Few rites of passage are as sudden and as full of surprises as the moment you become a mom. So much drama, in fact, that I wrote a song about it—musical theater style:
It’s actually tempting to write a whole musical about the different stages of motherhood, because I think motherhood follows the classic narrative arc of the hero’s journey in so many great works of literature, from Homer’s Odyssey to Star Wars, Harry Potter, and the Lion King. The hero embarks on a grand adventure, meets countless obstacles, defeats the dragon, and then returns transformed. The literary scholar Joseph Campbell famously broke the first part of the Hero’s Journey, the part of the journey that correlates with this transition into motherhood, into five stages. Not all of them apply to all moms, of course, but they’re pretty spot on: 1. The Call to Adventure 2. The initial Refusal of the Call or reluctance to accept the call, 3. Supernatural Aid, 4. The Crossing of the threshold into a new world, and 5. The belly of the whale– the final separation from the hero’s known world and self.
This new world is scary and full of surprises—even for Lynnette Sheppard, who was just about as prepared as she could have been. She even studied Family Science in college.
All my life, all I wanted to do was be a mom, I wanted to have like eight kids. And so I settled on Family Science because I felt like that would give me the strongest foundation for being a good mom. I felt like with all the research that I’ve done, and all the papers that I had written, and all the classes that I had taken, that I had this really strong foundation, and that I would be prepared for whatever life throws at me. I think Heavenly Father looked down and said, “Okay, we’ll see. We’ll see.”
And so my first baby was born just a couple of weeks before I finished all my coursework. And from the second he was born, he let me know that he was not going to follow my perfect plan for him. He just screamed himself hoarse.
The first night, we had him home from the hospital. He screamed all night long. And by the time morning came, my husband and I were both exhausted, we had been up all night long walking the halls with him and no relief from his screaming. We thought, “This is not how it was supposed to be. I think there was a mixup in the nursery. This one is definitely not ours. He’s not following the perfect plan.”
It was just really a wakeup call, right from the beginning. And that’s how it went from that point on. He was the poster child for strong willed: “Oh, yeah, you think I’m gonna do it that way? Well, I’ll show you.”
Lynnette is a mother of five kids who are now all teens and young adults and she and her husband Greg host a great podcast called How to Raise Grownups.
Chantel Allen, a life coach and podcaster at Living and Loving Your Life, had a similar experience.
I think being the oldest child in my family, I thought I knew what motherhood was going to be like and that I had experience. And then you have this rude awakening of “Did you did you really just put a kid in my car, I don’t know what I’m doing.”
It was a reality shift. I knew the book stuff, but now I had to apply it. And the child didn’t want to act like the book was telling me. So it was this rude awakening—very, very exhausting. But I had four in four years, so I had to learn very, very quickly how to jump into that whole pregnancy, infancy, lack-of-sleep stage. And I think I was just grappling for whatever I could possibly come up with at that time. W can pretend all day long, but we have no idea what to expect.
Misty Kempton, on the other hand, did not have experience with kids and wasn’t even sure she wanted to be a mom.
I’m adopted and an only child. I didn’t have little siblings growing up—at least that I knew of. So I was super weirded out with babies. I was like, “I can’t touch babies. I don’t like babies.”
I remember, I had to babysit and I had to call my mom because I didn’t even know how to change a diaper. So didn’t really want to have kids at first.
Then I met my husband Chase, who comes from a family of five. And he was like, “I think having kids would be fun.” I played along, but inside I was absolutely terrified. And then eventually, after we were married for about two years we thought, “Hey, let’s just see where it goes.” And all of a sudden, we got pregnant. I was very scared about it. But it was really fun, and definitely an adventure. I learned a lot about who I was. And my mom even said that it was almost like she saw a complete switch flip. I was never this really maternal, motherly person growing up, but when Everleigh was born, I was completely different.
This is part of a series about the transition to motherhood. Last week, I interviewed Emily about what it was like to become a mom as a teenager. If you missed that one, you’ll definitely want to go back and hear her story. Today we’re going to focus on the many surprises that come along with motherhood, and I’m working on episodes about how the transition to motherhood affects identity and career plans.
As any moms listening know, Lynette, Chantel, and Misty are not alone in being surprised by motherhood. Here’s just a partial list of things you have no way of predicting: what the birth will be like, whether your baby will be healthy, what your body will be like afterwards, whether or not you’ll get postpartum depression or anxiety, how you’ll function with extreme sleep deprivation–and how you’ll feel when you look at your baby for the first time, how delighted you will be by those first smiles, and the sensation of the sweet rise and fall of your baby asleep on your chest.
The degree of the surprise, and whether the surprise is positive or negative depends a lot on expectations. It was so fascinating to talk to different moms about their expectations and the collision of those expectations with reality. It was a pretty mixed bag of moms who were pleasantly surprised and those who were blindsided. And a lot of that depended on what other moms were telling them. Let’s start with Hannah Olson, a mom of four young kids, five and under, who runs a great Instagram page @freckledhan:
When I found out I was pregnant with Lydia, which is my oldest (she’s five), it was not a planned pregnancy. Timing wise, it was fine. I had just graduated and my husband was close to graduating from school. But it just wasn’t really the timeline that I had envisioned. I knew that that stage of my life would come but I wasn’t ready.
I think it’s one of those things where you find where you what you look for because I was already kind of grumpy about it. And then it just felt like noone I talked to had super great things to say about having a baby and parenthood. Sure, they slipped in the fun stuff, but then they’d say, “Say goodbye to your sleep. And date nights? Oh, those are a thing of the past.” Just all these negative sides of parenthood. And since it already wasn’t in like a great mental space already, I kind of fixated on those things.
Anyway, there were a few Instagram accounts that I followed at the time of moms that actually seemed to enjoy their life, so I really kind of held on to those because that was important for me to see examples of people who were genuinely happy with kids. I was just convinced that I was going to just hate everything about having a baby. That sounds dramatic, but I was actually very dramatic at the time. I mean, hormones are no joke.
But after she was born, I realized like, okay, even though this doesn’t make any sense, this is actually really amazing.
On the other hand, if your expectations are too rosy like Jen Brewer, your surprise can go the other way.
Often, if you’re a woman in a very orthodox Christian religion, everything you do is to grow up and be a mom—this is what you’re going to do. I had notes, I had books, I had ideas of what I was going to do and how I was going to be. Wowza—I had it all planned out. Mother of the year, right here.
I started into parenthood with twins, a husband in medical school, zero money, zero husband involvement. It was a baptism by fire. And it went downhill from there. It was just that ultra culture shock of “Nobody told me it would be like this—no sleep and no contact with humanity. It was bad. So I went through a depression, and through guilt. I thought I had to read every parenting book, do everything right.
When I had my twins, my mom (who has seven kids) came and stayed with me. And I was the total first-time mom, boiling anything that fell on the floor: Oh, your, your pacifier dropped? We need to boil it. We need to sterilize it before we give it back.” I was that mom. And then by child three, I laughed with my mom and said, “Why did you not roll your eyes at me or laugh at me? She just smiled and said, “Everybody needs to go through their stages, everybody needs to go through them on their time.”
You can find more of Jen’s wisdom and ideas at jenbrewer.com.
Some moms, myself included, anticipate motherhood for years before it happens for them. When the hard stuff inevitably comes, it’s hard not to feel guilty about the struggle when you finally get what you were hoping for. Here’s Joy Chantry, who blogs at joysfunstuff.com.
We had years of infertility before we were able to have our first. And actually our first baby, David, passed away right before I was going to deliver. So we had a long time where all we wanted were babies—to have a family. And it didn’t come and it didn’t come, and then it finally did. And then I was depressed. It was so hard because it was such a lonely world. And, and I think that can be a really hard, hard place for people to be in, to think, “Is this really what this is? But my sister, who’s nine years older than I am, whose kids are in the next stage always says, “Just give it a few years. Wherever you are, whatever the challenge is, give it a few years and it could be totally different.” And she’s right.
Another factor in your expectations comes from all the advice moms inevitably get when they’re pregnant. Here’s Maris Young, host of the podcast Young Honest Mother.
During my baby shower, I remember sitting in a circle of women, many of whom were already mothers. And I asked, kind of pleading with them, “Please tell me about your experience. What did you go through? What were some of the challenges? What were some of the things that were fun and joyfu?” I had such a range of responses. They were kind of on a spectrum and really stratified from one another. On one end, people would say things like, “Oh, it’s just gonna be so amazing. You’re gonna love that new baby smell.” You know, like rainbows and butterflies. And then on the other hand, I would have people say things like, “Well, I don’t want to scare you, so check back with me after you have a baby and then we’ll talk.”
A pregnant belly is a big old target for the slings and arrows of unsolicited advice and personal birth stories. Most of it is well-meaning—trying to prepare the new mom for what awaits. And it can be useful to hear a wide range of experiences. The problem is, nobody can prepare you for your own unique circumstances. Here’s Devon Smiddy, a parenting coach with Megghan Thompson Coaching:
My friend just had a baby, and she told me, “I had no idea it was going to be this hard.” Her kid’s not sleeping very well. I think he just turned a month old. She has lots of brothers and sisters who already had lots of kids, and she’s very involved in her nieces’ and nephews’ lives, and all of her friends have already had kids and babies, so it’s not like she had no childcare experience. But she still said, “Why did nobody tell me?” And we all said, “First of all, we did a little bit. But also you don’t want to scare somebody. And my experience might not be your experience. So I’m not going to project that onto you before it even happens.”
But most of all, you can’t really tell somebody what it’s going to be like until they go through it, because they might not believe you. I would have been super dismissive. I would have been like, “Oh, well, you know, you might be okay with your kid not eating homemade food, but my child will eat my homemade food. And my kid’s gonna sleep through the night by eight weeks.” I wouldn’t have thought that consciously, but I think subconsciously I thought, “It’ll be fine for me, it just might not have been fine for you. Maybe you just weren’t organized enough. Or maybe you just weren’t type A enough. But I’m going to Type-A this and it’s going to be easy and great. You just don’t know me.”
And oh, man, how much I laugh in the face of that now. But nobody could have told me any different. You have to live it.
Luckily, as hard as the hard parts are, some of the surprise just comes from the magnitude of the joy and wonder of the whole experience. Ashley Brown, host of the Routine and Things Podcast and mother of two, probably summed it up the best:
I thought that motherhood was going to be beautiful. I knew that it was going to be challenging, because everybody always says that. So I still had some realism. But I also was like, “Oh, I get to have this little human that I get to mold into this beautiful person along with God. This is going to be a beautiful experience.”
And it has been. It has been. Now, like I said, also was real about is going to have some challenges. And so that has been the case as well. But it has been beautiful. I was just upstairs earlier this morning with my babies, age one and three. I was looking at them, thinking, “Y’all are so freaking amazing: the smiles, the happiness, the joy that you have. I love that energy.”
Even in the challenging times—because I’m in the toddler phase and she’s doing a little bit of work to me right now—it’s beautiful to me, because I’m like, she’s learning herself. And she’s learning the world. And it’s just an amazing experience to be able to witness that.
Misty Kempton was very surprised by the connection she felt with her baby.
The biggest surprise was just how much love that I felt for her. When I was pregnant, everyone told me, “Oh, don’t you just have this huge connection with your belly? Don’t you just love this child who’s inside of you?” And I thought, “No. I don’t have anything to get connected to. There’s no face. It makes me throw up. It makes me sick. I have no connection to this belly. How am I ever going to connect to something if I can’t even connect to something that’s living inside of me.”
And then when she came out, it was like, “Oh, yeah, she’s literally always been here.” It was so amazing how quick it just happened and how I was like, “Wow, this makes sense. I love her with everything inside of me. And I would do anything to protect her. And I’ve known her for five minutes.”
So I think that was probably the biggest shock for me just because I didn’t know how to love somebody that you hadn’t really met yet.
Of course, for many women, motherhood doesn’t start with a pregnancy, which can be an even bigger surprise. Kathleen Stout had just started the foster care process and was on vacation in Scotland with some friends when she got a lifechanging phone call.
I had two weeks to prepare my house for a teenager, a 15-year-old, and a three-year-old. I met them and did one visit and then the next day they moved in. That was a challenge, just learning their different needs and being able to work full time and be a single mom.
There is so much more to Kathleen’s story, as you can imagine, so next week’s episode will focus on her sudden transition to motherhood.
Kathleen’s experience brings us to one of the biggest surprises of becoming a mother. Nobody knows this child—or children—that launch you into motherhood. He or she is a complete stranger. And the child’s temperament, health, and personality has a lot to do with what motherhood looks like. Like Lynette, my firstborn was colicky, and spent a lot of the first year of his life screaming.
I remember one long night in a string of long nights. My husband was working yet another late-night shift, and I was well into the second hour of non-stop screaming. I felt tired, of course. But worse than the fatigue was the feeling of helplessness. All the regular things—feeding, changing the diaper, rocking, singing, even running the vacuum, faucet, and hair dryer for some white noise—they had all failed me and he just kept screaming. Then a new emotion kicked in. Desperation. I just couldn’t handle any more screaming. I laid him, still screaming, safely in his crib, stuck my fingers in my ears, ran into my bedroom and just started jumping on the bed like a maniac to get out my pent-up frustration. After having four more babies, all much easier than him, I realized that some babies are just harder to take care of than others.
This was Katherine Griessman’s experience too.
She’s just been hard like from the from the labor on. She had lots of sensitivities, which were really difficult with sleeping. She didn’t sleep through the night till she was 16 months old. And so I was back to work at four and a half months and I was still getting up three or four times in the night with her because she would just cry and be uncomfortable. And I don’t know why. But because she surely didn’t need to eat, four times a night at 9 months, 10 months, 12 months. It was just—it was tough.
And while we sometimes think our kids will be carbon copies of ourselves or our husbands, that’s not a real thing. Here’s Maris Young again:
I was really excited about having a child and then I had my child and realized how much he challenged me in every single aspect of my being. And he’s been a very intense personality since the beginning. He’s very clingy. He’s very emotional. He’s very boisterous. He’s very adventurous. And I am. For all intents and purposes, the opposite of those things.
The next major surprise is what happens to our bodies during and after labor. There are the physical effects of course, recovering from the labor. And we have no idea how our bodies will react to the surging hormones.
For Jackie Johnson, who has muscular dystrophy, the physical side of motherhood eclipsed everything else.
I think my only concerns, really, were physical concerns. I couldn’t wrap my head around being a mom before I figured out how I was going to be a mom. How was I going to carry her? I’m not not a strong person. How was I going to get her off the floor? How was I going to be a safe mother? How was I going to take care of her when my husband wasn’t around? I’ve never had to take care of an infant.
Funny enough, all that stuff was worked out, so all that worry was for nothing. My pregnancy was fine. I didn’t have any issues, except for throwing up which was horrible. As far as complications, I didn’t have any.
It’s funny, when you’re disabled or handicapped, you’re just so used to figuring things out. How to make things work for you or how to get things done. It’s just another element of that—learning how to be a mom as a handicapped person.
So it all worked out. It’s funny, I can say this now–I was lucky, my husband lost his job right before our daughter was born, and it ended up being a really good thing, because it would have been too exhausting and, and he was able to get up with her at night. He was able to help me. I had a C section, so I couldn’t do anything anyways. Everything worked out—just not in the way you think it’s going to work out.
For all of us, our bodies are never quite the same afterwards. Which can be an ongoing struggle of acceptance. Diana Visser is a mother of two, who has really struggled with the physical changes after pregnancy.
The postpartum stage for me was really hard. My body totally changed. Not getting sleep was really hard. Trying to feel like I needed to do everything was really hard. My body changed a lot. So when my daughter was about four years old I decided to get in really good shape and take really good care of myself. I lost a lot of weight. But a lot of it was for the wrong reasons. I didn’t want her to be like, “Oh, my mom’s so embarrassing.” I wanted her to see me in a positive way. And it was good in some ways, but then it got like obsessive. It went to the dark side. So then with my son, I had the same experience. My body totally changed again. And it was really hard. I’m still working on it. But this time around, I’m trying to do it not for the image of my children, or how they’re going to think of me, but because I want to have the energy to be able to play with them and go hiking with them. How do I feel? It’s a much slower process and it looks very different, but it’s good to not be so judgy about myself, and to imagine that my children are judging.
You also don’t know ahead of time how you will react to extreme prolonged sleep deprivation. We all know to expect this with motherhood, but you simply cannot understand it until you live it. It makes you do crazy things! I’ll tell one of my weirder and slightly embarrassing sleep deprivation stories:
One morning woke up groggily from yet another mostly sleepless night with an infant, but this time, I felt different. A little more—uncomfortable. It took me a minute to understand what precisely was uncomfortable, and then I headed to the bathroom to confirm my suspicion. You guessed it—or actually you probably didn’t. I woke up wearing a diaper. Somewhere in the foggy blur of night feedings and changing, I had diapered myself, with an infant sized diaper (not fastened of course). Surprise!
The last two surprises we’re going to talk about in this episode are some of the most difficult ones: depression and anxiety. Again, something that you can’t predict ahead of time. And it’s not only postpartum. For many women, like Rebecca Brown Wright, host of the new Pause and Connect Podcast, it starts during pregnancy:
I had the best pregnancy physically, but mentally and emotionally It was so challenging, I really was terrified and scared of how my life was going to change, who I was going to become, and what burdens and responsibilities were going to be placed on me. It was overwhelming. I have since learned that I had anxiety. I didn’t know I had anxiety at the time—really large heaps of anxiety. And because I had such an easy physical pregnancy, nobody wanted to hear from me because I was feeling great physically. And I had no outward symptoms. And so when I would say I’m not happy or this is really hard for me, people just shut me down. They just didn’t want to hear it because they said, “You’re not throwing up. You don’t have heartburn. You don’t have all of the all of the terrible symptoms that that I experienced. So I don’t want to hear your stories.”
When I asked Joy Chantry what surprised her about motherhood, she said:
The biggest surprise is that I realized that I was depressed. That was a really hard one. When you have babies back to back, that postpartum is no joke. I’m a very social person, but I would limit myself from interactions from people. It was really, really hard, but it took a long time for me to understand that that I needed to get some help. And getting that help and reaching out, made a huge difference for me. I was able to kind of own where I was a little bit better, and enjoy where I was. The emotions weren’t just so on the surface like they had been for so long. I could feel things and appreciate things. I think some of that comes with getting more sleep as well.
Katherine Griessman’s anxiety kicked in postpartum.
I didn’t have postpartum depression, but I definitely had postpartum anxiety. My anxiety was so high that at times it was really it was hard to think through things rationally because it was just gripping me like, am I hurting her by trying to do this? I just need to let this go. I’m trying to do the best for her but am I doing the best for her? It was just incredibly difficult.
Even for moms without diagnosed anxiety, there’s plenty to worry about with a new baby around. Is she eating enough? Is he still breathing? What is that weird rash?
So much is new and surprising, and the stakes feel so high. But for all the worries, the sleepless nights, and the unmet expectations, there are those sweet moments in the rocking chair, the midnight waltzes, that first smile, and ooh, that new baby smell.
