Everyone tells you that becoming a mother will change everything. And they are right. But that statement is so blanketed. So enormous and so vague that it does nothing to prepare you for what the changing actually feels like from the inside.
It is a trust fall. A long, open-ended, no-landing-in-sight trust fall. And the thing about a trust fall is that you have to be willing to keep falling before you know when or where or how you are going to land. You have to release the thing you were holding and just … go.
I started falling somewhere in pregnancy. I could feel it beginning … this cellular, identity-level shift that went so much deeper than the physical. My brain chemistry changed. My relationship to time changed. The way I saw my life, who I wanted in it, how I wanted to spend it, what I was willing to keep and what I needed to release. All of it came into a focus so sharp it was almost painful at first.
I could see so clearly what needed to go. And I could not make any of it go yet. The knowing and the actualizing are two completely different timelines. And the gap between them, that friction, is where I lived for a long time.
Over a year into the fall now, I am somewhere near a threshold. Things have shifted in layers. Slowly and then all at once and then slowly again. And I am starting to feel something I want to try to describe.
The in between, the middle of the trust fall, the place of not yet landed, is the most alive place I have ever been.
I know that might sound strange. The in-between is usually the part we want to rush through. We want the friction to resolve. We want the answer to arrive. We want to land.
But when I picture myself in the middle of this transformation, what I actually see is vastness. Open space in every direction. No map. No fixed destination. Just possibility, as far as I can feel.
And yes, that can be terrifying. But it can also be the most expansive, exploratory, curiosity-filled time of your life if you let it be. This is the time to try things. To go backwards. To hit dead ends. To test your edges and your boundaries and your capacity to keep promises to yourself. To let go of the expectation that the in-between should be resolved quickly and instead settle, really settle, into the discomfort of not knowing yet. And find out what is actually there when you stop fighting it.
Some of the most forceful versions of this in between that I have witnessed and lived (and I know you are to are) …
A breakup. Especially the early days, when the identity you built inside a relationship is suddenly untethered and you have no idea yet who you are without it.
Grief. The loss of someone who held a piece of how you understood yourself. The long, nonlinear process of learning to exist in a world that no longer contains them.
Marriage. The portal of choosing someone completely and feeling the edges of your individual self reorganize around that choice.
Any big threshold, really. Any moment that requires you to release a version of yourself before the next one has fully arrived.
Motherhood has been the most forceful transformation I have moved through. The most complete dissolve. And I have heard that from so many others. That nothing else quite compares to the totality of it.
But the in-between is the in-between, whatever brought you there. And I want to say to anyone who is mid-trust fall right now, you do not have to rush to the landing.
The falling is not the dangerous part. The falling is the alive part. The vast, open, go-anywhere, try-everything, keep-no-expectations part.
Be curious in it. Explore it. Let it be as expansive as it actually is.
You will land when you land. And you will have lived something extraordinary in the meantime.