I’ve written a lot on this blog about my mother and her struggles with drug addiction. When I started this page, I decided that would be the platform I talked a lot about, yet a lot of the time I feel like a broken record. There are only so many times you can tell your thoughts, feelings, and experiences before people think, ‘Yeah, we’ve heard this before…’
But now I have a different view of motherhood now that I’m becoming a mother myself.
Throughout my entire pregnancy, even until the day I had her, I was so skeptical on my ability to love my child. I think every new mom worries about what kind of mom they will be and if they will love their baby enough. I honestly felt disconnected to the child that I was carrying.
And that scared me.
I had a lot of anxiety about becoming a mother because I had never been showed what a mother’s true love and presence felt like. My expectations of motherhood were so high because I wanted to be everything that my mom wasn’t. Sometimes I still feel unsure, guilty, and wonder if what I’m doing is what the “good” moms out there do.
It’s hard becoming something when you’ve only witnessed a negative viewpoint of what you are going to become yourself.
The moment I saw Della for the first time, I KNEW I was going to be okay. It all finally made sense. I think it’s hard for a first-time mom to truly understand the life that she made and is carrying. I didn’t truly understand the magnitude of pregnancy because I had never created life, grew it inside of me, and got to see the end result: a baby. But once I got to meet her and see that she was a tiny human that grew inside of me, it all changed. Of course I loved her as she grew inside of me, but all worries of if I could love her enough vanished once I could really see what I had made.
It is, and always will be, the most beautiful thing I have ever witnessed.
A mother’s love is like no other. After all, your baby is the only living thing on this earth that has heard your heartbeat from inside your body.
Between the Lens 