The Magical Transformation of Motherhood

I'm forty-two years old. I'm also six months postpartum. A middle-aged mother. What a combination of experiences!

A combination of experiences no one could have prepared me for. There just isn't the capacity in the human brain or body to understand the internal effort and experience of motherhood until it's happening to you. It's too indescribable. It's too great a transformation. It's too unlike anything else. It's too exhausting and enlightening and magical. It's too much of a paradox. No one could have prepared me for that, and no one could have prepared me for how that would make me feel.

Happy. I feel really, really happy. I feel surrounded by magic. I've spend six months trying to define my motherhood - and there it is. Magical.

The fact that I'm so happy is a source of wonder. I'm exhausted from nine months of carrying a baby (to the day - my son was born on his due date!), 21 hours of labor and delivery (mostly labor, thankfully), 2 days of recovery in the hospital with/from a magnesium drip to control my blood pressure (which spiked during my labor - does the hospital stress anyone else out? Just me?), only three weeks of maternity leave (I run my own business so taking time off is almost impossible), four months of terrible vasospasms (because I'm stubborn and wouldn't give up on breastfeeding my magical little creature), three months of intensive couples counseling (my partner and I nearly broke up when I was four months pregnant, and didn't fully move through that conflict until very recently), six months of co-sleeping (because at some point I decided that being horizontal was better than being correct), and one week of sleep training (judge me if you will - I'm a better mother when I'm a well-rested mother).

How does all of this add up to being so happy?? I promise I'm not one of those women who claims motherhood was or is easy. It most definitely wasn't. It most definitely isn't. But it is magical - and reveling in that magic makes it feel easier. Magic also creates wonderment, and I believe wonderment is a key ingredient to happiness. It's why travel is so popular - we as humans love to experience wonder. Wonder is a result of novelty, and novelty by definition is out of the ordinary. There's nothing more out of the ordinary than growing a tiny human - then having to sort out how to keep it alive, keep it happy, and teach it to be a better version of human than yourself. If that isn't magical and transformative in itself, I don't know what is.

I can't say for sure, but I do have to wonder if becoming a mother later in life is a very different kind of experience than doing it twenty, or even ten, years sooner. I'm more set in my ways, yes - but, in this case, it seems like having plans and routines is probably a positive thing. I certainly have enough life experience under my belt to know just how much I don't know, and that means I'm willing to be more flexible. I've also finally learned what healthy boundaries look like, and how to hold them with grace and kindness.

I certainly know that I very much want to be the best mother I can be. I want to approach motherhood deliberately and with purpose. I want to give my son an intentional upbringing - in a way that I'm not sure I could have done ten or twenty years ago. Perhaps that's the magic, right there. When I determined that his experience as my son would largely be a positive and magical one, maybe it naturally follows that my experience as a mother would be equally as positive and magical. I've always believed that positivity begets positive outcomes, because it makes the work behind the task easier to accept. And I've learned that work is where the transformation happens. Transformation is inherently magical.

This is the realization that made me want to sit down and write this week, to start sharing this journey of my motherhood. It's a journey that has been positive in more than just some steady-state kind of way. It is already largely marked by change - change that is positive, change that is profound, change that is deeply personal. How could it not be? I've literally just undergone the most transformative experience a human can go through. It's a transformation that, once begun, never really ends. The magical transformation of motherhood. And I already have so much to share. <3