The other side is another side

Discovering who you are when babyhood ends

Lately I feel like I’ve reached the “other side” of babyhood.

The shift happened subtlety. Like looking up one day and noticing the sun is setting farther south on the horizon than it did just a few months ago. My daughter is still just nineteen months old, but anytime I stop to look around, things feel decidedly different.

I don’t have to watch her every move anymore. I can trust her not to put every tiny object she finds in her mouth. She can tell me what she needs, even if it’s only in the binary code of “Yesss” and “No no no.” She marches from one side of the room to another to put on her shoes. She has ideas swirl into her mind and she tells me about them— “apple, tree, pick, outside!” When she wakes up she doesn’t cry immediately, instead she lays in the crib and thinks, plays with her teddy, tries out new words (this morning it was “me and youuuu!”).

We’ve stepped into the other side of babyhood and, amazingly, another side is here to greet me.

Early babyhood was precious beyond measure. But it was also harder than most anything I’ve ever experienced. Colic and chronic pain, worry and waking up at 4 am.

Becoming a mother for the first time felt like learning how to make one’s life on the sea. In some ways, it seems impossible. How does anyone survive here? And yet, we do.

Somehow, between the swells and the bottomless water, the howling storms and the sunrises so beautiful it breaks your heart—you make it work. You make a home among the undrinkable sea and the stunning stretch of stars, and you imagine this is where you’ll live forever.

But then, things change.

The boat drifts into warmer waters. You can see the bottom again. The constellations shift subtlety overhead. You arrive to new places.

You reach the other side of a cycle in your child’s life, in the fast-paced moons of their development, and suddenly another side of your life is here to greet you.

There are so many macro and micro cycles of being alive. It feels grounding just to acknowledge them, like naming flowers in the garden.

There’s the year it takes me to finish one of the leather-bound journals I love. The weeks it takes to burn a single beeswax taper. The mysterious rhythm of the white irises in my garden who bloom in the spring and then again in the fall. The first baby tooth to arrive. The last one to fall.

Each ending means something, no matter how small.

Each ending means, always, a new beginning.

I spent so long trying to figure out how to survive in the waters of early motherhood, I honestly didn’t know how to picture what another side would even look like. A land across an uncrossable sea—how does one imagine what one has never even glimpsed?

Now that I’ve found myself firmly on the other side of this particular cycle, I have to remind myself to pause and look around. To take in the wonder of the fact that I’ve not only reached another side in my child’s development, but that I’ve been opened to another whole side of who I am.

I am not who I was when I got pregnant.

I am not who I was when she was born.

I am not who I was even this time last year when I was still nursing in dark rooms and rocking my baby to sleep three times a day.

I’m not any versions of myself I’ve ever been before. The boat of my life has brought me through a tempest out the other side and suddenly I’m peering over the starboard at myself in the crystalline water.

Was she one I was sailing towards all along?

I’m still coming to know the image I watch wavering in the warm water, but I see her tenacity. The strength of her self-knowledge. The golden opal of the self-forgiveness she carries—the most hard-won prize. I see her self-gentleness and the joy with which she reaches out to the world. Her ability to trust what seemed untrustable before.

Being a parent means your entire life is change. Phases ending and beginning. Regressions that lead to progressions. Breakdowns and breakthroughs and horizons that change from week to week.

Being a mother means committing oneself to seeing another side of yourself again and again and again.

So when I look into the moving mirror of the water beneath me I decide, without a moment of hesitation, that I’m glad of who I’ve become.

Because nothing is more beautiful than the morning after a storm.

Nothing is more beautiful than realizing the other side was another side all along.