Watch out for those stories we tell ourselves about motherhood. Yes creatives, looking at you.

Sometimes, it’s not until you repeat a story, out loud, that your body tells you:

‘Oh no my love, that’s old. Time to give that one the flick.’

And then you realise. FUCK. I’ve been telling myself this shit for too long, haven’t I? I’ve been suffering my own story.

I was recently complaining to a friend about how -

I’ve lost so much sleep, I’ve lost so much time and I’ve lost so much freedom since becoming a mother.

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Yes, I was a walking zombie for the first three years while Gia’s body slowly learned to trust sleep, even in the daytime.

No, I didn’t have energy to execute my creative ideas for the first three years and yes, I was frustrated and resentful AF about it.

No, nearly four years after birth, I still don’t get to wake up at 5am, run down to the beach to watch the sunrise, journal and swim anymore without negotiations with my partner first. (Quite frankly I’ve barely bothered to negotiate on this).

And yet, this story has been holding me back, because in the reality of motherhood where Love is the main character, I’ve been running a narrative of ‘loss’ and lack.

I’ve been missing the bloody point. I’ve been missing out.

Douglas Lopez Unsplash

I chose this life, I chose motherhood.

And the first blessing of Motherhood was being initiated into an unprecedented unfuckwithability, even before I gave birth.

Growing life in my belly had me learning the very function of ‘no’. I became impolite by many people’s standards. I walked away from people and conversations that took lifeforce from me.

It was a choice between politeness or my baby.

I never once chose politeness, I never once explained or justified myself.

I kinda laugh at my maiden self who thought she was doing shadow work and learning empowerment for all those years, she was, but for real, growing a baby in my belly showed me the meaning of power.

I gained my fiercely gentle ‘NO’, I gained my wildly primal ‘Fuck right off’, I gained fierce discernment, I gained an unkinked hose of creative ideas and I gained the greatest love of all, the love of a child, who looks at me like I’m God.

And I’ve been looping a story about loss. This cannot go on.

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Here’s what I’ve had to reckon with lately:

Some mothers actually lose a child.

Do I really want to act like having less hours in the day to be creative is a loss?

Do I really want to act like there are several years of lost creativity that I need to ‘catch up on’?

Fuck no.

I’ve had to adapt and shuffle and surrender constantly, just like every single mother on earth. But this is VERY different to loss.

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I recently revisited Big Magic. Fuck I love that book. AND, there’s one piece I don’t agree with, especially since becoming a mother.

Elizabeth Gilbert says that creativity is not essential and we shouldn’t treat it as such (I won’t add more context, but she delivers a valid point around what is essential in life).

But for me, creativity is absolutely essential for my mental health. In fact, the few times I’ve experienced depression in my life, from bad to very bad, including phases in pregnancy, are the times when creativity has dug me out of the darkness.

Pregnant and mentally struggling. Thank goodness my partner agreed to a mural on the wall of the house we’d just moved into (I called her Muriel)

This is one reason why many mothers struggle in early motherhood, because with a fully activated, newly post-partum womb, we need a creative outlet for the gushing ideas that move through us. Not that we need to act on all of them, but we like to dabble, to play in the slipstream if only for an hour of giving ourselves over to colour and texture, words and sounds, smell and taste - to be held in the beauty of making art.

And often, this need to be held by art is not met. The baby needs to be held. The baby needs to be swayed and soothed and fed and cries all day and we don’t know why and we’re alone and sad and frustrated and angry.

Making art feels like an elusive reality because in each of those moments, we choose our child. And while this is natural and necessary, for the creative heart, therein begins this sense of loss.

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But if we carry this story of loss further on into our motherhood and act like we’ve got all this ‘catching up’ to do, it eats away at us and, the underlying resentment—

can we guarantee this is not felt by our children?

Even now, when Gia’s bedtime drags out for hours, I feel the clench creep in, the threatening ‘loss’ of an hour to stretch or read or journal before I go to bed.

But I simply have to reframe this, for my sanity, for my wellbeing, for my child.

My child is not taking anything from me, she is not in the way of anything.

She is the greatest gift that has brought boundless other gifts.

I don’t want the 80-year-old version of me to be like, ‘My heart hurts that I just didn’t get it back then.’

I want my 80 year old self to say, ‘Thank fuck I realised the preciousness of it all. Thank goodness I stopped blaming motherhood for taking from me and recognised the bounty I’ve been given in life and love.’

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I’m more creatively inspired than ever before. Motherhood gifted me this.

What is most meaningful to me, gets created, in its perfect time.

We don’t tell our bodies to hurry the fuck up and make this damn baby in like, 5 weeks. We create a baby (and let’s not forget, a whole new organ) in forty weeks. This is the pace making a baby demands.

Each creation demands its own pace. Each creation that wants to be birthed, will be.

In the meantime, let’s get down on our knees, come nose to nose with the magical beings in our lives and let love take its rightful place as the centrepiece of our reality.

Let’s not miss out on this.

🤍

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