Being a woman comes with a slew of challenges. It can be tough to navigate the seasons of womanhood, even if you have all the tips and tools to sail through it smoothly.
I also want to highlight that being a man means dealing with a slew of challenges, too. In fact, being a human being means facing hardships regardless of how one identifies. No one is immune to the difficulties that come along with simply being alive.
With that being said, I want to address an ongoing internal battle that I’ve been experiencing as a woman for all of my 20s (so almost 4 years now) and even a year or two prior. I may be the numerical minority in this instance, but I do know a few other women my age who have also felt this way. Perhaps there are more women out there who have been experiencing this too, so if the conversation has to start with me, so be it.
Let me make it clear that I am fully aware that circumstantially, I am not stable. I do not have a significant other, I don’t have a house of my own, I am in a very selfish stage of my life, and it is not the right place or time. Essentially, I know I’m still a very young woman trying to find her way.
In spite of everything, I feel this deep, organic desire to be a mother. As I age, I’ve felt my maternal instincts grow, and it is the most bizarre feeling because I never knew that my body would try to signal to me that it’s ready for kids based on just sensations.
I’m not quite sure why I wasn’t warned about this happening. I was prepped for a lot of other things that would happen to me, but I had no idea that one day I would wake up and have intense yearnings to carry children. I’m definitely not the first woman to experience this sensation, but I’ve also only heard from a few close friends that they’ve felt a shift in their biological cravings. Being pregnant or postpartum brings an onslaught of thoughts about children, but why isn’t it talked about sooner than that?
When I was little, I always knew I wanted to be a mom. I might not have known what I wanted to be (career wise) when I grew up, but if there was one thing I did know it was that I wanted to have children one day. But when you’re seven years old playing with dolls, you may say that you want to be a mom and you may mean that, but you don’t really feel that. It wasn’t until I was in my late teens/early twenties that I started feeling like my body was catching up to my brain.
There have been days I’ve spent hours trying to understand this feeling. In college, I would question how I could feel so conflicted. College is a time to drink, study, prepare for your first real job, and do whatever you want. It was in no way, shape, or form a time for me to contemplate motherhood. Regardless, I constantly thought, “why do I have these thoughts and feelings?”
This hasn’t been a phase, either. It’s not that I just have “baby fever”. I mean, I do have baby fever, but that feels like it’s a rather surface-level way of explaining this feeling. I hear “baby fever” and think of watching a video or looking at a picture of a cute baby and feeling all warm and fuzzy inside. That, I think, is pretty normal.
What I’m explaining is a sensation that causes me to repetitively think, “How will I parent my kids? What kind of mom will I be? How can I teach my children right from wrong? Will they appreciate me as a human or just as their mother? What if I mess up? What if I try to protect them but end up hurting them? What if I don’t protect them enough?”
I have a constant dialogue in my head of parenting and raising my kids. I have no explanation for it. I don’t know when it started. I don’t know how it progressed over time. Nonetheless, it’s real, and it’s present whenever I find myself in a predicament or whenever I’m around children. My mind automatically switches to, “what would I do in this situation if my child were watching?” or “what would I teach my children to do if they were in this situation?”
You don’t have to be a doctor to scientifically explain why I’m feeling this way. I am a 23 year old female; I am of childbearing age. This may be normal, but it doesn’t feel normal for where I’m at in my life.
It’s also important for me to state that not every woman does, will, or even wants to feel this way. There are women who don’t want to be moms or can’t be moms, and that’s perfectly okay. There will be women who read this who will not resonate with anything I’m saying, and I’m here to say there’s nothing wrong with not having a desire to be a mother.
For me, though, I have a craving to have kids, and it comes from a place that I didn’t know existed until I started feeling my maternal instincts grow. I wasn’t aware that I could feel so connected to something that I haven’t gone through yet, and at times, I feel like I’m at war with myself trying to understand this sensation.
Like I said earlier, maybe this sensation is one that only a few women feel— I wouldn’t know considering it’s not something you really drop onto someone. I wouldn’t exactly say, “so I want kids but only from a biological standpoint,” in a conversation with women I barely know, just to get a feel for if I’m crazy or not.
I suppose I’m dedicating a whole post to explaining this feeling because there are a lot of challenges women feel they have to go through alone. I wouldn’t call this a challenge as much as I would call it a battle, but if you’re a rather young, care-free woman right now who happens to be plagued with the feeling of motherhood, know that you are not alone. I have learned that this sensation is internally conflicting, but it’s also indicative of how beautiful the stages of womanhood can be.
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