Rather than try to stumble along in my own words, I want to quote a favourite book of mine on motherhood - the book is By the Secret Ladder- A Mother's Initiation and the author is Frances Greenslade.
"The enormous physical changes that mothers' bodies undergo in preparation for giving birth should be the outward signal of inward change to come. Your rib cage enlarges to accommodate your double-duty lungs. Your heart, too, is displaced, literally expanding with the new effort it requires to pump blood not only through your body, but also your growing fetus and the placenta. As your heart grows, it twists, trying to settle into a spot where it will fit.
Her body is altered in ways that cannot be undone. Her feet may be bigger, her rings may not fit anymore, her ribcage will be permanently expanded. And as everyone knows, once your heart's been twisted out of place, it never goes back to normal."
"When you become a mother, you undergo a psychic reordering even more monumental and profound than the physical. Until now you have been autonomous, the centre of your own universe, but from the moment you give birth, everything changes. It's like a crack has opened up in your world and on one side is your old life, on the other, the adventure of the new. "
"Becoming a mother brings you close to the bone, to blood and shit, to mortality and your absolute worst fears. It may be sweet, but it can also be dark and dangerous. It is, more accurately, one of the great adventures of many women's lives. It is a quest, with the mother as the hero-adventurer, encountering the pitfalls of all adventures: monsters, despair, and an overarching wonder. A mother, helplessly in love with and bound to her child by the minutiae of daily caring, comes face to face with her own soul."
Motherhood in a nutshell.
"When you become a mother, you undergo a psychic reordering even more monumental and profound than the physical. Until now you have been autonomous, the centre of your own universe, but from the moment you give birth, everything changes. It's like a crack has opened up in your world and on one side is your old life, on the other, the adventure of the new. "
"Becoming a mother brings you close to the bone, to blood and shit, to mortality and your absolute worst fears. It may be sweet, but it can also be dark and dangerous. It is, more accurately, one of the great adventures of many women's lives. It is a quest, with the mother as the hero-adventurer, encountering the pitfalls of all adventures: monsters, despair, and an overarching wonder. A mother, helplessly in love with and bound to her child by the minutiae of daily caring, comes face to face with her own soul."
Motherhood in a nutshell.
