A generation of mothers: Where do we go from here?

I think this has been the biggest question I’ve been asking myself, where do I go from here?

As a mother, we look at our babies as these wonderful gems of the world. A rare beauty that only we can truly understand and only we can cherish and value, but the truth is, we’re raising beings that will eventually challenge themselves and some ideologies we’ve raised them on, grow up, which means grow apart from us and ultimately becoming what we are now, parents and independent beings. It’s scary to think these small babies will be the people of the world, doing good and bad, making difficult choices and trying to repeat the cycle of what we’re doing, but hopefully in a better way.

I have often wondered what I would be like as a parent and I mostly thought I would be the detached disciplinarian. The one no one can mess with, the one who would pick up her career right away and not hesitate to compromise, but here I am, 4 months after giving birth and wondering If I am even ready to start writing again. We are often challenged by our ideas with reality and my real-life baby is challenging the kind of parent I thought I would be. I am soft and considerate, I can be selfish, but only momentarily. I am everything I didn’t think I would become, and I am so happy I was wrong on that.

When I look back on my transition into motherhood and the journey through pregnancy, it’s hard to remember the version of me that existed, it feels like such a distant memory. walking into the hospital pregnant and walking back out with a baby is probably the scariest things ever. Life changes in ways that we can’t control and as much as we are guardians to these small little people, we don’t get to dictate how it’s done because the power is floating in their little hands.

But what happens next? After we’ve done these most extraordinary things, we survived and existed from it all, how can it be so easy to adjust again? To me, it feels like discovering that you have superpowers, only being forced to hide them and live among normal people. If you’ve known every film and book made around that story, you would know it never goes well and always ends up with someone finding out the secret. How can we go back to being just a writer? Just an entrepreneur? Just a woman?

Where do I go from here and how do I do it?