How Motherhood Keeps Rewiring You — Even Years Later
- The Lifelong Transformation That No One Prepares You For -
They don’t tell you how long it will last. They say: “Motherhood changes you.” But they say it like it’s a phase. As if it ends. As it’s a switch, click, done. As if the rewiring stops once the milk settles or your body returns to shape. But even now, almost 500 days after giving birth I am still changing. Not in one moment — in every moment. Not just in my body — in how I think, how I feel, how I react, how I am.
And no one warned me.
The Rewiring Begins Quietly
It wasn’t just the positive pregnancy test. It wasn’t just birth. It wasn’t just the moment I held her in my arms. It started when I began to feel her from the inside. Her movements. Her rhythms. Her silent company before she had a name. And somewhere in there, something started rewiring while you realise that there will be this tiny human being completely depending on you.
I couldn’t think in the same straight lines. I became more sensitive — sometimes unbearably so (I was told 😉). The sounds, the lights, the world became louder. And unfortunaltey also my sense of smell. But I also became wider. I could hold more. Feel more. Be more. Even when I thought I was less.
I already spoke about the brain and neuroplasticity, but I can’t point it out often enough for people to understand that if the brain aka the neuroplasticity wouldn’t be able to change all throughout life, humanity would have been extinct a long time ago. But the ability to change and adapt is what keeps people moving. And in our case what changes us from woman to mother. No one calls that neuroplasticity. But that’s what it was. The maternal brain doesn’t just change once — it keeps changing. Because love is a frequency that reshapes you over and over again.
There’s No Going Back (Even When You Want To)
I tried, once. To go back to how I worked before. How I thought. How I planned. But the sharp lines of my past self had softened. My goals felt thinner. My time felt more sacred. My energy, more expensive. I was grieving her and myself and who I used to be — all at once. Some nights, I still do.
But there is something else here now. A part of me I never had access to before — a depth, a knowing, a presence I didn’t earn through books or years but through this daily, relentless, holy work of mothering. It didn’t all come from joy. Some of it came from breakdown.
From the moments I thought I couldn’t go on — and did anyway.
Letting Go Isn’t a Step. It’s the Path.
We talk about letting go like it’s a decision. One-time. Brave. Clean. But I’ve let go in layers. Slowly. Grudgingly. Sometimes crying. Sometimes grateful. Sometimes both. It’s like pealing an onion with many layers to it. I’ve let go of:
Control
Schedules
The idea that I can always protect her
The version of me who was “always available”
The voice that said I had to do it all alone
And every time I let go, something new appears. Not always immediately. But eventually. A new thought. A new capacity. A softness where there used to be steel. This isn’t regression.
It’s rebirth — again and again and again.
If you’re here, reading this, you’ve likely felt it: the quiet truth that you are no longer who you were, and yet… not yet who you’re becoming. This isn’t failure. This is the in-between. In some traditions, they’d call it a rite of passage. In mine, I call it Tuesday. Because it’s ongoing. Because every time I wake up and choose to show up — to feel instead of numb, to connect instead of control — I let the rewiring continue.
This isn’t a parenting style.
It’s a consciousness shift.
Somewhere along the way, I stopped waiting to be done changing. And I started trusting that every version of me — the tired one, the radiant one, the lost one, the lioness — was part of this spiral. Not a line forward. Not a ladder upward. But a spiral of return and becoming. Each turn rewiring me deeper into love. Into truth. Into her — and into myself.
