I’ve already shared my baby’s arrival with you on Instagram and promised a proper blog post on motherhood that would do justice to the past four months.
Needless to say, being a mom is indescribable. It’s a forever project that you can’t put on pause. It’s the best version of “handmade” I know. The biggest project I’ve ever embarked on, and that’s why it has the prominent place in my life and of course in this blog.
The last months have been a huge discovery for me and an immeasurable challenge. If in many of my projects I move forward without fear of a “blank canvas”, this new “blank canvas” occupies all my thoughts, worries and joys. It is something permanent and very sudden. And it relativizes all other things in life except the really important ones. It gives us a perspective of what is most valuable, of what we want to preserve and where we want to invest. This perception, at the level of motherhood, forces us, more than anything, to put it into practice, without postponements, rests or procrastination.
As a planner, when I found out I was pregnant I tried to prepare for everything. And there are things that society prepares us for. Today there are consultations, exams, books, courses and advice of all kinds. There are other things in the field of motherhood where I feel there is a lot of opinions but a huge lack of real information. But above all, nothing prepares us to surrender to the best and wisest knowledge of all: our intuition. And it was precisely in becoming a mother that I realized that despite so many years of studying, professional experiences, my adventures in so many areas, my handmade explorations, the information age we live in, the greatest skill I have to master to be a mother is in the use of my intuition. No handmade adventure has prepared me for this, no book, no course or work, no life experience, no advice. All of these things may have prepared me to be the person I have become, but in the end, the skill I ask for most today, on a daily basis, is my intuition. Very human, brutish and sometimes hard to understand.
It is with my intuition that I understand my baby’s needs, it is with it that I relativize the mountains of (mis)information that reach me daily, it is it that blinds me from comparisons and vain advice. It is by its non-universal measure that I measure the advantages and disadvantages of my choices, that I know the uniqueness of my situation as a mother and a person, of my relationship with my son in relation to the rest of the world. It is in my intuition that I lean when, even if different or controversial, my choices are made every day.
It was three months of the turnaround that all the mothers talk about out there. A kind of singularity that is incredibly widespread. I certainly not to forget the permanent worries and fears that were born to stay and that I have yet to learn to deal with. Nor the sleepless nights that the body readily dismisses. And all those things that mothers don’t talk about openly because they raise storms of controversy. But for me, for every mother, there is a singular aspect that affects all but is incredibly different for each one. It is what we call “a life change.” But it goes far beyond taking care of someone and forgetting about yourself. Because, to me, it has forced me to hold back more, to collect myself even more, to know myself better in order to know my son better and to take a path that only I can take and only I will know how to take for him. It’s the stories that only have intensity in my heart, the silly things he makes that only I see and laugh at, the conquests that only have value for me. It’s like watching the greatest movie of all time running in front of me and to which only I watch and have access, attentively and intensely. The one in which I am a spectator and an actor and of which I don’t want to miss a second of each of my versions. A generalized singularity: we all agree that it is, but none of us feels it except from within, from the inside, from our gut.
