I always just assumed that motherhood started when you gave birth. As a society, we’ve spent hundreds, if not thousands of years taking for granted how our mothers, sisters, and friends have seamlessly stepped into the role. Perpetuating the stereotype that one day you aren’t a mom, and the next day you are, and that is somehow perfectly normal. As if I’d lived my entire life as the color purple. I woke up purple. I went to sleep purple. The color purple is what I saw on the other side of the mirror. My personhood, identity, and relationship with myself were all based on the color purple. Then with the christening of two hospital doors, I was green. And in the span of a single day, no one remembered me as purple. All they saw was green.

I stood in the hospital lobby after my daughter was born waiting for my husband, standing next to the nurse who performed our final examination, our last hurdle to freedom. It was a sunny, warm spring day and I was anxious at the idea of stepping outside the hospital doors, to be reborn into the world as someone completely foreign to me: Mom.

The nurse and I exchanged some last-minute pleasantries before she looked down at my daughter, addressing her directly, “I can’t wait to read about you in the newspaper someday.” It was a reference to an earlier comment, “this is an exceptional and intelligent child” noting with relevance that one of her sons was currently attending MIT, the prestigious university in Boston. It was a shocking comment to make. Of course, you see greatness in your own child, but to hear it unsolicited from someone on the outside feels like they’ve trespassed into your deepest desires. I thought I may be hallucinating and when she left the room I locked eyes with my husband as if to confirm I wasn’t.

The day was perfect, like the trees and birds and flowers were celebrating our daughters’ arrival along with us. But internally I spun. We had only just left the hospital, but I found myself going over the comments, not sure what to do with them. Could Myla be exceptional? Will public school fail her? How will we afford private school? Can she bear the weight of some anointed destiny? Are these expectations already too great? Kind of rude for the nurse to throw life’s greatest questions at me right out the gate. No pressure, my mind whispered as my breathing quickened. I felt as though I was in a pool, wading out into the deep end as the tips of my toes frantically searched for the bottom.

I’ve since learned the saying “Women become mothers when they get pregnant, and men fathers when they see their child for the first time,” I guess that’s right. You can’t fault men for needing a moment to catch up. For a woman, there is no dissociating from the person growing inside you, not even for a minute. Once I knew I was pregnant, I would close my eyes and I could see the universe from the outside looking in, and how very, very small I was in it. One day I happened to recall reading Barack Obama’s book A Promised Land, that his mother never lived to see him become President. I couldn’t help but cry. Somehow understanding for the first time the incalculable joy, and pain, of being a mother.

After giving birth the doctors and nurses began addressing me as “Momma” and It was difficult to not look over my shoulder to see who they were talking to. The reality was that I didn’t feel like “Momma” at all. I just felt like me, as purple as I’d always been. For the days and weeks after, I wrestled with this other entity growing inside of me. Something primal and unfamiliar.

At home, I sat in front of the TV holding my weeks-old infant, too exhausted to pay attention to whatever was on. My mind wandered back to the 1998 natural disaster blockbuster Deep Impact. At the climax of the movie, a mother hands her baby to her teenage daughter and boyfriend, knowing they’ll be able to escape on a motorbike and away from the impending wall of water heading towards them. I barely remember watching the movie for the first time, yet I found myself sobbing at the newly recalled plot point. My husband came around the corner to find me crying hysterically, and I asked him through tears, “Do you think we would give up Myla if we knew she wouldn’t die in a super tsunami?” He stared at me blankly, then to the TV screen trying to understand. I nudged, “Do you??” He indulged me with an answer. He would simply punch the teenage boyfriend, take the motorbike, and we would all escape together. I laughed. And then I cried.

Deep Impact, 1998

Arriving home with a newborn was like restarting my life from the beginning. Every minute was new, every moment an adjustment. Any comforts of the hospital were a distant memory as I set my child down for the first time, my heart pulsing with love. Or was it panic? It’s tough to distinguish in those early days. I looked around at our perfectly assembled nursery, with a crib that my husband, a finely trained woodworker, built by hand. It was all just a mere veneer of order and preparedness. I had an entirely new life ahead of me, it was overwhelming. I had a sudden reckoning with the instantaneous loss of my personal freedom and the weight of this new world order. I felt the overwhelming urge to run. I felt as though I was a passenger in my own body. I think, “maybe I’m not ready for this.” I think these thoughts confirm it. I settled into an emotional cycle of love, fear, anger, guilt, shame, repeat.

Those first few weeks felt as though I was merely pretending to be “Mom.” It felt almost fraudulent. How could someone with so little experience deserve such reverence in name? How could a woman who could look into the eyes of her child ask themselves “should I have done this?” be allowed such a namesake? What credentials did I have? Lost in my own ignorance, It was difficult not to feel irritated when friends and strangers presumed my expertise. To be handed a fussy baby and think, “I don’t know what to do about this either.” The ever-present feelings of inadequacy were debilitating. At the end of hard days, all I’d want to do was disassociate from being Mom, but instead, I’d find myself endlessly scrolling through pictures and videos of my daughter, of her and I together. In them, I’d see myself looking almost mad with love. Watching these videos I was able to witness a joy that didn’t feel present in me until I saw it with my own eyes. Showing me that even though I didn’t feel like Mom, I still might look like one.

I kept waiting for someone to bestow the authority of a “mother’s intuition” onto me. A phrase that somehow feels uniquely designed to give women this impossible and elusive standard to live up to. I thought one day I’d come floating into my daughter’s nursery in an ethereal pink bubble, looking like Glinda the Good Witch from The Wizard of Oz, calm, capable, and glowing. Instead, I’d find myself on the edge of sleep thinking through the steps I might take if a fire broke out between our room and the nursery. Would there be time to grab my shoes? Should I go through the hallway, or would it be better to go outside and around to her bedroom window? I’d need something to break the glass. Shoes would help as I climbed through. We should check the lint deposit in the dryer. I should get CPR certified. It’s like I was possessed. I began to understand the idea of taking a bullet for someone in practice, not theory. The urge to protect was consuming my mind and body, but physically, I was just still me. Not this hulk-like character developing in my mind. I should get more exercise, I think as my mind relents and I sleep.

Suddenly I cared about how much alcohol I drank, if I was reading enough, if I spent too much time on my phone. I became a preservationist of my husband and I’s shared history, meticulously crafting photo albums of our life together so it wouldn’t be lost to memory. I made adjustments to take better care of myself. For the first time, I felt the burden of my own mortality. Realizing that someday I’d die, leaving my daughter alone. Understanding what true, crushing terror feels like. I started having vivid daydreams of me on my deathbed, my daughter at my side, and my squeezing her hand tightly, looking into her eyes. Telling her she gave me everything I had to be proud of in this life. I can see the sadness weighing on her. I want to protect her from my death. I anguish knowing I can’t.

One day my daughter and I were out on a solo walk when she began to cry. I scooped her up out of her stroller, gently rocking back and forth on the side of the neighborhood backroads, but her crying only intensified. Panic started to rise in me, I noticed the hot sun beating down more acutely. I put her back in the stroller and started pushing her home, at first walking quickly but then breaking out into an all-out sprint. My daughter continued to wail and the harder she cried the harder I ran, only stopping for short bursts to catch my breath when it felt like my body couldn’t do it anymore. As I rounded the corner into the driveway, my husband rushed out to me. Before I could reach him, I collapsed onto the garage floor, sobbing so hard I struggled to breathe.

I think about this moment sometimes when I have what I like calling a “good mom day.” These are days when I get my daughter in and out of her car seat with ease or execute a quick, painless handoff at daycare. I recognize how very far away that feeling of utter helplessness had become. Several days would go by where I actually felt capable, confident even. That feeling of pretending merely faded away, I had more room in my heart to let the joy in. I came to terms with the loss of my former self, and I regained some version of normalcy. Though, a new normal. I went out at night, wearing the same jewelry and dresses and shoes as I did before, only now, although unchanged in appearance, these things are suddenly shocking. “Look at you!” People love to say. Like they were seeing a dog walk on its hind legs. Something unnatural and shocking. These sorts of comments became exhausting. Each compliment feels wrapped in a reminder that I was no longer me. I was Mom. There’s no escaping it. But that all became familiar, and I slowly forgot all about her. My former self faded away and I felt more like Mom. It was all a little less foreign, the comments less shocking. A transition so delicate and subtle that I didn’t even notice it happening.

What struck me the most is how motherhood is sold to women as something that happens all at once. I expected to see my daughter for the first time and become a whole new person instantly. Someone wise and knowing. Expectant and able. But becoming Mom was a long, messy process. With steps forward and back. Full of friction. Consciously and unconsciously felt. And I had to grow comfortable with the idea that I might never fully get a hold on it. That I’ll never be done adapting, that I’ll never be done pushing through the fear, and always being mindful not to miss out on the joy. I reached a point where the old and new me no longer felt as if they were fighting one another. I looked in the mirror and could barely recognize her, the girl who used to be purple. I got more acquainted with this woman called Mom. I began to know her, trust her even. I found myself sitting in the dark, singing a song by Kermit the Frog to my daughter as she went down for a nap, the sound machine purring.

When green is all there is to be.
It could make you wonder why, but why wonder?
I am green, and it’ll do fine, and it’s beautiful.
And I think it’s what I want to be.