I've written before about my experiences so far with motherhood. How I've never felt more like I'm doing what I was meant to do. How this has been my purpose all along. How I feel like I'm walking the path prepared for me, and before I was just wandering along.
All that is true.
But there's another aspect to motherhood that I never would have expected. And I try not to go into anything with expectations, because they will never be met. Such as marriage. But it's pretty much impossible with all these subconscious things that have built up your entire life. So going into becoming motherhood I didn't expect to be perfect, but I didn't expect to be the worst, either. I didn't expect to know exactly what I was doing, but I didn't expect to be lost. I expected it to be hard. I expected it to be joyful. I expected to experience emotions I'd never experienced before. And I expected to come to know a love I had never known before. Which, in this rare case, my expectations have been met. The only expectation that really wasn't met was that amazing moment when I first laid eyes on my baby. Everyone said there was no greater feeling, that that moment would shatter me into a million pieces and change me forever. That's not how it was for me. It was all so surreal (maybe I was high on the epidural.. Ha). I felt like I wasn't even present in that moment, though I remember every detail. That's what it was for my husband, he was awestruck when the doctor pulled her out and raised her up. "That's Evvie!" He still says he'll never forget that moment. I'm glad that's how it was for him. For me it came later. About a week, probably, it sank in, and as I looked at my baby girl I wept all the tears in the world because I didn't know how else to express that love. In the moment of her birth, it all happened so fast that I didn't have time to process it all. One second I was just me, the next second I was a whole new person. Which brings me to the part of motherhood I didn't expect. An identity crisis.
Since becoming a mother, I don't know who I am anymore. Yes, I'm a mother. That's who I am. But who else am I? I feel like the person I was before December 19 at 2:30am has disappeared and I have to start back from the beginning in figuring out who it is that I am now. I don't remember that girl that wasn't a mother. But I don't know this girl that now is. It's as if someone took the "me" right out of me and replaced it with a whole new person.
It's as if I was born again at that same moment she was born, and here we are growing up together in a whole new life. Figuring it out one day at a time.
I don't know how to be a mother AND a wife AND my own person. All I know is that I'm a mother. That's the only identity that I can associate with. Everything is different. Trying to balance my relationship with my husband and my relationship with my daughter.
I've cried to my husband a few times now apologizing for being so distant, and trying to explain that all my attention has been on baby. Of course, he understands. Because he's the best. But I don't understand. I don't understand this identity limbo I'm in. I feel like a completely different person.
So here I am, on a quest to figure out who I am, as my former self has disappeared and I have taken on this new identity of "mother" in a matter of seconds, that I thought the 9 previous months would prepare me for but definitely didn't. And I don't think it's a matter of reconnecting with that person I was prior. I'm truly starting from the beginning in creating this new identity.
Thankfully there's one thing that never changes, that fact that I am His. No matter the phases I go through on this journey and the identity crisis' I face. I was lost and now am found. I was blind but now I see. I was bought with the blood of Christ because of His amazing grace to me, even me.