Explaining motherhood with verbs and nouns

Before I share the only logical response to the question: “How’s motherhood?”, let’s talk about you.

I made you this voicenote so you can listen to this as well.

You’re a noun doing verbs

That’s all you ever have been, it’s all you ever will be.

A reader reading, a sister advising, or a colleague procrastinating. And sometimes you can have a style or a way to do those verbs, like an adjective or an adverb. Reading quickly, advising poorly, procrastinating successfully. Ya see?

Your verbs range from…

• survival: breathing, eating and peeing

• to daily life: walking, talking and showering

• all the way to spicy and extracurricular: running, exploring and succeeding.
  

  

Your nouns range from…

1. given: you’re born a daughter or son.

2. to circumstantial: you happen to be a neighbour.

3. all the way to earned: you become a champion.

And that’s really it, you can be as subjective as you want and pin an emotion to them, but that’s your lot. You will end up defining parts of yourself by how well you do some of these verbs, when you do them and your relation to others as you do them.

This is just one way to objectively measure your daily existence and experience of reality. You are a noun, doing a verb, in some kind of adverb.

Now… to motherhood.

So let’s say, on Saturday you were your normal list of nouns doing your daily verbs in the adverbs you did them. You were you. Human breathing calmly, client listening passively, pedestrian walking quickly. And on Sunday, you had a baby.

You can’t do those verbs like that any more, and if you try to do them, you’ll do a different version. If you can do them, they almost certainly have a different adverb.

Survival and baseline verbs

Before we mention the remarkable verbs like running and sewing, let’s start with breathing, peeing, standing etc.

You breathe oddly on Sunday. Your lungs aren’t where they used to be, so you can’t breathe the way you used to. You pee hesitantly. And medical professionals are heavily invested in peeing going well. You get asked more than you’ve ever been asked about urine.

You eat hastily now, like a thief - an opportunistic one. You’re usually parched, so you drink eagerly but never often enough. You sweat profusely, and while stationary. You cough fearfully, and you avoid sneezing at all costs.

You sleep unexpectedly and the pattern is irregular, it will be for a while, so somehow there’s peace in that. You wake suddenly and you’re tired as you do so.

You’ll do your other baseline maintenance verbs like brushing teeth or cleaning, frantically, and during hours you may not be used to. The line between clean and sanitary blurs uncomfortably for a while.

You laugh rarely for a while if you’ve had a c-section, the pain that follows is seldom worth it. You chat briefly but the way you talk has changed anyway, because your breathing has changed. There are no adverbs for this, you just take what you’re given with this one.

You drink warm drinks reluctantly after all the horror stories of burnt children leave you just as scarred.

You walk wobbly now because your centre of gravity has shifted since Saturday, so standing is tiring too. While this does impact your verbs, your identity could stay intact. Until the spicy verbs. They have the power to impact your relationship with yourself.

Spicy verbs

The remarkable thing about spicy verbs is that the ones you do enough will become nouns which shape your identity. If you run enough, you will be a runner whereas, you’d really have to go above and beyond to be known as a “breather”.

Every day before that Sunday, you had your pick of spicy verbs. You had the scope and free will to cover them. Within reason. You could play chess, you were able to crochet, and dive, and run. You could have done them until you became a chess champion, a crocheter, a diving instructor, a marathoner… you name it, you could become it and it would become you.

But what happens when you have to deprioritise these spicy verbs for the survival verbs? Not because you want to, but because that’s the logical and good thing to do. Do you lose sense of self? Sure! Do you question who you are? Of course! Do you contemplate watching others do them as a way to satiate the appetite you have and glamourise having once done them? Almost certainly.

If you had a c-section, the next 3 months limit your physical activity, so if fitness was a part of your routine, you’ll have to reconsider. You could swap running miles for scrolling through kilometres of montages of people running the distances you used to cover just to feel something. Just me?

Even if you had the physical ability, you’d still need time. So what happened to that time? The time you used to dedicate to your spicy verbs? It’s been stolen by your new set of survival verbs.

New survival verbs

Changing, feeding, burping, checking, packing, folding, wrapping, patting. New entries to your list of survival verbs. You most likely didn’t do any of these on Saturday or any day before that. Now you do them all the time.

They’re so new to you that they don’t have an adverb. You’re learning to do them as you do them. And your best-case scenario is that you’ll get to do them for as many days as you get to do them.

Who are you as you’re doing this stuff? An augmented version of Saturday you. A changed version. Not bad, or good, but different. Your nouns have mostly stayed the same. But, you get a whole new set of those as well.

Your new nouns

You are a mum now. They all call you mummy.

You’ll also get called a parent. You’ll be doing “parenting” every day. It’ll become you. It’s up to you to let it consume you, or how much you want to be consumed by it. But by this point in this article, you’ve understood that if these changes don’t consume you, you might be missing something.

So, how is it? How’s being a mum?

On your first day, you’ll have to reconcile:

• sacrificing a whole set of verbs - at least temporarily,

• altering the time and place you do a whole bunch of regular verbs,

• relearning the way you do survival verbs and

• adding a new set of survival verbs to your list.

So you’re not the same person. If your actions, priorities and vital verbs are all rearranged, you’ll have to become someone else. How could you stay the same? Why would you? And would it even be beneficial?

Answers vary and there is no right or wrong. 

The polite response to the question is: “Yeah, great! Yeah! I love it, yeah! Oh, and it’s really hard!” But it is not an accurate response.

All this to say, motherhood is going well, I’m excited by the company I share in my home. And I look forward to hearing from you. 

Voicenote to S.H June 2023 2 months upon her becoming a mother, 2 years after my first-born.