Life Before

I’m at a stage of my life where so many of my friends are married with children or in serious, long-term relationships. Through them and my sister I’ve witnessed people transform from girls to women to mothers, so I wanted to, perhaps controversially, write about their experiences.  

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Controversial you ask? Well yes, maybe. For those reading this who don’t know me, I’m not a Mum (yet). If you’ve read enough of my blog you’ll know I take the piss pretty often and joke about being single and alone, but the more I ponder all these things the more I believe this is all in my plan. I’m surrounded by amazing women who are showing me the way. Through their lived experiences I get to prepare for the realities of motherhood, not just the over-the-top baby showers and cute onesies that people post on Instagram. Seriously though – can we all agree that baby showers are getting absolutely mental these days? Who has the kind of money to keep up with this stuff? I organised my sisters baby shower in my Mum’s backyard on a hot as fuck day where everyone was sweating bullets and we had to hose down the tent just so people wouldn’t die. I spent the night before painstakingly doing my own arts and crafts for the cake with a few sticks, a piece of string and some cardboard (no joke). If I tried that shit again I’m certain people would start rumours that I’m poor and I’d never get a date in this town again. Not that I can get a date anyway.    

All jokes aside, my point is this. If you’re questioning what someone like me would know about being a parent, I don’t blame you. I do however encourage you to read on. You’ll hopefully realise that this isn’t necessarily about being a Mum. It’s about who you were before you became one.

Life has seen fit to gift me with some seriously good friends and luckily for me, they are the same people that I’ve traversed all its major hurdles with. Together we’ve eaten stolen ice cream at the local park, been to weird parties where dogs were wearing nappies, navigated our first periods, put pyjama wrapped cruisers in Country Road bags and told our parents we were having a ‘sleep over’, vomited in bushes, felt the pressure to get OP1’s, mended one another’s broken hearts, cried at each others weddings, crossed our fingers for pregnancies and celebrated each beautiful newborn that has made its way into our lives thus far.

The mothers I know are seriously successful Business Owners and Designers and Lawyers and Therapists and high-flying Finance wizards. They are Nutrition and Fitness Guru’s and just straight up Boss Ladies. They are genuinely women that you would look at and go, “Wow, she has it all”. And I guess depending on what angle you’re coming from, they do. Great husbands, wonderful friends, good jobs, loving families and all the things that are truly important in life. These young girls that used to sit on the school oval with me shooing away bin chickens and eating tuckshop vegemite rolls are now responsible for very small, very fragile humans. They are the same women that went clubbing and drank irresponsibly and backpacked Europe and stayed in dodgy hostels and gave blowies to jerks and collectively, made all the mistakes in the book. So just because they got older and had children, does this mean they have any idea what they’re doing? Of course not. None of us do.

As I wrote in the piece 'Chapter None', there is so much we simply don’t know about life. Teenagers are some of the most audacious people I know because they make plans at 15 that they genuinely believe will come to fruition. I don’t think our confident naivety ever factors in how truly difficult and life changing it is to bring a child into the world. How quickly it drops you to your knees and how much you mourn a life you didn’t even know you were taking for granted. The life where you drank wine on Friday’s and slept in on Sundays. The life where you left the house with your phone and your keys because that’s all you needed. Ducking to the shops. Spontaneous girls trips to Sydney. Jumping on a plane to New Zealand for a random concert. Buying that Fendi bag without a second thought.

My point is – apart from the obvious - you are exactly the same person the day before you give birth as you are the day after it. You still want all the same things but how can you have them when nothing belongs to you anymore? Neither your body nor your time nor the food on your plate. You still love a wine, you just can’t have one (or maybe you can, no judgement from me). You still love a night out with the girls, you just can’t go. Mostly because you haven’t slept or showered in days and can’t tell a Friday night from a Tuesday morning. You still love to dance but make any sudden moves and your bladder threatens to give way. You still know how to talk, it just doesn’t feel like it because you’ve been in a breastfeeding blackhole for hours and don’t remember the last time you opened your mouth. You still love your husband, you’ve just forgotten he exists.

I don’t know what it’s like to be in the trenches of motherhood but if witnessing my friends is anything to go by, the biggest lesson I’m taking away is this.

There is still room for you in your own life but my God will you have to make it. And in those moments when finally, finally, you get some much-needed time with your friends, that woman you set aside for the gift of motherhood will come back as if she never left. She’ll sit around a table laughing at dick jokes and reminiscing about high school crushes and maths class shenanigans and dancing on tables and spewing in the Cotswolds. She will remember who she was before and go home a better wife, a better mother, a better lover. She’ll fumble with the keys and tiptoe straight to the kids room to watch the steady rise and fall of tiny little chests…and she will smile thinking of that young girl who traipsed about in London absolutely hammered on a Wednesday night. Because women who give themselves permission to remember, go home to a life they never want to forget.

I hope you’ll understand now why this piece was never about being a Mother.

It’s about who you were before you became one.

With love, always

J