This isn’t the end – it’s your becoming.
You wouldn’t believe how many people said to me when I got pregnant:
“Oh, that’s it—your life is over now.”
The same people who, only months before, were churning out the well-worn and totally helpful (!!!) choruses of:
“When are you going to start a family?”
“Time’s ticking, you know.”
“You don’t want to leave it too late.”
The contradictions in the bullshit are just crazy.
One minute, you’re running out of time. The next, time is apparently up, life is over and we’re all doomed!
First, the world pressures you to conceive. Then, they mourn the person you used to be—before you’ve even had the chance to meet the new one you’re becoming…and trust me the new one you’re becoming is about to be fricking awesome!
Well, here’s a little news flash—for them, and maybe for you too, if you’re sitting in that dark and scary place between fear and desire, wondering whether it’s true that having a baby means saying goodbye to who you are:
This is not the end.
This is the becoming.
Let me be completely real with you. Motherhood is wild. It’s raw. It’s pretty damn scary.
There are definitely days when I grieve parts of my “old” life. I miss my freedom. I miss drinking wine. I miss having a shower that lasts longer than two minutes without thinking I hear phantom baby cries.
But motherhood is also something else. Something almost… otherworldly.
It’s messy and magnificent. It breaks you open, tears you down and then somehow makes you this whole being that you only imagined being before.
In my mind—now humour me here—I honestly picture it like a superhero origin story.
Not in a facetious kind of way (although I did survive cluster feeding with cracked nipples, so frankly, so yeah I think I really do deserve a shiny red cape!)—but in that way that Spider-Man first got bitten. He didn’t suddenly have it all figured out. He stumbled. He struggled. He woke up in a world he didn’t quite recognise, his old identity slipping through his fingers.
But slowly, he began to see the magic in this new reality.
He discovered he could scale skyscrapers. See cities from above and swing freely from place to place.
He realised his strength. His purpose. He got to save the world.
Motherhood is like that.
You’re thrust into this surreal terrain of sleepless nights, leaky boobs, and emotional free-falls.
You forget who you were for a moment because everything is unfamiliar and the lack of sleep makes you just a little bit deluded and spacey – there’s a reason sleep deprivation is used as a torture method!
But then, without warning, there’s this quiet shift and a beautiful sunrise occurs.
You feel it when your baby curls into you like you’re home.
When they lock eyes with you and smile, like you’re their whole world.
When you hold their tiny hand and something in your heart just explodes with love.
That’s when it hits you that this isn’t the death of your identity.
It’s the deepening of it.
Trust and believe me, it’s not easy. Not even close.
Motherhood is climbing the steepest mountain with the most beautiful view.
There are days when I doubt myself. Days when I feel like anything but a superhero. Days when I sob heavily in the dark because the weight of it all is just too much.
But there’s also joy here. Wonder. Strength I didn’t know I had.
Motherhood didn’t end my life. It expanded it.
It taught me to live with more intention. To love wholeheartedly and fiercely.
To break and mend, over and over.
So to the person still on the outside, fearful of what they might lose:
Yes, things will change. Yes, you will change.
But don’t let the fear-mongering drown out the truth.
You are not disappearing.
You are becoming.
My advice?
Don’t listen to the Negative Nancys.
They’ll warn you about sleepless nights and lost freedom and the mess and the mayhem.
What they won’t tell you is that you’ll find magic in the mundane.
That there’s beauty in the breaking.
And that you’ll meet a version of yourself so fierce, so tender, so powerful—that you won’t want to go back.
Because this life?
The one you’re stepping into?
It’s not over.
It’s just beginning.