I love being a mother, and I love my children more than words can express. But at the end of the day, motherhood can be really hard.
This is an excerpt from a longer essay about my motherhood experience. This is about my real thoughts and feelings before I became a mother. It wasn’t a simple decision about whether or not to have kids and become a mother.
It was a grey area. It was a middle.
The Yes Years
My mother is amazing. I have always looked up to her for strength and love, so it’s not surprising that when I was young, I wanted kids. Not just any kids, I wanted a big family just like my own. I wanted to be the amazing mother my mother was.
As the youngest of five children, I learned a lot from my older siblings’ life experiences. They all married relatively young and had kids young. This meant that I had my first niece at 14. In a span of 10 years, I got 12 nieces and nephews.
Growing up, I thought I loved kids, but I quickly realized that wasn’t entirely true.
The I Don’t Know Years
Kids are fine and all, but I prefer adults. Chatting is a core aspect of my personality and how I relate to people, and most children don’t really chat.
Don’t get me wrong, my nieces and nephews are wonderful. They all hold a special place in my heart, and I admire things about each of them.
While I was in college, I would go over to my sister Amy’s house once a week and hang out with her and her kids because they lived nearby. While this made me close to them even to this day, they knew I was there for my sister, not them. I don’t think they ever saw this as me loving them less, but it was one of the first times I saw total acceptance of who I am and everyone (including me) being okay with it. My niece Grace once said, “Lacey, we know you come over here to see mommy.” She wasn’t upset about it; it was just a statement. Later, one of her brothers said to me, “I know you don’t play or imagine,” when he asked me to come check out a fort in their backyard. I told him I would love to come see it in action, but I’m not going to be a pirate with him. He was cool with that and went about his day.
I’m not the doting, fun aunt, and I’ve come to accept that it’s okay to just be the aunt that I am.
This is important because it started to shape whether or not I wanted to have kids. Maybe I wasn’t meant to be a mother. As I got closer to that reality, it made me question whether or not I would be capable emotionally and mentally (not physically capable, but that too).
Yes? Years
When I met my husband, we agreed that we wanted kids eventually. It took us a while to get married, and we wanted to be married before having kids. After marriage, everyone comes out of the woodwork to ask when you are going to have kids.
This was always the most bizarre question to me. Basically, they’re asking if you’re having or when you plan to have unprotected sex, which would be SO WEIRD if they said those words. I always wanted to have the guts to be like, “you know Diane, I really prefer to take it in the ass so that makes our chances lower. But, will you keep your fingers crossed for me?” (This has no reflection of my actual sexual preferences; I just figured it would make people the most uncomfortable.)
Also, what if we were trying and not being successful? Or just had a miscarriage and chose not to share? I know I’m guilty of asking people the same question and can think of specific times I did. I now try to ask if they want kids, and in the same breath, I want to be clear that I am coming from a place of curiosity and interest in them as a person, and that they can choose not to answer.
I’m so much fun at parties.
I Knew Too Much
The questions did start to make me think about it, and at the end of the day, I was scared. I knew too much. I had seen so much of pregnancy, labor and delivery, babies, and toddlers to know that it was really hard. It was something that was all of the time, and I have a hard time getting dinner made every night just for me and my husband.
There was also an element of losing myself in motherhood. Working hard to get everything that you have, working hard to like yourself, working hard on your relationship, makes it a lot harder to say, “you know what, yeah let’s just completely change everything.”
Most of the women in my world are amazing mothers, and now that’s what I think about when I see and talk to them. Motherhood first, everything else is kind of quiet. I did not want that. What about all of the other things going on in my world? What about all of the other things that made me, me?
I shared this fear with my husband, and naturally, he had the best answer possible, “we won’t let that happen.” He had always been insistent about me not losing myself in our relationship and still having hobbies and friends outside of him. He said we would continue to make that happen.
In it Together
The key in what he said was we. He was showing up to be my partner in this. Not just to change diapers and take care of the house, but to take care of each other and push us to be the people that we both wanted to be.
This is the magic of a marriage based on partnership and equality. I don’t want to pretend that my marriage is perfect because it certainly is not. But I never knew that a marriage like this could exist. I didn’t know that you and your partner could truly negotiate how things worked and be there for one another in many different ways. It is very possible that the marriages around me work in this way and I just didn’t see that side of them, but from the outside many of them looked very traditional with traditional gender roles. I began to see that may be contributing to my fear of losing myself, and it was something that wasn’t totally necessary.
While this didn’t eliminate my fear completely, it helped me see we could overcome it.
And we did.
We had our son.