Motherhood: Neither nightmare nor dream

When I was pregnant with my first child, I prepared for war. I fully expected to be exhausted, isolated, broke, buried under burp cloths, missing my old life. That’s what I’d been told to expect. I had such a weird view of what the first days and weeks with a new baby would look like - I actually thought I’d be confined to home, unable to leave the baby’s side for weeks at a time, in a kind of isolated, paranoid fever-dream. It sounded awful; I dreaded it. In reality, I prepared to make chores a little easier, and still went outdoors, we still went out to eat, we had visitors, and life went on - just with a little needy sidekick.

To be clear, motherhood is hard. It reorders you. There is sacrifice involved—bodily, emotionally, financially. But what shocked me was how much of the doom narrative just is not true. It felt like someone had handed me a script written in panic and Pinterest posts. When I threw it out and looked around, I realized: this was not only doable—it was beautiful! Now I tell everyone I meet to have babies with the right person, as early as you can, and as often as God allows.

Here are the most striking discoveries I made in the early days with my baby:

If you expect the early days with your new baby to be a waking nightmare, they will be. But if you accept the strangeness of this ethereal, transitory time and choose to meet it without bitterness, it becomes something else entirely. It becomes precious, and you will begin to notice how fleeting it is. It is a wonderful time, and not one to let expectations and perfectionism interfere with. It can be great—but you have to set your own mind right first.

You’re not going to sleep “like normal,” and that’s OK. Nothing about your life is going to be like it was before, and I’m here to tell you that it’s a wonderful new life you’re entering. I noticed this from the first night, when—after a prolonged induction—I finally delivered at around 1 a.m., and with that, we were off to the land of the sleepless. But a strange thing happened that night: when we changed rooms at 3 a.m., I didn’t even notice how late it was. Perhaps that time blindness came with the realization that I had a new goal in life, a new purpose, and a new person watching me. It was revolutionary. I won’t say I never felt tired again, but I never looked back—and it helped that I stopped expecting, hoping for, or trying to get a “full 8” every night.

I have zero regrets about the early days with my now-toddler. I love where we are now, but I fondly remember the privilege of being the one to wake up at 2 a.m.—the only one in the world to be there, at that moment, with my own unique child. This is a sentiment I sometimes see on Instagram, and I’m grateful that other millennial mothers are noticing that it’s actually a gift to be able to give a little bit of yourself to your child in this way.

The baby-industrial complex is real. New moms are told we need bassinet strollers, wipe warmers, $600 monitors, and the “right” aesthetic for our nurseries. You’ll see Instagram moms link to seventeen versions of the same silicone teether and act like it’s normal. It’s not. This is just stay-at-home moms supplementing their income—and I respect it—but these things are not necessary.

In my case, I took my carefully curated Amazon baby registry to Burlington and walked out with almost everything on my list for a fraction of the cost Amazon had tallied. That said, I’ll add that a few things do need to be high-quality and will cost accordingly: a good highchair is important. So is a car seat that is practical—for example, one that clicks into a stroller base. Those are pretty important. I learned the hard way that a highchair without the right ergonomics is going to make your teething baby less likely to want to try new foods.

But the truth is that, when all is said and purchased, babies don’t need much—and certainly nothing fancy. Our grandparents slept in open dresser drawers, for pity’s sake. Newborns pretty much just need you, and maybe a soft organic cotton swaddle. The idea that you need thousands of dollars just to get started feels like anti-natal propaganda or the panicked worrying of people who have no idea that humans are resilient, adaptable, and have survived all of history’s harshest times to get to where we are (in the baby aisle, genuinely convinced we need a $600 baby bouncer). We do well to remember our roots.

No one tells you how loud the panic can get when you’re pregnant. The world screams that you need more—more gear, more apps, more experts. But I found the opposite. The more I simplified, the more confidence I gained. The routines came easily, and I learned to trust my instinct (uniquely highlighted when you’re lactating, for sure, as well). I didn’t need fifteen swaddles—I just needed one that actually worked. I didn’t need a bouncer, a vibrating seat, and a luxury lounger. I just needed a reliable swing so I could keep the floor clean and give the baby a new perspective to avoid that baby FOMO, a play yard, and a few fun toys.

The baby thrived in simplicity, too. They love learning about the world around them, and isolating them from it does not serve their development. The lie is that the tools will make you feel ready. They won’t. They’ll just fill up your house and your head until you feel like you’re suffocating.

Finally, and most significantly, I noticed that we’ve been lied to about what it means to be a mom—somehow in opposite directions simultaneously. Our fancy, indulgent, modern Western culture either trivializes motherhood or sanctifies it to the point of dysfunction. Either you're “just a mom” who should get back to work ASAP, or you're a martyr who gave up your identity to become a diaper-bot with a pulse. Obviously, both these things are lies that betray the essential work of being a mother—especially to a newborn.

Motherhood is work. It’s demanding, daily, often invisible work. But it’s work that I was thrilled to sign up for—and having that mindset changes everything. You shift away from both “woe is me, the martyred mother” and “this is unimportant, petty work, I need to get back to earning money because that’s the real goal of life.” When you do this, you find you don’t need either a beatified pedestal or a beloved bottle of wine (a topic that could span an entire essay itself). You find yourself just doing the work for the love of the work, and for the betterment of the people who rely on you. Even the laundry feels a little more meaningful, if only because it seems as eternal as God’s love for us.

I guess what surprised me most is that this new, small, ordinary-feeling life is better than what I had imagined. Not because it’s glamorous or easy, but because it feels like the only real thing—what else could possibly matter more? How would my skills and instincts be better employed?

It simultaneously asks everything of me and gives me so much in return, and for that I am daily grateful. Motherhood isn’t a sentence, it’s a calling, and I’m glad I had an opportunity to answer. Ignore our culture’s anti-natal thinking, and you might just find being a mom is your greatest mission.