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Motherhood, in the Quiet Hours
Early this week, I was given three full hours to myself. It was thrilling. In that quiet, I found myself reflecting on the last seven months since becoming a mother.
I have never embraced anything as fully as I have embraced motherhood. I look at what has been given and what has been taken, and I am still bewildered by all of it.
People often talk about “bouncing back” after pregnancy, and I find it incredibly reductive. That body no longer exists. You don’t spring back like a rubber band. You don’t return. You become someone else entirely.
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I think about how my body moves now — how it has changed, how it has sacrificed to bring my children into the world. I think about the C section surgery, about being opened and remade in a hospital room “7 layers of heaven and earth” And then, in what felt like both an instant and a lifetime later, my children were here — alive, present, and looking for me as if I had always been theirs.
They find me now with that same certainty. Strong-willed, anchored to the world, as if they belong to it more than they belong to me.
And what rises in me, more often than anything else, is gratitude.
The nights blur together sometimes —The glow of the hatch machine, crumbled snack wrappers on the floor, the sound of my own breathing , interrupted sleep and a kind of fatigue I didn’t know existed. And then morning arrives, sun breaks through, with tiny sounds that signal the start of another day we will somehow move through together.
And in those moments, I feel it again: I am not who I was before. I am not meant to be. I am something new.
And I am still learning her.
