What Nobody Tells You
By Tanya Rolfe, CEO of Lovingly Signed and a mum.
I am a mum.
And there are things nobody told me. Things I wish someone had said out loud, before I found myself sitting in the dark at 3am, wondering if what I was feeling was normal.
It was. All of it. Here is what I know now.
Nobody told me that the moment they placed my baby in my arms, I would feel two things at once that had no right to co-exist together: the most complete I had ever felt, and the most terrified.
Nobody told me about Day Three. That on the third day, something shifts, the hormones drop, the adrenaline leaves and you will cry at everything. A spilled cup of water. A song on the radio. Nothing at all. You are not broken. You are right on time.
Nobody told me that loving your baby instantly doesn't mean loving motherhood instantly. That the bond and the exhaustion and the grief can all co-exist in the same hour, in the same body, without any of them cancelling the others out.
Nobody told me that the love doesn't always arrive the way the films said it would, all at once, like a wave. Sometimes it comes quietly. In pieces. The first time your baby grips your finger. The first real smile. A Tuesday afternoon when they are just lying there, and you look at them, and something in your chest rearranges itself permanently. However it arrives, it is yours. All of it.
Nobody told me that around Day Two or Three, something else happens too, something that sounds impossible. A kind of knowing. As if a manual was quietly uploaded into you. Instincts you did not have the week before. Trust them. You are stepping into something that has been passed down since the beginning. Of-course, you know what to do. And on the days that you don't, that is what the rest of us are here for.
Nobody told me that the mother I imagined I would be, patient, certain, calm and the mother I actually am have never met. And that the mother I actually am, exhausted and second-guessing and doing it anyway, turned out to be the better one.
Nobody told me that the hardest week isn't the first. It is the one when everyone goes home. When the meals stop arriving, the visitors stop calling, and the world quietly assumes you are fine. You may not be fine. That is also fine.
Nobody told me that the way your mother looks at you will change the moment you become one. Not because you are different. Because now you finally speak the same language.
Nobody told me that you will never again read a story, watch a film, or hear a headline about a child being harmed without it going straight through you. That part of you is permanently open now. It is the price of loving someone this much, and you will pay for it without thinking twice, every day, for the rest of your life.
Nobody told me that some days I would look at my baby and feel nothing poetic at all, just tired, and touched-out, and desperate for ten minutes of quiet and that this was not a failure of love. It is what love actually costs. And you are paying for it, every single day, without anyone handing you a receipt.
Nobody told me how long a 3am feed can feel. Or that the very hour you are watching the clock through right now. desperate for morning, is the one you will spend years trying to get back. The weight of your baby in the dark. That specific silence. It is already becoming the thing you will miss.
Nobody told me that you are already doing it. That there is no point at which you officially become a mother. You already are one. You became one the moment you first worried about someone more than yourself and you know exactly when that was.
You didn't just bring them into the world.
They made you.
At Lovingly Signed, we make gifts for new babies and the people who love them. We believe the early days deserve to be marked, not rushed past. If someone you love has just become a mother, we would be honoured to help you tell them what nobody else will.
Happy Mother's Day.
Tanya, and the Lovingly Signed team
