There is this unwritten, toxic rule in motherhood: your love is only as real as your suffering. We count our bruises like medals, competing in some twisted game of who can break themselves down the most.
The days blur. You haven’t showered, you’ve canceled every piece of your old routine, and your nights are just endless, broken stretches of keeping a tiny human alive while completely exhausted. Yet the moment you ask for a lifeline, the world gasps. How dare you get a night nurse? How dare you let someone else hold the baby for a few hours?
Oh, and EVERYONE has an opinion. Swaddle them. Don’t swaddle them. Rock them, burp them, nurse them longer, try Ferber, skip the bath. It’s a deafening wall of noise when all you’re really doing is surviving on pure trial and error.
Some days, I want to tag out. I want to hire a stunt double with steel nipples and an infinite milk supply just so I can step out of my own body and breathe.
Because let’s be real, we are only in month two, and it is heavy. It’s the deep, bone tired exhaustion. It’s the sudden, ugly crying for no reason. It’s the sheer panic at 3:00 AM, googling some bizarre symptom because a coo sounded slightly different and your mind immediately jumps to the absolute worst case scenario.
And then, right in the middle of feeling like an utter failure, especially when I forget those damn vitamin D drops again, she looks up and smiles. And my whole chest aches. That tiny, effortless reward makes all the dark moments recede, just for a second.
No one prepares you for how lonely this is. You are holding the entire physical and emotional weight of a new life on your shoulders, trying to find anyone who actually gets it without judging you. It is the most isolating thing I’ve ever done, and yet it’s the fiercely deepest love I’ve ever known.
If you told me a year ago I’d be right here, frayed, terrified, totally unraveled, but hopelessly in love, I never would have believed you.
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