When I was heavily pregnant with my first child I noticed a certain look that a lot of other mother's gave me. It wasn't an unkind look, it was a very warm, compassionate and somehow intimate look. But it was also a knowing look. I hadn't yet had my child so I couldn't properly interpret the message in that look and I wasn't exactly sure what it was that these strangers could possibly know about me. And if I'm honest their looks repelled me:

"I will not be like you", I thought to myself, averting my gaze, "So tired, and worn out, so smothered by your children. I will be different. I will remain myself. A separate entity. A woman, not just a mother."

But now, with the advantage of hindsight, I can better understand that look. In fact I'm quite certain that I've given it to other pregnant women on occasion. It is a look that says:

"Huh! you're free now. But wait, just wait. In a few short weeks your life is going to be tipped upside down and turned inside out, everything you know to be true today will be different; you, your experience of the world, your very soul, will be irrevocably changed. You will be one of us......a mother.....and MotherLove - and all the immense joy and uncertainty and vulnerability and fear and longing and hope and paralysing foreverness that goes with it - is going to change you. Your life will have a new weight; a joyful heaviness that you will never, ever be free of. That carefree jauntiness in your step will be no more......"

And I can also understand how unappealing this truth can be to women who are not yet mothers:

"I will not be like that. So messy, so squishy and formless, my identity so wrapped up in my children, I will not be so...so....motherly."

There is such an enormous divide.....

.......................................................

When my first child was born (by emergency C-section after a frightening attempt at induction)I was blissed out, high on love ( and painkillers), I couldn't stop smiling......It felt like Christmas and my new son was the best and biggest, most wonderful present Santa had ever brought me. And this motherhood job was surprisingly easy. We both took to breastfeeding immediately and he was a calm little thing....being a mum was a toddle.

But then, on the third day, I started to weep. I howled and howled and howled. This was dreadful. This was too much. I loved this little boy so much that my heart literally ached. The world was suddenly terrifying. The future impossible and dangerous to navigate. How could I protect him? How could I ensure that he never suffered; from disease... heartache... rejection....humiliation....should I wrap him in cottonwool? Keep him home forever and ever?

I made bargains with God - "please please God keep him safe and happy and I will be good forever...I will do anything. ANYTHING."

And I made bargains with the devil. "Yes. you can kill everyone in China, in fact you can nuke the rest of the world if you will only keep him safe and free of pain and by my side. Everyone else can suffer. I do not care."

I cried for two entire days. And then it was time to leave the hospital. I wiped my nose, collected my darling son and took him home.

And though I was happy and loved being a mother that dreadful fear remained for quite a while and was reinvigorated each time I had another baby. It is, thankfully, a lot less intense now, and despite what I imagined when my boys were babies...I do not collapse each time they scrape their knees, or are emotinally hurt by one of their friends . They are tough, these little people, and they have to navigate the world for themselves and they have to suffer (not because I think it is good for them) but because it is unavoidable.

But the fear is still there, buried deep, but ever-present. ......What does the future hold?