Before I became a mother, I thought I knew what strength looked like.
I imagined the people who walked into a room and owned it. The ones who held their heads high, rarely seemed anxious and carried themselves with an almost unshakable confidence. I thought strength was being able to rise to a challenge and remain steady. To know what to do. To cope.
I still think those things are forms of strength. But motherhood has made me notice another kind. It is quieter and it doesn’t announce itself.
It is the ability to keep going when you are exhausted. The resilience to keep showing up, while making mistakes and learning as you go. It is finding the strength to be present for your children while still trying not to lose yourself in the process entirely.
That is not to make motherhood sound negative, because it isn’t. It is the most wonderful, deeply loving thing I have ever experienced. I loved being pregnant and I have loved being a mum at every stage. But it can be hard, and it asks things of you that you didn’t know you were capable of giving. And love and difficulty can exist in the same place.
Nothing prepared me for the depth of love I would feel for my daughters. It isn’t dramatic or fleeting. It is constant. It sits underneath the ordinary moments of everyday life, and it doesn’t become less powerful simply because it becomes familiar. If anything, it deepens as they grow and it is watching them grow and become more fully themselves that has changed the way I think about strength.
It is their strength that often stops me in my tracks. Because it turns out children are incredibly strong. They experience so much more than we sometimes realise. And the strength they need to navigate the world often goes completely unacknowledged. Often, they don’t have the words to explain what they are feeling and sometimes they don’t even recognise that they have been resilient or shown strength. Not in the way I once understood strength. Not because they are fearless or certain of themselves. Often, they are neither.
They worry. They compare themselves. They feel left out. They get embarrassed. They fail at things their friends can do. They hear a careless comment and carry it around for days. Sometimes they don’t even know why they feel the way they do.
I see it in my daughters and in other children too. I see it in the deep breath before walking through the school gates on the days when they’d rather not. In the disappointment of not being chosen. In the sadness of being left out. In the embarrassment of not being able to do something their friends can do without thinking.
I see it in the effort it sometimes takes to hold themselves together for an entire school day because there simply isn’t anywhere to fall apart.
Then they come home. Sometimes they are tired and irritable and want to lie on the sofa and stare at a screen. Sometimes they cry over something that, to an adult, seems impossibly small, but it isn’t.
And perhaps that is the part we forget. The older my daughters get, the more I realise how much children are asked to carry. They need to be confident, but not too confident, be kind, but not let people take advantage of them, work hard, but not to make anyone uncomfortable with their ambition. They are told to be themselves, but preferably a version that everyone else finds acceptable. They must always try hard and give everything a go, stay curious, and never fall apart.
They never get to switch off from the noise or the many opinions about who they should be and how they should behave and what they should achieve. At times, I want to just protect them from everything, from disappointment and rejection, unkind words and the little ways the world teaches them to make themselves smaller, quieter and easier to accept. But I’m learning that it’s not my job.
People always say motherhood teaches patience. It does, and it teaches endurance, too. But I think, more than anything, it has taught me awe and strength. There is something extraordinary about watching another person slowly become themselves. You spend years thinking you are shaping them, only to realise, quietly, that they have been shaping you too.
So, what my daughters have taught me about strength isn’t confidence, certainty or perfection. It is the quiet determination to keep becoming yourself and navigating the falls. You don’t arrive at strength; you grow into it.
My daughters are still learning who they are and I think, because of them, I am too.
Written by Corinna Gough