Dear pregnant self: This is what it feels like to become a mama

Dear past me,

This is future you writing. The one who has been through the full nine months of pregnancy. The one who gave birth and breastfed and stayed up all night with a baby full of gas and sore gums. This isn’t you, yet.

But it will be.

It’s hard for you to fathom that you will become me. You look at other mothers, mothers with squirming 1-year-olds or rampaging toddlers, but all that seems so far away. You can’t marry it together, your bump with those giggling, giddy kids. It seems miraculous that one will become the other. It’s too hard to believe.

But it will happen.

Right now you hold the baby inside of you. You are the only one who feels every kick as he wiggles and wriggles around. How can you begin to imagine how it will feel to pass that baby, that baby that inhabits you, that lives because you live, to someone else?

Sometimes it will be hard, to watch your precious little one getting passed around. He’ll seem so vulnerable out there without your stretched skin protecting him inside the cocoon of your stomach. But it will also be wonderful.

Just wait. Just wait until your mother meets him for the first time, the little quiver in her voice as she tells you he’s beautiful. It will remind you of the first time you brought your husband home to meet her, your boyfriend as he was then, and you knew that she knew that this man was special.

I know you dream of it, your husband holding his child, the child you brought into the world, for the first time. You imagine how it will feel to see them together. Will there be pride? Or worry? Will you feel happy? Will you feel put out?

Let me tell you.

You will feel all of those things, like watching a film in 3D high resolution with surround sound. Every emotion is more intense than ever before, so intense it is overwhelming. You’ll apologize to your husband for taking the baby back because he’s screaming and he probably needs feeding. You’ll feel like your intruding on their life-affirming moment, when you ask your husband to pass him to you so you can try, again, to get him to latch on. The midwife will tell you not to apologize, that it’s your responsibility to feed him and that’s the priority. She’s so sure and confident, even in the way she handles your precious newborn. That doesn’t live inside you yet.

But it will.

Time will race away from you and, before you know it, you’ll be spoon-feeding puréed vegetables from little Tupperware pots. You’ll be tired. More tired than you are now when the baby kicks every time you get comfortable enough to fall asleep.

But time flies by.

And someday soon you will be me, the mother of a 2-year-old. It’s the same baby you carried in your stomach, that made your belly wobble when he hiccupped and that kicked you when you drank orange juice. It’s the same one you gave birth to, the one you brought home from the hospital and placed in the crib next to your bed on that first night in the house.

Yet, he’s different now. He’s more whole somehow, a proper little person. He doesn’t know all the names for the parts of a face so when you call him a cheeky monkey, he strokes his chin and giggles. He loves wearing hats—bobble hats, summer hats, it doesn’t matter which—and he pulls them off better than you ever could.

He’s so perfect and wonderful and some days you’ll feel like you’re not good enough for him. You’ll be utterly convinced that any moment he’ll figure you out. “Mommy,” you imagine him saying, “you’re not that funny after all. And the activities you do with us aren’t very exciting, no matter how hard you try and make buying bananas fun. Can I get a different mommy?” Of course, he’ll never actually say this.

Because he loves you.

It was obvious from the start, in the way he used to look for you when someone else was holding him, searching you out in the room, making sure you were close by. He loved you when he gave you his first smile, his first giggle, his first step. I know you’re worried you’ll miss it because you have to go back to work, but he’ll save it for you, the stumbling toddle across the room from mommy to daddy and back again. It will be your reward for making it through the first year of parenting. By the time he’s two he’ll treat you by telling you he loves you, stroking your face and smiling because that’s what you do to him. He knows it means love.

All of this will come. Take my word for it; I’m the future you and I’ve lived it. But right now, enjoy these precious pregnancy moments because, even though it feels like it will never end, you won’t be pregnant forever. Breathe every second of it in.

But also know this: the best is yet to come.

Love,

The future you