What happened when I became a mom

One of the things that threw me the most when I had my first kid—actually before I even had him, when I was still pregnant—was how outwardly different I felt. Everyone told me you become a new person when you have a baby, everyone told me how much I’d be changed, but what I didn’t realize was A) how much that was true, and B) how much I didn’t actually *want* to be changed. I really liked myself! I liked my life before I had my son (I like it now too, but for the purposes of not writing an entire phone book about this, let’s move on). I remember going in to actually have him and thinking “I’m a cat who’s gone too far up a tree, I can’t do anything but jump.” And jump I did, straight into a brand new identity.

When I was pregnant, I resented my husband for being able to go about his business not looking “expectant”—nobody had to know he was on the verge of parenthood. He could keep on drinking his stupid beer, wearing his stupid clothes, sleeping on his stupid back. I lived at the bott…