Motherhood: The Highest Highs! (and the Lowest Lows)

There is nothing like motherhood to expose us to uncharted extremes of emotion. I have always lived a quite passionate existence; experiencing euphoric highs of energy and sensation during times of motivated happiness counteracted by crushing lows of disappointment when my fortune and fervour ran dry.

But what I thought I knew about the limits of my emotional experience, I hadn’t a clue. The day I became a mother - actually three days before, during the first onset of labour and corresponding despair at my absolute loss of control - my soul was stirred to unfamiliar psychological depths.


Nothing I had read and nothing I had been told prepared me for the pain and devastation that I experienced during the labour process. My suffering was so monumental, I was certain that I was dying. My exhaustion was so complete that even after the birth I was bankrupt of all emotion. For the first time in my life, I had nothing left in me to feel.

And while time has gradually blunted the sting of my labour memories and rendered them foggy in detail, there was one moment of spiritual transcendence that I can still recall with perfect lucidity. In the midst of a particularly potent contraction it was as though past and present had merged, and I felt myself connecting spiritually, through time and space, to all women who had experienced childbirth. It was an immutable bond: the collective unconscious of women throughout time had opened its arms and welcomed me to the club. At once, I wholly embodied what it means to be woman.

Today, when my son toddles over to me with arms outstretched and embraces me with his whole body while cooing “mama, mama,” waves of profound joy wash over me. Watching him accomplish something new and seeing his face shine with delight is more fulfilling to me than anything I might accomplish myself. And when I hold him close at night and feel his heart beat against mine, I know that there is no stronger bond in the world than that between a mother and child. I am humbled by my good fortune at being born a woman and having given birth to a child.

Before becoming a mother, my sole mission was to maximise my own life experience. No goal was too lofty, no barrier too high to overcome. I had complete control over my life and my experience within it. I was fuelled by limitless energy, self-sufficiency and ambition to achieve. These days, my energy has vaporised into near-constant fatigue and my self-sufficiency has morphed into a comfortable interdependence among our little family unit. Perhaps most drastically, my ambition and charge-and-conquer mentality - traits that have proven to be of very little use in rearing a child - have steadily been losing ground to something which had no prior place in my life: surrender.

What an incredible journey of the body, mind and soul. With each being stretched and thrust into new dimensions of pleasure, pain and sublime awareness, life has become richer, more colourful and more exquisite then I could ever have imagined. Behold the verdant bounty of motherhood!