Notice What's Alive

Can you notice, name, see what has come alive in you?

With the birth of a child comes the birth of new perspectives, new beliefs, new ways of seeing the world. This new aliveness doesn’t come like a flower slowly unfolding or the sun slowly rising. No, it’s just there, as sudden as the baby in your arms, as sudden as the way you left your home with one family unit and came home with another.

It was a little shocking, a little disorienting, for me to realize this. Was there always space inside me for more me and I didn’t know it? Or did one thing change into another? Did things, parts of me, die to make way for something else, also me, to come alive?

One thing that came alive in me was rage. I had never been much of an angry person before, had always been laidback and easygoing. It was hard to provoke me into actual anger. But just a few months in to this new life, into matrescence, and I had become acquainted with this new fiery partner of mine as clearly as if it had a physical form. I could feel the rage sitting on my chest, smoldering in my stomach, laying taut on my shoulders, ready to snap, ready to burn anything and everything down. I hated it, was afraid of it, felt shamed by it.

And then I started to listen closer.

Before exploring that further: yes, the overtaking, all-encompassing rage was absolutely a symptom of something wrong—don’t mistake this for romanticizing postpartum mood disorders. The flames fed on hormones and anxiety and exhaustion and leftover physical pain. They exploded out of me in ways that were hurtful and harmful, that needed to be addressed and worked on, that I’m still working on.

But the flames also burned against injustices, systematic failures, invisible labor, unfair expectations, and the lack of general and scientific knowledge around this experience that over 2 billion living people have gone through. Sitting on the couch with my six-week-old, aghast, livid, I angrily googled “how to become politically involved as a mom” … and immediately joined a cohort that led to me being in Washington DC on Capitol Hill eight months later, learning how to help advocate for legislation about childcare and maternal health. My dreams for the future have come alive in a way that didn’t exist, couldn’t exist, before matrescence. It’s exciting, electrifying—

and other dreams have died. I simply don’t want them anymore, or recognize that they are impossible now, at least in the way I’d dreamed them before. There’s grief in that, some days more than others, and acknowledging that matters.

Even writing this blog post is an ode to the give and take, the death and new life, loss and new, the burned down and regrown.

I used to be able to sit and have my fingers dance across the keys, thoughts tumbling out into perfect sentences, rarely needing to draft or edit. Now—writing this took me a week of thinking, turning over thoughts in my head like stones being smoothed by a current, with painfully simple sentences clunking heavily off my fingers like pebbles, and having to chisel away at this marble block of a run-on paragraph before it could resemble anything like art. I feel like part of my brain has died, like this new way of thinking and creating is harder and slower and… what’s the word… it’s right at the edge of my mind, I know there’s a word, but I can’t remember… like that.

I also know that my thoughts are deeper. Richer. Steeped in more wisdom, fuller experience, and expanded perspectives. I think more carefully about what I’m saying, the message I’m sending; I’m more open to changing and editing and admitting maybe it wasn’t perfect the first time, admitting maybe it doesn’t need to be perfect at all.

New things that matter come alive, and with them, death to the things that don’t as much, anymore. This is a part of life, a part of the matrescence journey.

More things that have come alive in my matresence journey that I’m learning to process and lean into and celebrate:

Compassion, taking the place of judgment and scoffing.
Advocacy, taking the place of passivity and timidity.
Flexibility, taking the place of rigidity and perfectionism.
Anger, taking the place of indifference and apathy.

What has become alive in you since starting the journey of matrescence? Can you name any ways that it has made you fuller, wiser, stronger, more awake, more involved, more able to see?

This post is part of a blog hop with Exhale—an online community of women pursuing creativity alongside motherhood, led by the writing team behind Coffee + Crumbs. Click here to view the next post in the series "Alive."