I don't think I've changed all that much since becoming a mom. If I've changed I've just become more like myself than ever—more of a homebody, more attached to having a plan—an amplification of who I was before.
One thing has definitely changed: I cannot learn about a child dying without starting to cry. It can be fiction, it can be non-fiction, it can be a 1,000 word essay or a 10 word tweet, it could have happened yesterday or 100 years ago—whatever it is, I will shed tears. Same with a baby being taken from its mother or lost in some way.
Of course these kinds of things were always upsetting, but I don't ever remember crying over them before. Not unless I had a personal connection to the tragedy. Learning about a 1-year-old who died of scarlet fever 159 years ago is not exactly new information that requires my immediate emotional response. And yet, I will now cry over it.
It makes sense, of course. In the course of human history, mothers who are attached to their babies probably do better on average in getting those babies to adulthood. Obviously I'm crying about my baby, and the idea of anything happening to him, but I also find myself crying for all the women who have had to live through their children's deaths.
Up until about 200 years ago, half of all children didn't live to their fifth birthday. That is so much cumulative grief, I don't even know how to think about it. So instead you will now find me over here crying about it occasionally.
