Nobody Tells You

Nobody tells you that motherhood is the most violent love you’ll ever feel. That it will crack you open and fill you up and empty you out and do all three at the same time.

Nobody tells you about the rage. The love, yes. Everyone tells you about the love. But not the rage that lives inside it like a fist inside a glove. The rage at anyone who threatens them. The rage at yourself for not being enough. The rage at a world that expects you to do this perfectly while giving you nothing to do it with.

Nobody tells you that you’ll lose yourself. Not in the beautiful, sacrificial way the culture sells you. In the actual way. Where you can’t remember what music you like or what food you want or what you did for fun before fun became a word that only applied to other people.

Nobody tells you about the guilt. The constant, grinding, low-level guilt that follows you like a shadow. Guilt for working. Guilt for not working. Guilt for being tired. Guilt for wanting five minutes alone. Guilt for shouting. Guilt for the screen time. Guilt for the fish fingers. Guilt for not being the mother you imagined you’d be when motherhood was still theoretical.

Nobody tells you that the love will make you brave and the exhaustion will make you cruel and both of those things will happen in the same hour on the same Tuesday and you’ll go to bed feeling like the best and worst person alive.

Nobody tells you that you’ll do the night feeds alone. That you’ll cry in the shower. That you’ll stand at the school gate performing a version of yourself that costs everything. That you’ll batch cook at midnight and answer emails at 1am and lie awake at 4am wondering if you’re doing any of it right.

Nobody tells you. So I’m telling you.

It’s the hardest thing you’ll ever do. It’s the best thing you’ll ever do. And the distance between those two sentences is where motherhood lives. In the gap. In the contradiction. In the love that destroys you and rebuilds you every single day.

Nobody tells you.

But you already know.

Because you’re living it.