once a mom only a mom?

The moment a child is born, the mother is also born.  
She never existed before.  
The woman existed, but the mother, never.  
A mother is something absolutely new.  
         ~Rajneesh


looking back to when i became a mother, i was young, but took my new role very seriously. being a mother was amazing and i embraced it with my whole heart. i felt like most of the people i knew thought i would fail at something, whether it was as a mother or that i would not finish college. i knew differently. i knew i would not only finish, but excel, and also keep my feet firmly on the ground, promising myself i would never forget who i was. well, i did finish college with two bachelor's degrees in four years with a high GPA, while raising my first child, being married for part of it, working nearly full time for half of it and still managing to know myself for all of it. i prided myself on making him only the best food; at the time most people chided me for only buying organic produce and hormone-free milk and meat. i made his first birthday cake (an organic carrot cake) from scratch (i even shredded the carrot) and used to put flax seed in his cereal. we would go for night-time walks with flashlights to see what the world looked like at night. yes, i am proud of all that i did for him as a young mother and without too much self-sacrifice. those were some really great years...

so many years have passed since then and so much has changed. becoming a mother once was so life-changing in such a positive way, that in 2006 i welcomed a baby girl into my life and made the most of it. i struggled to feel competent as her mother; she cried a lot and it seemed like i could never quite meet her needs. by the end of summer, i was ready to go back to work and felt terrible about it. shouldn't i have wanted to be with her all the time, regardless of the challenges she and i had together (constant puking and nursing, her seemingly endless need to be entertained or nursed?? :) i tried so hard to meet her needs as an infant and also to meet the needs of my first son as a first grader, that i naturally put myself aside for them. as she got older, it got easier, but i always yearned for something else. within the years that followed, i was faced with some very difficult times. there was a pregnancy that failed and caused me to become extremely ill and created a wide divide between my husband and myself. then two short months that followed, another pregnancy (baby boy in 2008), i became a stay at home mom and shortly after a surprise baby girl in 2010. it all happened sooooo fast that i don't really know if i had time to deal with all of it properly. that time of the failed pregnancy and being so incredibly sick is just a long dark space of time in my memory. after that, i threw myself into my family and tried to get back to being that mom i remembered myself to be, yet i could never really live up to my own expectations.

knowing all i have been through, it is easy for me to recognize how exactly i lost sight of myself and my goals, dreams and simply what was important to me outside of being a wife and mother. what i have a hard time with is accepting that this is just what happens once a woman becomes a mother. maybe it's not after the first child, or maybe not even after the second. every mother i know has a different experience with this; some can relate and some cannot. for those of us that it does happen to, is it really necessary to give ourselves up entirely to this new (or continued) role called motherhood? why did my vision of my role as a mother change so much from one child to the next? i felt such internal pressure to perform perfectly as a mother after having my third child that i quit working to stay home and raise them instead of having them in daycare, yet now here i am, four months into being a working mom once again. so many women i know are having babies lately and nearly every one of them struggles with guilt when it is time for them to go back to work or leave them with a sitter for a night out with their husbands.

becoming a mother certainly is life changing and definitely re-defines us, but does it have to BE the definition of us? aren't we still someone's sister or friend, or someone's partner who we are sharing our life with? what about ourselves? is it really necessary to wonder if it is selfish to want to take care of ourselves or make sure our own needs are met? i personally feel that it is my job to show my children how to take time for themselves, the importance of taking care of themselves and to stay involved with something they love, to have a passion. twelve years ago, our very first pediatrician gently reminded me to find 30 minutes a day for myself and to not feel badly about it, yet i feel like that was the most difficult thing to do and still is on any given day because there is always something that needs to be done in regards to being a mom. being a mother is something i would never change, nor regret no matter how hard it gets or how much i miss knowing myself like i used to.

i remind myself that the life i am living is not something that has to stay the same, that it can bend or change to meet my needs. the life i want starts the moment i decide that i am going to do something differently in order to have the life i so desire. i don't have to settle for what is or who i have become. i can always move forward without forgetting what i have done and appreciating where i am because of the choices i have made. right now, my biggest, most important job is a mother, but that is not all i am. i still yearn for something more and i am seeking to be more present in order to find the clarity i need to define for myself, who i am.