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How Motherhood Taught Me How to See Again
Published 4/13/26
Advice
I once tried to take my toddler on an adult vacation. There were cacti involved.
I won't say more except that I learned my lesson and a baby's foot paid the price.
So the next trip, I surrendered. Fully. We went to the place with the castle.
And when he met the mouse, the very famous, very large mouse, he shook with excitement.
Full body, couldn't contain it, arms frozen at his sides like he was trying to hold himself together.
And I stood there watching him and felt something come up my throat that
I can only describe as almost throwing up from how cute it was.
I get the adults that wear mouse ears now. I am one. Moving on.
But here's the part nobody warned me about.
Later that same day, there was a splash pad. And my son found a puddle, a glorified puddle, in the middle of the most magical place on earth, and he lost his absolute mind over it. Just jumping. Over and over. Same energy as the mouse. Same full body joy.
Then there was a little drum installation. Bongos, basically. He banged on them for twenty minutes like he was headlining a show. This tracks. He does this at home with anything that isn't a drum. The kid just likes to make a racket.
And somewhere between the puddle and the bongos it hit me: the castle had nothing to do with it. He would have had this exact same time at home. The joy isn't the place. The joy is just him. It goes everywhere he goes.
Which means it was always everywhere.
He's seeing everything for the first time. And somehow, so am I.
I used to look at puddles and groan about my shoes. Now I look at them and think, oh that's a really good one. He's going to love that.
I notice things on our walks now that I would have scrolled past before. Lawn decorations. Interesting rocks. The garbage truck that might as well be a parade float. We have strong opinions about our neighbors' yard art. We are personally invested in the new flamingo on the corner. Hi Shirley, love what you've done with the place.
He finds an empty coffee container on the counter and it's the greatest discovery of his life. Not the toys. Never the toys. The coffee container. Obviously.
Someone once pointed out that there's a quiet invisible job in motherhood, the noticing. The pointing out. The constant work of saying look at that so that they do. She's right. And once you see it you can't unsee it.
This is the part they don't put on the brochure. That having a kid doesn't just change your schedule, it changes your eyes. You start seeing the world as full of things worth stopping for. Because to him, it is. All of it. Always.
Motherhood Rewired Me. I Didn't See It Coming.
I want to be honest about who I was before.
I was not a stop-and-smell-the-roses person. I was a get-through-the-day person. Efficient. Slightly impatient. The kind of person who walked fast and had a lot of opinions about people who didn't. I looked at the world mostly as a series of things to get done and places to be.
I did not notice lawn flamingos. I did not have feelings about garbage trucks. A puddle was a thing that ruined your shoes and that was the whole story.
Then I had a kid and something quietly, completely rewired in me.
It didn't happen all at once. It happened in small moments I almost missed. The first time he stopped dead on a walk to stare at a crack in the sidewalk for a full minute and I almost tugged him along before I caught myself and thought…wait. What is he seeing right now? I crouched down next to him. Just a crack. But also ants. A whole situation with ants actually. Fascinating, if you're fourteen months old and this is the first time you've ever really looked.
I stayed down there with him for five minutes.
That's new. That's not who I was.
Motherhood didn't just give me a kid to take care of. It gave me a reason to slow down that actually worked. Every walk takes three times as long now. Every errand has a detour. Every ordinary day has approximately forty two things worth stopping for if you're paying the right kind of attention.
I'm paying the right kind of attention now. Finally.
And I think that's the thing nobody fully prepares you for, not the hard parts, not the sleep deprivation, not the logistics of keeping a tiny human alive, but the way it quietly opens something back up in you. The wonder you forgot you were capable of. The ability to look at a completely ordinary moment and think, genuinely, this is the best thing I've ever seen.
A glorified puddle. An empty coffee container. A very famous mouse.
The best thing I've ever seen.
It's all in your camera roll. All of it.
When I scroll back through my photos I see it everywhere. The rock that absolutely had to come home with us. The cloud that looked like a dog if you squinted and believed hard enough. The puddle. The bongos. The face he made trying something new that I somehow caught at exactly the right second.
Thousands of photos of completely ordinary days that somehow add up to everything.
For a long time I did nothing with them. Not because they didn't matter, they obviously did, but because when would I? I was busy living it. I was busy noticing the next thing for him, pointing at the next garbage truck, keeping up with someone who finds genuine wonder in an empty coffee container.
Until, finally, I found a system easy enough for me to use. Every month, a little book of whatever that month held. The big stuff and the ordinary and everything in between, and it doesn’t even need to be perfect. And the act of going through them, actually looking, actually noticing what was there, feels a lot like what my son does every single day.
Seeing it all like it's the first time.
Turns out that's pretty good practice for anyone.
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