Learning Motherhood Before I Learned Myself
Nobody prepares you for the silence after giving birth. Not the peaceful kind….the heavy kind. The kind that sits on your chest when everyone leaves the hospital room and it’s just you and this tiny human who depends on you for everything.
I remember leaving the hospital with Aiden, still sore, still unsure, still barely believing I was someone’s mother. I held him close and gentle like he was glass. My body felt foreign. My life felt unfamiliar. And yet, all I could think was, I hope I don’t mess this up.
At 18, most people are learning who they are. I was learning how to swaddle, how to breastfeed, how to survive on three hours of sleep. I was learning motherhood before I had the chance to learn myself. The first nights were the hardest. The house was quiet, and every sound Aiden made jolted me awake. I was terrified something would happen when I closed my eyes. Terrified I wouldn’t hear him. Terrified I wouldn’t be enough. And under all that……the postpartum hormones, the exhaustion, the chaos of it all…there was this deep level of loneliness. Not because I didn’t have support, but because i felt no one understood.
My friends were out living the life we were supposed to be living, and I was pacing the hallway with a baby on my chest, humming lullabies at 3 a.m. And then there was the judgment. The stares. The assumptions. The whispers. People talk to teen moms like they’ve already read our ending. Like we’re a statistic. Like we don’t stand a chance. Everywhere I went, someone had something to say even if it was just in their eyes. That I was too young. Too irresponsible. Too naive. That I had thrown my life away. But what they didn’t see was how fiercely I loved my child. How determined I was to show up for him, even on the days I didn’t know how to show up for myself.
After Aiden was born, I went back to school. A High School with a teenage parent program, the one that became a lifeline. I’d walk in with my diaper bag, my textbooks, and a knot of anxiety in my stomach, hoping no one could see how overwhelmed I was. But inside that room, surrounded by other teen moms, I finally felt understood. Nobody judged me for being tired. No one questioned why I looked worn out. We shared fears that made sense only to young mothers trying to rebuild their lives from scratch.
And still, I had to grow up fast. I learned how to make bottles before I learned how to budget. I learned how to advocate for my baby before I ever learned how to advocate for myself. I learned resilience not because I wanted to, but because I had to. Aiden became my reason for everything. My reason to get up. My reason to fight. My reason to heal things in myself I didn’t even know were broken. But I won’t romanticize it some days were hell. There were days I cried on the bathroom floor because I was so exhausted I felt hollow. Days I questioned whether I could do it. Days where the weight of responsibility felt like too much for someone who still felt like a child herself. And yet, every time I looked at him every time he curled his tiny fingers around mine or looked up at me with those innocent eyes I felt something shift. Something soften. Something anchor me to the belief that maybe I was capable. Maybe I was strong enough. Maybe I wasn’t the failure everyone expected me to be.
Teen motherhood taught me a different kind of love. A different kind of strength. A different kind of purpose. It made me resourceful. It made me protective. It made me grow in ways I didn’t know I needed to. Aiden didn’t ruin my life, he helped me rebuild it. He gave a lost girl direction. He gave a hurting girl hope. He gave a doubting girl the proof that she could do hard things.
I look back now at that version of myself…18, terrified, overwhelmed and I don’t feel shame. I feel pride. I feel compassion. I feel in awe at how she survived everything thrown at her while raising a baby who became her entire heart.
People love to write teen moms off. But we’re the ones who learn how to turn chaos into routine. How to turn fear into determination. How to turn judgment into fuel. And how to turn a life we didn’t plan into a life worth fighting for. Because that’s what I did. That’s what so many teen moms do.
We don’t fall apart, we rise, quietly and fiercely. And I would choose Aiden again. Every time. Every version of me, past, present, and future would choose him