A Little Something for the Moms-to-Be
Originally posted for People.com on December 3, 2020.
Family selfie – Courtesy Elisa Donovan
(Portions of this were written for a friend who has since given birth. Many congrats and hugs, K!)
For those of you standing on that glorious precipice of parenthood, that edge of your seat/senses/sanity of being completely responsible for a tiny human being for the rest of eternity — a human that will continue to grow whether or not you have okayed it — here is what I want to say to you: Being a mom is the best thing ever.
I repeat: The BEST THING EVER!
With that in mind, here are a couple of simple things that I would have found useful to know before I entered this labyrinthine expedition that is called parenting.
Innovative layering – Courtesy Elisa Donovan
There will be a lot of crying. A lot. And I don’t mean the crying of your newborn (for even if you were somehow raised amongst wolves and had no realistic understanding of what having a child meant, I’m pretty sure you still deduced that babies cry). No, I mean your crying.
We moms cry. A lot.
You’ll cry at sappy commercials (don’t even get me started on all of those dad spots during the Super Bowl. I mean, are they trying to put me in a hospital?), you’ll cry because you can’t find a parking space or just because … it’s Tuesday. You’ll cry because you’re so exhausted that you forgot how to brush your teeth and drive a car.
And if you’ve been fortunate enough to be one of us who had a healthy child at birth, once you’re out of the otherworldly bubble of the first few months and you think you’re in the clear, you will discover new reasons to cry — like the first time your child hurts herself or gets a fever. (I won’t elaborate on the specific sort of torture that you will endure during winter cold season because I do want you to continue reading this.)
Before you bolt running from the room with your hair on fire and start googling one way tickets to Tahiti (FYI — it’s really hot there, like really hot; and even though a tropical beach far, far away might sound heavenly, don’t forget how it sucks to have sand stick to everything you own and Mai Tais are really not that good), please know: You will also cry because your heart has been opened to such a breathtaking degree that you will feel a profound sense of the entire human condition. It will fill you with a fierce love and gratitude for every good thing in your life.
SO. There’s that, too.
Guitar and socks – Courtesy Elisa Donovan
You will also LAUGH a lot more as a mom. Oh, you’ll laugh like a Mad Hatter. You’ll laugh when you are losing your marbles in those first couple of months because you have no idea where you put anything or how to get anywhere or how you ever had time to take a shower before. And you’ll laugh once your kid starts to discover she’s alive and that she has FEET and HANDS and a NOSE and KNEES.
And you’ll really laugh when she starts to walk for the first time, like a tiny drunk person wobbling from side to side. And then you’ll laugh when one day, at the age of 2, she instructs you to “sit down” so she can “read to YOU” from her book that she holds upside down, and then mumbles a lot of things that sound mysteriously the same — all like versions of the name “GEORGE.”
And you’ll really cackle when, strapped into her car seat behind you as you drive her to preschool at 2½, she announces that she wants to hear “Uptown Funk,” and then sings along “Up-Town-Funk-You-Up, uptownfunkyouup!”
And you’ll have a tough time remaining upright when you watch her dance around the kitchen screaming, “I WANT HEAR DUDAGO, I WANT HEAR DUDAGO!” referring to an Argentine rocker whose name is actually Gustavo, and then proceeds to do an interpretive dance that culminates in a lot of gesticulating and strong exhales and ends with, “I want yogurt.”
New throne – Courtesy Elisa Donovan
I want to say in short, that you will be forever changed. And there just really isn’t any way to explain it until you go through it. It is monumental and gorgeous and scary and powerful and beautiful and crazy and hilarious and difficult and complicated and terrifying and absolutely glorious. And sometimes you will feel all of these things over the course of an hour.
But do not fear: Being a mom is without question The Best Thing Ever. It is rewarding beyond measure. Your heart will expand exponentially and you will marvel at your capacity to love something so enormously and so completely.
So my few words of advice are these:
Prepare and educate yourself in the ways that make you feel strong and confident and at ease … and then be ready to let go of all of that preparation and play it all by ear. Let yourself be mesmerized by the beauty that you never could have imagined in your wildest most perfect daydreams.
Trust that everything in your life up to this point has brought you here, and that that has armed you with all of the grace and love and commitment that you will ever need.
I wish you much love and light on your journey. It is just beginning.
My nugget – Courtesy Elisa Donovan
xoxo,
— Elisa Donovan
P.S. It may help to remember some of these things during labor when you will want to be put out of your misery and you will seriously question your sanity at ever having thought this having-a-baby-business was the right thing to do. ? xoxoxxoo!