity and help make them courageous. It’s all a truly novel experience.

There is nothing anyone can do or say that quite describes the feeling I have from being a mother. And so, no, I won’t be able to tell you what percentage of butterflies you will feel in your stomach every time they look at you or the number of goosebumps on your arm when they learn to nestle their head between your neck and your shoulder. And I most definitely won’t be able to describe the strange combination of relief and sadness the moment their tears stop at nursery drop-off. But I hope that if you are on the fence about having children, this gives you some peace of mind or sense of direction. I hope that if you have children, this resonates, and I hope that if you don’t want children, this provides some understanding as to why other mothers might want them or keep having them. It’s my kind of crazy big love, and it’s what I always knew I needed.