Becoming a Parent: The new you

The birth of a child is a world altering experience. They show up on the scene and a seismic shift happens. Your world will never be the same. You will never be the same and you do not know in what ways yet. The changes are small at first. You dedicated a room to them in your home. You spend a little more money (or a lot more). You don’t sleep as much, and you learn to quickly respond to vulgar smelling diapers. But then it grows, you don’t spend as much time with your spouse because the child’s needs always feel more pressing than your spouses, and you want the child to stay alive. Then work feels different, and relationships, and how you view the world, and what is safe, and what is not all shifts. Then time shifts. Your time is not your own, and the days are so long but the years are short. You look around and you are not the same person. You are a parent now. You have been given to and taken from. You are not who you once were and that is painful and beautiful. Your little one rules your world and you are still mostly yourself but parts of you have died. Who to become now? How to exist now?

You wrestle with your previous self. Yearning for that previous life and for just a moment to be who you once were. You day dream of your former life, but your crying child snaps you back to reality and the parent you wins. Eventually you must submit. You must submit to the you you’re trying to become. It’s new, it’s gritty, it’s so very tiring, and sometimes you’re unfilled, but it’s you.

Don’t wish to live someone else’s life. Don’t even wish to live a previous part of your life again because what is making up the current moment is uniquely yours. It belongs to you.  Your life, your spouse, your child. This wild, messy, beautiful life is yours. So let the present moment wash over you. Let it wrestle you to the ground and laugh hard when you’re tackled. This is you now.