I am a mother.

“I’m just so bored,” I cried to my husband, saying the thing no new mother is supposed to say during the first few weeks of her new child's life. My brain couldn’t handle another hour of pointless TV and my body had hit its max capacity of rawness.

You are stripped down to a version of yourself that is completely unknown, one that aches and bleeds, one that feels at an immensity that you didn’t know possible, and yet there’s an instinctual sense of who you are and what you’re supposed to do when you’re taking care of this tiny being who is utterly dependent on you.

There are brief, minuscule moments when I lose myself in thought, usually when I’m writing or working on something that takes my brain to a different frequency that I forget this new archetype I’ve stepped into, my mind free falling into the void of an identity I used to co-exist with. Before I became a mother I thought you could separate yourself from your child; now I know that’s impossible, now I know that lifetime of being detached from another has expired. There is no one without the other, no turn off switch or office attire for being a mother.

At times the weight of it is unbearable. The sheer and unusual fact that you are now responsible for helping this tiny creature thrive and exist as well as keep yourself stable enough to live a full life outside of the massive responsibility of motherhood is a societal must.

I can feel myself clinging to old parts of me, past routines and creature comforts that once made me feel tethered to who I was. Habits and rituals that once made me feel like me, only this time around, in this version of my skin, they feel brand new again, with some of them dying off while others stick at different angles.

Slowness continues to swim in my bones whether intentional or not, but I can feel the insidious nature of quickness try and leak its way out through tiny pores and cracks in the surface. I don’t want to rush the days, the hours and minutes, and yet I ache for what’s to come.

The wind could blow the wrong way and I feel like my bones could crumble at the tiredness they feel. The dry, brittle lack of nutrients they needs to stay strong and stable, but then moments later she smiles at me and it’s the brightest light I’ve ever seen, it’s the lightest those bones have ever felt.

Every first for her, is a first for me.

Every new state of being for her, is a new being for me.

Every joy and fear she feels, I feel them 10 times over.

And yet slowly, but surely, I am coming back to myself, only in this new version, this new skin that can no longer separate me from her. It dances the line of daunting and extraordinary, lighting up different parts of my soul that I never knew existed deep down.