In partnership with
On Being a Mom
The Secret Society of Motherhood
By Sonata Kogan
There are a few things in life that will change you so much you will almost entirely forget the person you were after that event. Then, you’ll spend week after week trying to figure out who you are now. Childbirth is one of those phenomenal events. Now, when I say that you almost entirely forget who you are I do not mean that as a bad thing, as it is almost necessary, and thank goodness nature has arranged it so that you forget some of the process of childbirth. If we did not forget some part of that event, I have a feeling that the population of the human species would be dramatically smaller.
Last year when I was pregnant, and all the previous years of my adult life, during which I had actually paid attention to people that had children, I snubbed people in my mind who remotely mentioned having memory loss or difficulty with parenting, I was certain that would never be me. I admit it, I was a judgmental and snooty girl who thought she knew plenty about parenting and children because I had once worked as a nanny and done plenty of babysitting.
It turns out that all the experience I had under my belt with children amounted close to nothing when it came to going through this experience myself. Three and a half months ago, when I became a mother to a beautiful girl; my idea of childbirth, parenting, and the person I was all collided together.
And everything is different now.
For starters I forget things all the time, when that actually used to be my forte, people used to ask me to remind them of things all the time. Now I sometimes have a hard time recalling what I am talking about in the first place. Just like that, I am having a conversation with someone and I will forget what we are talking about. With this memory loss, which my girlfriends’ and I have dubbed “Mommy Memory,” also came an entirely new set of attributes that perhaps were not part of the recipe of who I once thought I would become. Yet, somehow they are the characteristics that I have – and I have no idea how I survived without them for this long.
Foto: SXC
The secret society of motherhood
More from Sonata:
Eight Months
I look at people differently. Somehow, my daughter has opened up my heart. It literally feels bigger and more flexible, and with that the world feels like a bigger place. Every person that passes by I suddenly want to talk to, and ask them if they have babies. When I see babies I now look at them as little people and know that each one will one day grow and have their own story to tell.
However, my favorite part of becoming a mom and enduring all the change in my life is that I feel like I am a part of a secret society, which is really not all that secret, but it felt very distant to me before I gave birth. Yeah, sure we all know that there is always a connection between people when they share an experience together. But now that I have a baby sharing the momentum of being a parent feels like the ultimate sharing one can do.
The most interesting thing about childbirth is that you and I and everyone we know, know of at least three people who have given childbirth. Each one with a different story of how their baby was born, and the experience as a whole. So, I wondered why is it that the most intense and emotional experiences in our lives usually boil down to a cliché saying that your mother repeated endlessly during your teenager years. Such as, “Just wait ‘til you become a parent then you’ll understand” or “You wait and see when you have kids…”
Now, I finally get it. Some events in life are too intense, overwhelming, and emotionally spectacular, and we are forced to simplify them so that we can cope personally and socially. We need the one-liners not only so that we can let go easier of the things we have forgotten, accept the change that has occurred, and not spend hours trying to remember what it was we were trying to say in the first place.
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