I remember sitting outside writing in my journal and thinking about motherhood. I was pregnant and a lot of things were changing for me. Where I was once in school, I would not be in the fall. Even though I was once single, I had a husband now. For a while it would be just the two of us, and soon (sooner than I had anticipated) we would be a family of three.
It was weird to think about motherhood, having seen many people who are mothers or have been mothers, but never having been one myself. I was 100% terrified and 100% exhilarated (if you can't see how two emotions can both be at 100%, just try pregnancy and the hormones that come with it!). We were starting our own family, and it was a joyous, yet frightening, occasion. The biggest question on my mind was "How will motherhood change me?" I felt like once I was a mother, that's it, that's all I would ever be. It seemed as though my first sacrifice in motherhood was my previous, non-mother, identity. However, in thinking about it, I found that that was not true. If I picture myself as a tree with many different branches of my personality sticking out from it, that tree does not just wither and die because I became a mother. It didn't do that when I became a wife. Or when I moved away to school. Or even when I graduated highschool. These momentous life occasions helped grow my person into who it is today. Motherhood, I came to assume would just grow a new branch. I was partly right. While there is a fresh growth of a branch labelled mother on it, many things that were already existent as part of my identity were growing stronger. In the past six-ish months since becoming a mother, I have grown a strength of love I didn't know was possible. I have persevered for longer than I ever thought I could. It seems like I have had my patience tested to the limits more in the past six months than in the rest of my life prior. Motherhood has nurtured many of the old branches into new life. Some of the old branches that are less selfless have grown to be bigger too, but I'm working on that. I work on it by focusing on the good gifts God has given me. I work on it by focusing on the fact that although I am a mother, I am still a child of God, and so I follow example set for me by my mother and the mothers (biological or otherwise) that I am so blessed to be surrounded by.
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Jordan is...A mother, artist, designer and loyal friend. May this blog bring you hope and a normalization of both emotion and logic. Archives
March 2021
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