A passing comment I made on Facebook has sparked a thought in me and it’s to do with being postpartum (after having a baby) in particular but change in general.

It is inevitable and inescapable that you change profoundly once you have a child. The change probably begins from the moment you decide to start trying to become pregnant. With every cycle that passes, every period that comes when you were sure this month was the month. With the positive pregnancy test and then, I’m sure, again when the pregnancy heartbreakingly does not last. With each month as symptoms come and go and change and you grow and grow and grow. Then the life-shattering, awe-inspiring, defining hours/days spent giving birth. Then there are the first few weeks of having a baby. Those weeks changed me personally and irrevocably. They brought me to the lowest pit, made me question who I was, what I wanted, what we were doing. I will forever look back on those weeks as the breaking, remoulding and making of me. Then with each month as baby grows and they need you less but more in different ways and they smile and they move and they stand and they’re off. Then when you actually have to parent instead of just keep them alive. That’s all I have right now because that’s where I feel I am.

Of course every experience in your life is going to change you. For good or for bad. This experience in lockdown is irreversibly going to change us and our world. In what ways is up to us but there is no escaping it.

Change can be hard, especially when it comes when we don’t expect it. Even when we do expect it, it doesn’t always look how we thought it would.

But I am glad to be changing. I feel that, especially since becoming a mother and the few years it took to get to that, I am becoming me more. I am turning into who I actually am. The experience of becoming a mother has stripped me back to my barest, simplest, actual self. I do not feel some of the pressures I used to feel. I no longer seek to please people as much as I used to. I’m sure you can think of an experience in your life that brought you to a similar place. Maybe this time is it! Maybe you don’t think you’ve had it yet.

Let’s not be afraid of change. Let’s embrace it, let’s seek it, let’s pray for it. Let’s ask God to make us more like He intended us to be, more like Jesus. Let’s strip off all the expectations, all the pressures, all the insecurities and find who’s underneath. I’m looking forward to meeting whoever they are.