Is motherhood really that beautiful?

So a close friend asked me this last year. Is motherhood really that beautiful?

We became friends very unexpectedly. She became my neighbour and somewhere in those first few exchanges, something just clicked. I still remember the very first time we actually talked. A few minutes when she came with her family to visit the house. We simply introduced ourselves and something about it stayed with both of us.

Then life moved, as it does. They shifted, we became friends, I moved after I got married, then she got married and moved. Now we are in different cities. But when we talk, we talk more about the metaphysical world than the physical one, like thoughts, ideas, emotions and the internal landscape of things. She's one of those rare people who feels like a soul reflection. Very rare to find, yet very easy to recognise when you do.

So last year I went back home with my baby and we sat down for tea, she looked at me and asked, “Is motherhood really as beautiful as it is made out to be? As romanticised as it is in the movies, in the books? Is it really that great?”

And I said yes. Completely, absolutely yes.

I meant it. But let me try and say what that actually means.

If I have to describe what motherhood feels like honestly, it is the most hectic, emotionally demanding, physically demanding experience I have been through. Especially in the first few years, during the infant and toddler phase. I have just entered the toddler phase and it is a lot. What they say is true, it truly takes a village to raise a child. You need a support system around you. A strong one. Without it, I genuinely do not know how people do it.

And even with all the help in the world, it is still not easy. I think about my mother’s generation, my grandmother’s generation, who did all of this while also cooking, cleaning, working, holding entire households together. I cannot even fully imagine it.

The very first thing I felt when I found out I was expecting was fear. A very real of whether I would be good enough. And in that moment, the first person I thought of was my mother. How scared she must have been when she became a mother. How she carried that fear and still did such a brilliant job.

But here is what nobody really prepares you for on the other side of that fear.

There is a moment and if you are a mother you will know exactly what I mean, when your child comes back to you after playing somewhere for an hour. And the second they see you, their face just changes. This happiness in their eyes, while they are running towards you, stretching their tiny arms to hold you tightly, gleaming with all the joy in the world. And the feeling that comes with it, I genuinely do not have words for it.

A friend once said something that has stayed with me. She said that in your life, you might be one of the most important people to your parents, siblings, partner or some friends. But there is nobody in whose life you are everything. Literally everything. Except here. For your child, in these early years, you are everything, the comfort, safety, food, home, the whole world. You are not replaceable here the way you are replaceable everywhere else.

No matter how exhausted I am and I am exhausted, genuinely, regularly, like every toddler mom out there, there is something that makes you want to hold on for another half hour. To just be there, to comfort them. That feeling does not care about tiredness. It just exists alongside it, somehow. (P.S. Will surely write a separate write-up on the other side of motherhood, the sacrifices, the anger, the pent-up frustration, postpartum blues and much more.)

The look in a child’s eyes when they need you. When they are with other people and they find your face in the room. The innocence of it. It feels like being loved at the highest possible level, like being the most important person in the room simply by existing.

I have a habit of looking at things rather poetically, sitting with an experience and then, later, turning it over slowly to understand what it actually was. Motherhood has been no different. Looking back at this first year, the tiredness, the moments I could not even take care of myself properly, the learning and unlearning happening simultaneously, it has been a lot. All of it.

But nothing comes close to it either.

So when my friend asked me if it is really as beautiful as they say, the honest answer is yes. Not because it is easy or glamorous or what the movies show. But because of the emotional range of it, the highs and the exhaustion all wrapped together. It is unlike anything else. You feel everything, all at once, all the time.

And somehow, that is the most alive I have ever felt.