When I became a mother, my identity changed

I was in the living room of my house with Vicente in my arms. . There was dead silence, my son was a newborn and I didn’t want him to wake up. On the one hand There was a photo of me and my husband from a trip we took to Machu Pichu. When I looked at her, I started crying uncontrollably; I felt like everything I was at that moment no longer existed. I felt like this version of me would never come back.

When I got married, my husband and I decided to wait a bit until we had children. After a while – when we already felt ready – I got pregnant. Vincent It was very planned and expected, but when it arrived I had no idea everything that would happen to me.

Regardless of the typical reaction of overwhelm and physical fatigue in the first months after giving birth, I felt alone, trapped. When I became a mother for the first time, I felt like everything had changed for the worse. . I was angry at my friends who had kids, it felt like they had ripped me off. How come no one warned me about this?, I thought. Because beyond not sleeping or resting, I felt like my identity had changed, that I had stopped being me.

But when Vicente turned two, I looked back and, although it had been difficult, I loved where I was. I realised that I had accepted my new identity, my new self, and that’s when I decided to have another child. I knew it would be difficult and tiring, but this feeling of fusion with another which first invades you and takes away your intimacy, would transform into a bond impossible to quantify in terms of love, impossible to compare with anything else.

I went from being an unprepared and very scared mother to one who was still scared but already knew where she was going. I felt like I had walked through a misty forest and rebuilt myself; It was like a metamorphosis; from caterpillar to butterfly. I managed to understand that this transformation, even if it scared me, was a good thing. That’s why everything was very different when I had my second daughter, Leonor, because although she also changed my life, I experienced it differently, with joy and pleasure.

Now that I look at things in perspective, I think With the arrival of Vicente, I experienced the mourning of this woman that I never was again. Going through a difficult time pushed me to ask for help and that’s why I opened an Instagram account (@maternidadsinpausa) which became a life diary. Then, I trained as a perinatal psychologist. Today, I work with women who suffer from postpartum depression, or are simply going through this process, and I see myself reflected in them, in these first moments of motherhood.

I don’t know if becoming a mother is the most important experience for a woman, nor can I say that it makes you a better person. but I believe it is a transcendental transformation. Today, I look back and I am indeed no longer the same. Four years have passed and I feel like there is a huge distance between who I was and who I am.

There is a typical phrase that says you have to be a mother to understand what that means. I believe that beyond learning to change a diaper or staying up until four in the morning without sleeping on the bus, the expression refers to this feeling of feeling that when you are a mother, the world transforms. Or rather, you do.

*Jocelyn Villarroel is 38 years old and is a psychologist.

Source: Latercera

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