motherhood
I’ve been trying to write this for awhile now. Logistically, it’s hard to find time to do anything while caring for a baby, and when you do find yourself free for a moment while your little miracle takes a miracle of a nap - you just want to eat, or sleep, or finally transfer the laundry over to the dryer.
Which is why most of this post was written on my phone with one hand while breastfeeding.
I’ve honestly cried so many times writing this. From remembering how I felt at the beginning and from comparing it to how I feel today. This is the most vulnerable entry I’ve ever written and I’d be lying if I said the “publish” button didn’t feel daunting. I can’t promise this story is perfect, but I do promise it’s honest.
Motherhood is transformative, consuming, spiritual, incredible, and all-in-all the absolute wildest journey I have ever been on. It tore me open (literally) and completely changed my life in every way.
My heart lives outside of me now.
I.
Eleanor Anne Lancaster came silently into this side of paradise at 12:06AM on 1/26/2026. She’s got her lucky numbers already.
She was deep purple, almost grey-ish. I thought she looked like an alien. They laid her quiet body on my chest for only a moment, just enough time for Ryan to cut the umbilical cord, before whisking her off onto the infant incubator about 8 feet away. The distance felt like an ocean.
She made no sounds, and I frantically asked the room of people why she wasn’t crying. The doctor assured me she was okay, that she swallowed quite a bit of fluid on the way out, and they needed to clear her lungs. I laid open on the hospital bed, craning my neck, desperate to see any part of her, as the doctor stitched me up.
She was a month early. The NICU team kept commenting on how big she was (7lbs 11oz), but all I could think about was how I had never seen something so small and delicate. I craved the sound of her voice, and when a small cry finally pierced the air, something stirred deep in my chest.
Once she was stable, they bundled her up and laid her in my arms. Here she was, after all this time. After all this fear and hope and anticipation. She was here and she was breathing and she was mine.
I wept.
II.
Let’s rewind a bit.
The Friday before my scheduled induction on Monday, my OB’s office called with the results from Thursday’s bloodwork: My LFTs (liver enzymes) were on the rise - my body was no longer responding to the Cholestasis medication. They wanted me to go to the ER to be monitored and said I would likely not be going home. That weekend was the “winter storm” that never happened.
Long story short, I received little and unclear information from doctors while I was there. I ended up being admitted into the hospital on Friday but was still on schedule for a Monday/Tuesday induction. Then, late Saturday night, a doctor came in and told me I was being moved to Labor & Delivery. Oh! Okay.
They started my induction at 1AM. Foley balloon. Misoprostol every 4 hours. Manual water break. They started me on Pitocin at 1PM. I labored for about 22 hours and pushed for about an hour. Wildest day of my life.
The nitty, the gritty + the weird: notes from labor and delivery:
They blow up the Foley balloon catheter while it’s already inside. When they pulled it out, I shuddered.
The Misopostol causes nonlinear contractions: Every 5-6 minutes in the first hours, then only a couple the second, then every 2-3 minutes in the third, etc. Super confusing.
I was worried with the epidural I would not be able to feel anything and wouldn’t be as present during birth as I wanted, so I denied it until I couldn’t handle the pain anymore. That was not true at all. It was still painful and I would 12/10 get it again.
However, I did not know that the epidural made you lose feeling completely in your legs. I thought I was paralyzed and I was afraid to tell my nurse. (“Hey guys, um…”)
I had to be sandwiched between the nurse and the anesthesiologist because I had a contraction when she put the epidural needle in my spine. That, was terrifying.
I half-watched SpongeBob and Family Guy all day until it was time to push. Talk about what absolute nightmare fuel it is to hear Peter Griffin’s laugh while getting your cervix checked.
No solids during labor, so I was sustained by popsicles, broth, juice, and protein jell-o (Gag. I told the nurses it tasted like cat litter and refused to eat it)
You’re hooked up to so many things: IV, vitals, fetal heartbeat monitor, contraction monitor, catheter, foley catheter, epidural remote. I felt like Vecna.
Time wasn’t real in the hospital postpartum. Night and day blurred together with the constant stream of doctors, nurses, visitors, needles, and food trays. There was birth certificate and Social Security registration (sorry babe, you’re officially on the grid), lactation consultants and pediatricians, and a laundry list of tests to be run (including a 90 minute car seat test which for some reason had to be done at 12:30AM)
There was no peace and zero privacy in the Mom and Baby unit. Don’t know why I expected that after giving birth, but I digress. It was a constant cycle of nurses coming in and saying, “Ok mama get some rest, you need your rest”, and then approximately 15 minutes later you’re getting flashbanged by the overhead lights and, “OK MAMA TIME TO ______!” (fill in the blank with literally anything. Checking vitals. Medication. Blood tests. Fundal massage. Asking when the last time the baby ate and for how long [and somehow your answer is never good enough]. Get chastised for not resting enough. Rinse and repeat all day and all night.
I was so ready to leave the hospital. I had Ryan and my dad loading up the car before the discharge papers arrived.
III.
We were relieved to finally be home. We were in our own space, our sweet little bubble, and we could begin life as a family of three. We had no idea what we were doing, we were just in awe over her. It was perfect. I had my annual honeybun while I nursed her in my rocking chair. It felt sticky and well deserved.
Our first night, we laid down to go to sleep - Ellie in the bassinet at the end of our bed. As soon as my head hit the pillow, the fear enveloped me:
What if she dies? What if she stops breathing and dies? What if she needs me and I don’t hear her and I don’t wake up and she dies? Every panicked thought had the same horrific end. I was exhausted from being up for days, but I couldn’t sleep. I laid upside down in bed and watched her chest, and every time it fell - I was convinced it wouldn’t rise again.
Ellie’s feeding plummeted the day after we got home. She was impossible to wake to eat, so feeding her took over an hour every time. I tried all the tips and tricks, scoured the Reddit threads. Well-meaning friends and family tried to reassure me it was just your usual newborn sleepiness and advised tickling her feet or changing her diaper to keep her awake. Then I would tell them I put an ice pack on her belly and back in an attempt to wake her up and it didn’t work, and they would stare blankly back at me. In my gut, I knew something was wrong, but I had no way to prove it other than a long string of failed feeds.
Two days after being home, while making fun of how swollen my legs were, I remembered that the doctor wanted me to monitor my blood pressure at home because I was at risk for postpartum preeclampsia. I checked it. 168/99. I was in stage 2 hypertension. We went to the ER.
As they ran more tests on me, I pulled Ellie from her carrier in anticipation of another failed feeding session. Under the harsh fluorescence of the ER lighting, I noticed she had gone from tan-ish to a deep yellow. Her eyelids fluttered open. The whites of her eyes were yellow.
Of course. That’s why she can’t stay awake. That’s why she’s not eating. She’s jaundice.
My yellow baby
That ER visit was the catalyst for everything that had happened in the last week: the mental and emotional shock of having a baby, the growing pile of bills, my torn and bleeding body, and now here I was, topless in a diaper on the gurney in a triage room, hooked up to a bunch of machines again, nursing my yellow baby, and crying uncontrollably because everything felt like it was falling apart.
Don’t get me wrong, I know jaundice isn’t a huge deal. It’s super common, especially in babies born prematurely, and it’s treatable with light therapy and extra feeds to flush out the bilirubin, but that’s hard to do when your baby…isn’t eating. She was losing more weight than she should have and that was concerning.
After a confirmed diagnosis with her pediatrician, we began a long weekend of daily blood tests and desperate feeds because her numbers were so high and continuing to rise. We packed our bags and ended up at Texas Children’s, back in an ER for the third time in a week.
When the ER doctor came in the room and said her bilirubin number had fallen, relief washed over me. No hospital stay. Hallelujah. We could go home and continue sunbath treatments by the window. She was healing.
She slowly started eating better and waking up more as the bilirubin left her system. Her color changed into the soft pink it is today, matching her mom perfectly (how unfair is it that I’ve spent my entire life trying to obtain some sort of a tan, and I’m the same color as a two week old), and she was rapidly gaining her weight back. I cried tears of relief when we went in for a weight check and she had not only hit her goal weight, but surpassed it by a pound.
Health-wise, we were on the upswing. With medication, my blood pressure was slowly stabilizing, and Ellie was waking up to the world around her a little more every day. Getting to see her open her eyes more (which were no longer yellow), was exhilarating.
Emotionally and mentally, I struggled. Immensely.
IV.
I anticipated the postpartum hormone crash, but it was honestly so much harder than I thought it would be. I cried every day. I felt like I was going crazy.
Here are a couple (more sane) journal entries from those first weeks, panically scribbled into my journal:
“This is all so terrifying to me. I love Ellie so much + I think it scares me how much I already could not live without her, even when living with her has become the biggest, hardest, scariest change I have ever undergone in my life. This is all hard. This is all really, really hard.”
“I feel so insecure about everything that comes with being a mom + raising a child. I’m so afraid I’m going to mess her up or hurt her in some way, and I can’t seem to stop feeling this way. I’m sitting here watching her nap + all I can do is worry, worry, + worry more…I can’t turn it off.”
“Someone at MC last night asked if I felt like a mom + I didn’t really answer. It feels like, I have a baby. I am a person with a baby, but no, I guess I don’t feel like a mom.”
A week after I gave birth, Ryan convinced me to leave the house for the hour and a half between feeds. He knew I was struggling.
I didn’t know where to go, so I ended up at the most natural place to have a meltdown: the food court at the Woodlands Mall. I sat by the carousel and unabashedly cried into my untouched orange chicken and felt guilty for spending money. I had never felt so lost and disconnected from the world around me, from my own child. I thought, I can’t do this. I don’t know why I ever thought I could do this. What’s wrong with me?
I obsessively watched every woman that walked by me at the mall.
Is she a mom? She looks like she could have been a mom. Okay if she’s a mom then she got through this because she’s still here and that means I can get through it too.
I threw away the chicken and left. I cried the whole way home.
The first couple months felt like treading water, and oftentimes like drowning. I told Ryan that it felt like my entire world stopped and everyone else’s just kept going, even his sometimes. Every time the sun set, I felt an overwhelming feeling of dread, knowing today was like yesterday, that I wouldn’t sleep tonight, and that it would all begin again in the morning. The sleep deprivation was draining my soul, but the anxiety was fueling my body. I felt trapped and afraid of everything, most of all of something happening to her. I was afraid of germs, I hated people touching her, and I had intrusive thoughts and images of every horrific thing that could possibly happen to her. I didn’t trust anyone with her, including myself. I felt so defeated.
My days revolved around her demanding feeding schedule and it kept me at home, tethered to my rocker and feeding pillow (My Brest Friend, sponsor me). I missed my friends and I was ashamed at the jealousy I felt seeing them post about the things they were doing, free from the responsibilities I now felt weighed down by. I felt like that one Squidward meme.
This one
I didn’t know how to talk to anyone about how I was feeling because every time I tried explaining it out loud, I kept thinking about how I sounded like an awful, ungrateful person.
And the guilt, man. For not loving every second. For feeling like you’re failing as a parent from the starting line. Because you literally begged God for this and sometimes it got so hard that you didn’t want to do it anymore.
These are the parts that are so hard to talk about because the problem is really not the baby. The baby is what makes the hard things all worth it. It’s the hormones and the exhaustion and you scrambling for a sense of control like a light switch in the dark.
I confided in friends who are also moms and after word vomiting all of this, relief washed over me when I heard them say again and again:
I felt the exact same way and I promise you, it gets better. I know it doesn’t feel like it ever will, but I promise it gets better.
V.
Becoming a parent has been the biggest learning curve I have ever experienced, with the hardest growing pains. It feels pretentious to discuss my own “sacrifices”, but motherhood is full of them and they’re evident. From little things like not being able to use the bathroom when I need to or go to sleep when I’m tired, to larger more abstract things like freedom and time. Every choice I make, no matter how small, in some way or another is influenced by my child. Sometimes if I think too much about that, I start to panic.
But then there’s this other side, the side I struggle so much to put into words…
Like when I’m rocking her to sleep and she nuzzles her face into my neck and sighs, and suddenly everything that has ever happened in my life seems to have led to this exact moment, and I would take it all, every good and bad thing, if it meant I could just have this one single moment with her.
Or when I wake up to the sound of her cooing up at the sheep hanging from her mobile and I whisper “good morning” from my bed, and the sound of my voice alone makes her smile and start kicking her little feet in excitement.
A couple weeks ago, Ryan was holding her in his lap at church and she kept looking up at me and smiling, real big so that her eyes crinkled. I just sat there and smiled back at her with tears streaming down my face. When she looks at me, everything makes sense in the world. I could have sat there for the rest of my life.
She is everything to me. I can’t put the love into words because nothing feels good enough, big enough to accurately describe how my heart is consumed with the thought of her. She’s my daughter. I try to memorize the smell of her skin. I secretly record noises she makes because I’m afraid to forget them. I cry thinking about how I won’t be here to hold her when she’s an old woman. I’d give her the breath in my lungs and the blood in my veins if I could.
The joy I feel watching her grow, rolls being added onto rolls, and knowing my body sustained, brought forth into this world, and helps to steward hers each day, is insurmountable. Breastfeeding, which began with feelings of inadequacy and failure, has become one of my proudest journeys. She’s a growing girl!
What a privilege it is to struggle. I mean it. What an absolute privilege it is to struggle with all of this, because it means I get to be her mom. I wouldn’t give that up for anything.
I truly don’t know how I could have done this all without Ryan, but what’s new? He’s a gold star husband. He grounds me in reality when my brain takes me to scary “what if” places, encourages me to take time for myself, and changes out the Diaper Genie every time it’s full (my hero). Most importantly, he loves Ellie so deeply and so well. Fatherhood comes so naturally to him. He has truly seen me and loved me through the highs and lows of this season. He’s my safe place to land.
VI.
One night I was nursing her in the spare bedroom at our Wednesday night church group. As I rocked her, I looked out the window and saw the sun setting. I realized it was the first time in months that I wasn’t afraid for night to come. Not because I knew things were going to magically be easy, but because I knew I was capable of handling whatever it looked like. I finally started to believe in myself again. I can do this, I thought.
It gets better.
There wasn’t a singular moment that lifted me out of this darkness I found myself drowning in at the beginning, but rather a gradual and steady ascent back to the light. I’m still climbing. I am sustained by new mercies each morning, and I take things one day at a time like I should. I am growing into motherhood more and more every day.
Each week I feel a little more capable, a little less afraid, and a little more like myself again. I no longer just feel like a person with a baby.
Today is Mother’s Day, and I finally feel like one.
Cheers to my daughter, the light of my life. I love you, Ellie-Bellie.
