I got asked the other day what it’s like to become a mother for the first time. I can’t speak for everyone but, here’s what it was like for me.

Imagine if you will you’re the janitor of a major business conglomerate. You’re happy in your job. Even if you wish you could do more or be more. Day to day you don’t worry about anyone else but yourself. All you have to do each day is do your job. If you’ve done that, then everything is good.

When you go home you walk your dog, you have dinner. Watch some TV and relax before bed time. You lay in bed for a while reading and then you sleep. All night.

The house is not so bad. It’s not too messy and it’s quite livable. You’re quite happy with how your life is going.

One day, you wake up like every other day. Nothing is different. You’re comfortable and you know where everything is. You know what you’re going to do that day. Everything seems just right.

You get to work just like every other day. You’re all set to grab your stuff and make a start when all of a sudden someone grabs you by the hand and drag’s you to the “big office”

They plonk you down in the chair, behind the mahogany desk and tell you that from now on, you’re in charge. They give you no explanation and they don’t leave any instruction’s.

All of a sudden you find yourself having to make choices that will affect everyone else in the building. You have to do everything and you have no idea how to do it.

Now you can’t just go home and go to bed. Now you have other people to consider. You have dinner parties to organise and you don’t even know the caterer’s number. Now you have employer’s who look to you for things to do and who don’t always do what they are told and they make life so difficult that you never seem to be able to stop thinking about it.

All you can do is learn on the job. And that, is hard. You start from scratch. Everything is new. Everything is different. And for some reason, nothing is where it used to be.

You’ll probably read some books. Books that tell you the best way to run the business. Maybe you’ll get yourself two or three (or more) books about the same thing…but they’ll all tell you different things. It’s all so confusing and there are no night classes to take to learn how this all works.

But then one day, after weeks of wracking your brain trying to figure out the button’s on the phone, you transfer a call and it works! The next, day you find a little book that tells you all the people that you can lean on for support. And sooner or later you’re running the business like it was never any other way.

Slowly things start showing up. Where once you thought you’d lost them or misplaced them, they appear exactly where you had left them. Soon, you forget that there ever was a cleaning job for you down in the basement that you were quite happy doing. You forget your old life and this new life running everything and being responsible for everyone else doesn’t seem so bad.

It took a while. But you got there. And now you just wouldn’t have it any other way. You will always remember how hard it was to start that new job and have no manual to follow and no training to get the job done right. You start to see that what really needed to happen was you needed to learn how to do it your way. Without the books and without the mentor over your shoulder telling you how you should be doing it.

And THAT, is what it was like becoming a mother for the first time. You go from one way of life on one day, to another on the very next. And you have no idea and even though you have some idea it’s all different to how you imagined it would be. Things are sloppy and messy and unorganised for a while. Things get forgotten and left behind. For a while, you miss the old life. The one where you had nothing but your life and your job and your things to worry about. But slowly, taking half an hour to leave the house instead of three minutes becomes normal. You start planning differently…and it all just gets easier.