The New You - Daisie Lane
/The New You
When you are told that becoming a parent changes you, you immediately think of the obvious, followed by the logistical day to day changes. You try to imagine the love, unlike any other. You try to envisage how your husband will look in fatherhood. You think about how you will manage less space in your car, how you will cope with the lack of sleep or whether you will want to return to work. However, the true changes are felt in the depths of your being, which no one can prepare you for. Your outlook, your mind, your hopes, your fears, your beliefs, your emotions, and your sense of self are all thrown up in the air in this new role.
Since becoming a mother almost two years ago, I am an entirely different woman. OK – exhausted. Yes, my back hurts 90% of the time, and my staple outfit is now leggings and a baggy jumper with food stains on. I am everything you hear and read about, an embodiment of society’s clichés of ‘mother.’ But the best bits are so much more than this. They are the changes you don’t see coming.
I am more confident, both in my thoughts and my skin. I grew and birthed an entire human, who is now toddling around with a box on her head trying to open a cupboard door. Surely I can pat myself on the back for that? I am stronger in ways and more fragile in others. I am more sensitive because of motherhood yet hardened by it. My voice is louder, for if I don’t stand up for myself, how will my daughter learn to do the same? My priorities have shifted and little things that used to bother me now float above my head and disappear into the clouds. Motherhood has given me an “I’ve got bigger fish to fry” mentality, which is the most freeing feeling I’ve ever experienced. My defence mechanisms shoot up far quicker and my anger rises to the surface faster, emotions which are not always a bad thing, but we simply just feel more. Life means more. We have more to be angry about, more to care about. Our boundaries are firmer. We are always ready to fight. We now see everything through the lens of what this will mean for our child. We now have two brains, two hearts, two pairs of eyes.
Becoming a parent has shown me sides of myself I didn’t know existed. I get overwhelmed easier than I thought, I experience sensory overload and feel immense guilt pretty much all day every day, usually for no real identifiable reason. My memory is terrible. But the positives are overwhelming - I can love like I didn’t know I could, in fact so much so, that my heart feels unbearably heavy at the weight of it all. It can swell, break and burst within a split second, only to be mended again by a sloppy toddler kiss. I have strong instinct which I have learnt to trust. I am patient. I am a better person if I ask for help.
Deep down I am naturally a control freak, who likes things clean, tidy and organised. Parenthood has thrown that out of the window and forced me to take a more relaxed approach to life, in which I have learnt to ignore the mess. When my baby first started eating solid foods, I was poised in waiting with the baby wipes, cleaning as she went along, ready to catch any tiny, discarded morsels of slop faster than a curler sweeping the ice in front of the stone. Now, I watch it in slow motion as it flies across the room. A bit of spaghetti up the walls won’t hurt. It takes many months to truly understand, and feel comfortable with the fact that, we simply cannot live by the same standards we did before having children.
In letting go of my old self, I embraced my new self. The old, with all the bits that mattered, was still there underneath it all, but with a slightly amended brain. I have shed my skin; I have emerged from my cocoon. Sort of like when Elsa lets her hair down in Frozen. Whichever way you want to look at it, I am a new version of myself, which I believe I needed to be to ride the rollercoaster of motherhood. Tackling the many challenges of having a baby requires us to learn, adapt and evolve.
Of course, it is perfectly normal to grieve the person you were before you had a baby. Missing the care-free days, filled with spontaneity and lie-ins, is nothing to feel guilty about. It doesn’t mean you love or appreciate being a mother any less, rather, it is simply identifying the huge (and pretty much overnight) change to your life. A life that you don’t really get chance to say a proper goodbye to. Thrown into the depths of motherhood, we try to make sense of our new role and purpose as quickly as possible in order to keep afloat. With the good old power of hindsight, it is only upon reflection that we can understand how absurd this expectation is when you realise you are suddenly responsible for a living, breathing thing other than yourself (and not just booking their doctors’ appointments and prepping their lunches, LITERALLY keeping them alive.) It took me many months to wrap my head around this and embrace the new me, let alone try to reach the woman I was before, the woman underneath the Motherhood hat, Elsa with the scrunchie. Parts of her started coming back, in their own time, slowly at first, in tiny flickers squeaking, “I’m still here.” Then, quicker, as the independence of my child increased.
Along the way, I even re-discovered bits of me that were buried deep in the past, like my childhood love of being outdoors and in nature. Having a child of my own encouraged me to get out of the house more, to take a stroll in the fresh air as I pushed her pram. My daughter, now a toddler, picks up leaves, lets pebble dust fall through her fingers and cackles as she rolls around on the grass. It has become a love of mine, as it is hers. Every morning, she notices the sound of birds, that I would probably not have registered as an adult, cancelled out by the thoughts whirring around in my head, the headphones in my ears or the outside world’s blasts of frustration that are sadly much easier to tune in to. The birds sing, she stops in her tracks, looks up at me and points to her ear, as if to say, ‘listen.’
I embrace the ‘new me’ that motherhood has given me. I even kind of like her better than the previous version. In pregnancy and early motherhood, I focused on and worried so much about what I needed to teach my child. I now understand, as my little girl marvels at the birds in the trees with a face full of wonder, that she is the one teaching me.
Bio:
I am Daisie Lane - mother, writer and poet. My writing is open and honest, and focuses on the ups and downs of motherhood as well as maternal mental health, having been diagnosed with postnatal depression myself. I have a degree in English and Creative Writing and post my poetry on my Instagram page where I have gathered a following of almost 5k in a short space of time. This was aided by one of my poems about giving birth in lockdown recently going viral and being shared over 50k times across three platforms. I am working on self-publishing a poetry book and have a children's picture book due out later this year.
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