How Many Moms Will We Be?

I'm on my second iteration, personally - maybe even my third.

March 2022

When I was pregnant with Robbie and for months after his birth, I suffered from Raynaud’s in my nipples. (Turns out this is not uncommon if you already had the disease/syndrome, which is super fun.) During one middle-of-the-night nursing session, I put the nipple shield on my breast and latched my infant to nurse… and felt absolutely nothing. Robbie was sucking and didn’t seem in any distress, so of course I jumped to the obvious conclusion: my nipple had fallen off. I remember being totally unperturbed. Like, “Welp, yep, this is just one of those things that happens. This is it for the rest of my life. I just don’t have that nipple anymore. Hi ho.”

Turns out that, in my half-awake state, I hadn’t actually put the shield over my nipple and I felt no physical sensation as Robbie sucked because he wasn’t, in fact, nursing. But I always remember that story - and how certain I was and how accepting - when I think about how permanent each phase of parenting seems when we’re in them.

I once read an interview with Esther Perel in which she said that most people experience three marriages with the same person: one before kids, one while raising kids, and one after the kids have grown up. We become almost completely different people while we have young children at home; what we can give to and what we need to take from our relationships changes over the years thanks to the demands put on our minds and hearts and bodies by parenting.

Taking that one step farther, what we can give to and what we need to take from our relationship with ourselves changes throughout parenting.

Marina Cooley shared statistics from a Pew survey on her recent blog post about the importance for moms of making time for hobbies that I’ll repost here because it’s nice to have real data backing up my anecdata:

To pull out one bit of this: women with children ages 0-4 participate in fewer hours of engaging in leisure activities per week than any other group.

While this was true for me - and I can say that in the past tense now that Claire is four, though it started about a year ago - it wasn’t due to any guilt I might have felt from spending the precious time and energy I didn’t devote to work on anything other my children. It was simply that I didn’t have the capacity to even think about what I might want to do for myself, let alone to plan or prepare for it. Actually doing it? Ha. (How hard can it be to just go for a quick run? Okay, but the running clothes I wore pre-baby don’t fit anymore, so I need to get new ones. When I was still breastfeeding, it hurt too much to exercise before the baby nursed. Is there time to run after the first session before needing to get ready for work - or after work but before diving into the dinner/bedtime/bath routine? And, depending on the time of year, I might spend almost every daylight hour at work; is it safe as a woman to run in the dark? I now live in a different neighborhood than I did when I last ran regularly, so I need to figure out new routes that are well-lit if I am running before dawn or after dusk. Etcetera!) The thought of figuring out the logistics alone were overwhelming when my kids were really little. And, while in the thick of it, I couldn’t even imagine ever getting through that phase.

I was lucky to connect with a wonderful woman on Instagram (who is now private so I won’t link her here) before Claire was born whose kids are a few years older than mine. She told me at every opportunity that I needed to be easier on myself; to not beat myself up for not being who I’d been pre-kids while having young kids. And then, around the time her daughter started elementary school, she completed her first triathlon. She was one mother when her children were little and another when they got older, and I knew that, one day, I’d enter my second motherhood, too. Seeing her live it was exactly what I needed to understand that there’d be a different phase after the one I was in, the one I couldn’t fathom would ever end.

So, as I commented on Marina’s post, I think my conclusion or call to action here is twofold:

We - societally, not necessarily individually* - need to do a better job of not pushing women to have unrealistic expectations of themselves in the first years of their child's life, whether that's to "bounce back" physically or to resume their pre-pregnancy lifestyle/identity.

*That said, please unfollow anyone on social media who does model or encourage unrealistic expectations!

And we need to help women understand that motherhood has its own phases just as childhood does, and we'll experience different demands and opportunities when our kids go through each.

This second piece is one that we can undertake as individuals, and I love hearing/reading/seeing my friends enter new phases of motherhood as their kids get older, whether it’s being able to read more books from one year to the next or taking up a hobby like needlepoint or pickleball. Talk to the moms in your life about this, especially those in a phase you left recently. Let them know - gently - that they’re not in this one forever. They will get through it and they’ll be someone else on the other side. And again, and again, and again.

I’d love to hear how you experienced this - please do leave a comment below with your own story!