A Mother Level - Adaptive

Motherhood involves incredible degrees of change and transformation - and it continues from the moment it begins.

We change inside. Our bodies are making new life, building bones, new hearts, new minds. Our chemicals react and make magical things happen. The most natural thing in the world; yet the most extraordinary metamorphosis there is.

Changes to our bodies. Changes to the way we view ourselves. Changes to our ambition and sense of purpose. Changes to the way we see our own parents, and how we relate to our siblings. Changes that expand us, and those that make us contract. Changes that require decisions and those that happen without our choosing.

All our resources change when we become a mother - our attention, our energy, our capacity. Our priorities, our values, our choices. Everything shifts. And often, we don't notice it happening. Too often, the world around us would rather not notice, or accommodate the change. We don't know or recognise what it, or we, have become. We adapt, and day-by-day find new rhythms, new patterns that work around the unpredictable shape of a family. We tune in, we work it out, we get on with it.

There is change in the body and mind. And there is change in how we relate to the outside. Our relationships shift, our ability to keep in touch changes, our expectations and histories begin a new chapter. Sex changes. Love changes. If we're not careful, we might look back and ask: how did we get here?

And there must be surrender to the changes outside of ourselves too; us in relation the world at large. We find ourselves in the rhythms of school holidays and maternity leaves; dictated to by the availability of swimming pool timetables and nursery opening hours. As in changeable weather, we adapt to our environments and make the most of our circumstances.

And at every point of change there is a goodbye to what has just been: a grief for the final hearing of a mispronounced word, or a favoured jacket too small, or a hand once willingly held. To steel yourself against the sentimental, we keep going, keep up, manage today's set of logistics; don't look back, don't scroll through the photos on your phone. It can make you long for something long gone.

Whilst we may not notice the changes in ourselves, we closely witness the changes in others. It can feel like a constant letting go, as skin after skin is shed. You get a strong sense of the passing of time when clearing out clothes too small in your children's drawers. Or that moment when they want to walk to school on their own. The only constant in parenting is change.

But change is life, right?

Yes. But in motherhood the rate and pace of change feels condensed, sped up, whirlwindish. It can be all consuming, so much so that it can spin you round and spit you out the other side.

The days are long but oh boy! the years are short.

But then, as mothers, we can find the concept of change for ourselves so very challenging: we find it hard to know what we want, or what to choose, bogged down in the logistics of the day-to-day and the week-to-week. Drenched in mental load. We lose a sense of self that knows the changes that we want to make. We get a bit lost.

And it can feel risky - change for our sake. We can't take risks like we used to; no, others rely on us now and so we must seek safety and security and fit in with the rest because too much change wouldn't be good for anyone. Would it?

Change is inevitable. We can't control it. It just happens. As mothers we are witnessing it every day in our children. We are brilliantly adaptable to their change - tuning in to the details, noticing the shifts, responding to the new needs.

But we fear it in, and for, ourselves. We turn down the noise of the changes we want to make, those directions not always clear, though they clang about in our ears. What if we're wrong? What if we make the wrong choice? What will that mean for our children? Will they suffer?

We watch our children change and develop and grow whilst putting our own growth on pause. Waiting until they might not need us so much, anymore. Oh but the pain of that, too! Don't stop needing me, please? When did that happen? I didn't notice... What a tension - that resistance to change can be.

What would it be like if we could accept (and embrace?) that we change as much as our children do? What if we could be comfortable with the changes that occur in our bodies, in our hearts, in our minds? What would we do differently if we embraced change more fluidly, even sniffed it out, to suit us, rather than it working, like a force, against us?

We adapt to meet the changing needs of our children. We innovate and learn and grow all the time - in parallel. We flex and shapeshift, sometimes uncomfortably so. We have a gift for change. We have been through so much of it. Yet it goes, like so much of mother skill, unnoticed, uncelebrated, undervalued. So underused.

And how much stability and rocksolidness we are expected to provide, as we work hard to adapt to new forces acting on both the inside and the outside? Pressed and pushed and moulded by what is expected of us, in the parameters we are given; and yet told to stay steady, keep rooted, be consistent.

Motherhood is a host of paradoxes. But/and we have an ability to adapt and change - in all respects - like few others. We are designed to meet the needs of our children, and in doing so experience transformation in ourselves. That really is a superpower worth harnessing, a gift worth sharing.