was one of those women – and we may be a majority – who think motherhood is not going to change them. I was too smart for that, I thought, too sophisticated, too modern. Within days after the baby’s birth, I’d be working again, I’d be wearing my slimmest jeans and highest heels, going out with my husband to all our favorite places, baby in tow.
“We have a technical term for this kind of thinking,” says David Shane, a clinical psychologist in San Antonio who specializes in parenting issues. “It’s called denial.”
Oh, yeah, I was in denial big-time. I was also blissfully ignorant and profoundly unaware. I didn’t understand that having a baby would not only forever alter the rhythm of my days and reorder my closest relationships, but would revolutionize who I am as a person, all the way down to my soul.
Most women go through this kind of transformation, though they may not realize how deeply or in what ways they’ve changed until much later, when the chaos of the early years of parenthood subsides and they have a chance to take stock. Having a child, for men too but usually more intensely for women, tends to be a through-the-looking-glass experience, with one’s values, emotions, priorities, beliefs, one’s very sense of self turned upside down.
And it’s not just our psychology that changes with pregnancy and childbirth, but the actual chemistry of our brains. Having babies, according to the experiments of neuroscientist Craig Kinsley, Ph.D., make women, in a word, smarter.
“The brain of a late-pregnant female resembles a hot rod, gearing up for the increased demands about to be placed on it,” says Kinsley, chairman of the psychology department at the University of Richmond, who was inspired to undertake his work by the changes he observed in his own wife when they had kids. And the benefits don’t stop once the baby is born: Kinsley’s animal subjects were faster learners and had better memories throughout their lives.
“The reproductive changes we and others are observing may represent a wholesale alteration of brain and behavior that reaches into many more facets of the female’s life, and for significantly longer, than we’ve ever realized,” says Kinsley.
Having children, then, introduces us not only to a new way of life, but to a new universe within ourselves.
“Every child evokes a new world in us,” says Harriet Lerner, Ph.D., a psychologist at the Menninger Clinic and author of The Mother Dance: How Children Change Your Life (Quill, 1998), who has two sons. “Your children will teach you many things about yourself, including things you might prefer not to know. You may discover a capacity for rage, worry, love, fear, guilt, and protectiveness that you didn't know was possible before you became a mom.”
Often, these intense deep changes are overlooked in favor of more obvious, temporary ones: the sleepless nights and schedule shifts, hormonal havoc, and financial pressures of the first months of parenthood. As disorienting as these early upheavals are, however, most of them pass as life calms down to some new version of normal.
But women themselves are never the same. What’s more, this internal revolution takes place whether you undergo a dramatic childbirth or an easy one, whether your baby is calm or colicky, whether you resume your old career or shift job and home and marriage along with having a baby.
“The basic facts of having given birth and being responsible in a global way, over the long haul, for this hugely vulnerable scrap of DNA – these are the experiences all mothers share and that are the most formative,” says Susan Maushart, a sociologist and mother of three who wrote The Mask of Motherhood: How Becoming A Mother Changes Our Lives and Why We Never Talk About It (Penguin, 2000).
While the changes that come with motherhood are virtually universal, the shape they take is often highly individual. Here, the ways that having a child can change your life.
