A Grand Shattering: After a Baby You Become a Whole New You

I have been thinking a lot lately about what Sarah Mangusa describes as “the grand shattering” that occurs when you become a mother. A disintegration of the self where the YOU you used to be is forever gone. I was thinking about this at a first birthday recently. The birthday boy’s mum was saying how the first year seems like an eternity. Somehow though it also goes so fast that you can’t quite believe that your newborn is suddenly a toddler. I got it completely. Sometimes I feel like the old me – the pre-mum me (the me I was only a year ago) is slipping through my fingers like a memory that I can’t quite grip onto. Her thoughts and feelings don’t seem like mine anymore, and sometimes I look at pictures and I can’t quite remember who I was in them.

One change that I did not expect was that my mind, so ever chatty and filled with self-contempt, knows when to be quieter now. Now that at any one time it is juggling the needs of two little people and ensuring that their day, week, month, year and next second is going well, it seems to have quieter moments. It is balancing the physical, emotional and psychosocial needs of two little people with the concentration and precision of a heart surgeon.

The night my babies were born my heart split open, completely achingly open, and I had this urge, this need to be there for them in a way that I had never felt I needed to be there for anyone. I loved them completely unconditionally. Their needs were prioritized before mine, to the point that sometimes I wouldn’t even have noticed that I hadn’t showered or eaten lunch until my wife arrived home at the end of the day. It wasn’t just my mind either, my body responded to them in a way it hadn’t before. When they cried the first time, that really worked up newborn baby cry, I remember clutching them to me and trying to breastfeed them as I wept.

Something happens when your heart is split open like that. I remember feeling all the love in the world that night. I was completely in the present moment. My whole life was broken down into what they needed and learning who they were. Thoughts about politics, and psychology, and Facebook… even about chocolate were replaced with silence as I spent time in the loved up twilight zone where I was able to soak them up. I basked in them like you revel in the sun when you arrive on your winter escape holiday.

It didn’t stay like that forever, and I am acutely aware that not everyone feels like that in the first week or weeks. The sublime happiness was replaced with exhaustion and all the stresses that come with learning about two newborns. But no matter what was happening my heart was split open and it would never be as closed as it had been prior. I was no longer just me, I was now permanently split into three people.

She was so right and it happens so suddenly – even with the nine months of preparation. Suddenly my heart was now in three parts and two of them were independent living, breathing hearts. And it was my job to guide them, and feed them, and nurture them, and fill their hearts with all my love and reassurance until they knew with complete certainty that they were enough. It was my job to explain the inexplicable and guide them through a world that I knew so little about.

Being split into three people can be exhausting, and a lot of the times my eyes are barely open. But somehow this constant distraction is a keyhole from which I now have more focus and clarity than I have ever had before. I dove in head first to both the grand shattering and all that came after it. I have felt all the love in the universe. I have held the personification of all my hopes and dreams in my arms. I have watched my babies grow and change before my eyes.

My mind has been blown. My heart has been broken, and shattered and filled with so much love it overflowed and leaked out my eyes in the purest of tears. My world has been shaken, and everything I once held to be true has been moved. And just like the Phoenix that rises from the ashes, and like my mother, and her mother and all the other mothers before me, I have risen and grown and come to realize that women’s hearts thrive when they are split wide open.

I have realized that the old me didn’t know the kind of happiness, the kind of aching, the kind of breathlessness that comes with watching your living breathing hearts grow and learn. I realize that even though I have been shattered into a million tiny pieces, I know feel more whole that I have ever been.



Kat Stanley is a storyteller, research lover and conversation starter. She writes blogs that she hopes will help other women find a voice for some of those soul shattering and life altering events that life throws up. In her spare time, she is trying to figure out how to fold a fitted sheet.