No one is really ready to be a mother. When I say this out loud, I realise I once deeply believed I was ready to be a mother the moment I decided to conceive. I had wanted to be a mother to a girl since I was fifteen. I’m sure many of you felt that motherly instinct from a very young age. When the time finally came, I was certain I was biologically and emotionally ready. But no one really prepares you for it. I knew motherhood would be hard, but no one ever talked about it openly around me.
So, when my baby girl arrived, my whole world turned upside down.
I had a traumatic birth. It was a “normal” delivery on paper, but I pushed for an hour to bring her into the world as she had two loops of cord around her neck. I still remember wondering where I found all that energy. I remember being teased for being physically weak by my husband before I gave birth, something he would completely take back today if you asked him. You’re expected to survive a sleepless night and immediately take care of a newborn, starting the very night you give birth. I remember how hard it was to set aside the difficulty of my birth and feel the overwhelming happiness I was “supposed” to feel at having a healthy baby girl.
I told my birth story to everyone who came to visit, and I remember how my family would frown at me for it. But I healed through the telling, through narrating it, owning it, and refusing to let it stay unspoken.
I was weak. I wanted to sleep. Definitely, I wanted to cry. And I wanted to take care of her, all at once, all the time. I felt like I had lost the girl I used to be. For a long time, I didn’t know what to call what I was feeling. I kept searching for a word, turning the feeling over and over, trying to understand why it wouldn’t leave. I had everything I had ever wanted. And yet.
When Motherhood Feels Like Grief
I remember two close friends who were pregnant alongside me. Every time we met, I sensed the same nameless feeling in them too. They became my strength, my pillars, through this whole journey. We were honest with each other. We talked about how hard it really was, how much we missed our old selves, and how much we missed doing the things we used to love.
That’s when it hit me: we were grieving.
Grief isn’t only about losing something you can hold. It’s also about losing what you can’t see, what you can’t touch, and the version of yourself that quietly disappears. I felt it every time I looked in the mirror. Silent grief felt like an impossibly wrong thing to say out loud when you have a healthy baby in your arms. So I kept it to myself for a very long time.
The Mothers We Don’t Always See
Before my pregnancy, I never really looked closely at mothers. We coo and cajole the baby and rarely stop to ask how the mother is doing. But after becoming one myself, I started noticing mothers differently, almost as if I could see straight through them.
Have you ever watched a mother holding her baby? She’s smiling, kissing that little face. But her own face is tired. She’s sleep-deprived, and yet she’s happy.
If you look a little longer, you start to wonder: how has her body changed? Did she always dress this way? How young she still is, even though the world now only calls her “mother.”
You wonder how bored she must get, caring for her little one single-handedly. Did she have a career before this? Was she someone’s boss? Does she miss her friends, the late nights, the easy laughter? Can she still afford to be careless, even for a moment?
Does she look in the mirror and miss the way she used to feel in her own body? Does she notice her at all?
Growing Around the Grief
Like every kind of grief, we grow around it. We miss our older selves, but slowly, we learn to love and embrace who we’ve become.
I notice that I’m more resilient now, more empathetic. I’m no longer afraid of much in life. I’ve learned to keep unnecessary people and unnecessary comments out of my way. Above all, I’ve learned to love unconditionally.
So yes, there was a silver lining at the end of it.
I still think of my older self sometimes. I imagine wrapping my arms around her in a hug. And I imagine the things she loved doing, the lazy, careless afternoons she spent doing absolutely nothing at all.
Grief, I’ve learned, is a strange and quiet thing. It doesn’t always look like a loss. Sometimes it looks like becoming.
From One Mother to Another
You are not alone in this journey. There are beautiful mothers like you all around you. The journey isn’t easy for anyone, even for the most ready ones.
It becomes easier when you have each other, when you listen, and when you stay with them.
Let’s learn to notice mothers like us.
We are the village.
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