portals to other worlds

I’ve been writing this note in my head for over a year, trying to capture who I am these days. Well, I actually started writing it back in October 2023:

Hello, I know it’s been sometime. I had a baby in July, so I’m a mom now. A few people have been surprised when they find out that I have a baby, and rightfully so. I think I posted about having a baby once or twice on Instagram stories and there was a photo of me pregnant buried in a carousel post.

The truth is, miscarriage anxiety fueled a lot of my pregnancy after experiencing a previous loss around 6 weeks. It took more effort than I hoped to get pregnant again and the idea of announcing this joyous life event and then having to un-announce it felt too heavy.

So, I kept my pregnancy mostly a secret.

Or rather, I didn’t intentionally make it a part of what was going on with me externally. I had a lot of other things going on, like navigating a layoff and trying to find an apartment and settle into it just weeks before becoming a parent. I guess you could say I tried really hard to float through the world as my old self who just happened to be pregnant.

Now, here I am, a year and change later, picking up this letter where I left off. It’s safe to say that I’m very much a mom. It’s also safe to say that I don’t know what I am outside of that.I guess the person that I was before I became a parent and the person I am now are still trying to figure out who we’ve become.

Like so many people who become mothers, I’m carrying a lot of shame (is that the right word?) for not having an interesting identity outside of it. Before my body and identity transformed, before I was ever growing a human inside of my womb, I spent too much money paying my therapist to confess my worst fear: that someone would buy me a mug that said “momma” and I’d be doomed to a life of sweatpants, messy hair, and not remembering when I last showered.

Now on the other side, I don’t so much mind that “mama” paraphernalia, some of which I’ve self-inflicted. I haven’t become a sweatpants person (which I attribute to my parents never letting me leave the house in them as a kid), and the messy hair and showering part is still debatable. Postpartum has destroyed the version of my hair that I liked, so I don’t have a lot of incentive, time, or energy to do much about it right now.

Before becoming a mother, I was in the midst of an identity journey, weaving through the estrangement of my adopted parents, the reunion with my biological father’s family, the grief of my biological mother’s passing before I got to know her, and the undoing of the internalized racism I inherited growing up in a white family.

The truth is, I’ve never allowed myself to lean into an identity that felt like home in my body, afraid that it might ostracise me from my family and the people who were supposed to unconditionally love and protect me. I wasn’t willing to risk abandonment. This fear kept me from deeply claiming any real interests, leaving me to shapeshift into spaces, and always opting to dull the fullest expression of my being, knowing full well that dissent from the norm, even when the norm was actively harmful, had real consequences. Where I find myself now forces me to revisit these feelings and specifically, this fear, so that the overpowering motherhood identity doesn’t swallow me whole.

I once read a substack post where the author noted something along the lines of “No one can ever write anything about motherhood that hasn’t already been said” and that thought has paralyzed me every time I’ve tried to get back into writing. Because, like anything you’ll find in any piece on motherhood: yes, I too feel a loss of self, my priorities are wildly different, I’ve mourned the friendships I haven’t been able to be more present for, society’s expectations for mothers feels like a trap, and I’m constantly lost in Groundhog’s Day.

So now, here I am, fully steeped into motherhood, feeling like a cursor blinking on a blank page, wanting to share something that I hope resonates. I’m not sure that this forum will be a pure outlet for all things identify, but I do know that this newsletter, going all the way back to 2016, has always felt like the warmest, safest place, and I’m happy to be back.

Here’s a fresh playlist just for you. 😘