
There were many things I expected about motherhood, thanks to friends, family, TV and movies. I expected to be consumed with love, spend hours talking to strangers about the frequency and consistency of poo, to passively aggressively tag my husband in the meme instructing dads to ‘take the damn photo’.
I’d heard whispers that taking a trip alone to the supermarket had the potential to be the highlight of your week. That when your baby had finally fallen asleep you’d spend hours looking at photos and videos of them.
However there have been a few things that have caught me completely off guard. Let me explain.
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1. I can no longer listen to true crime podcasts.
I spent many a weekend in my twenties lapping up Law & Order SVU marathons nursing a hangover. I, like so many others who consume this genre, have a morbid curiosity when it comes to murder. Before I became addicted to true crime podcasts, I would watch Criminal Minds, Crime Investigation Australia, any crime doco I could get my eyeballs on.
My love of podcasts was ignited by the first season of Serial, an investigation into the murder of highschool student Hae Min Lee. I was hooked, and from there I listened to Sword & Scale, Australian True Crime, Casefile and True Crime Conversations to name a few.
During my pregnancy all I wanted to consume was baby content, so I saved a whole heap of episodes to listen to while on those really long walks I was apparently going to be taking.
Turns out not only did my son hate the pram, but that I can no longer listen to anything that revolves around murder or kidnap, or crimes involving children. My heart starts racing and I start picturing a world in which this may happen to my own child and that’s it, I've gotta switch it off.
2. I can’t get through a birth scene without bawling my eyes out.
From Charlotte’s “I curse the day you were born” water breaking scene in Sex and the City to Kourtney Kardashian pulling her son Mason out of her own vagina. It doesn’t have to be the storyline and sombre music featured in One Born Every Minute to set the scene. If there is even a whiff of a birth, I can feel the tears come on instantly.
There’s something so beautiful about watching a baby come into the world now that I'm a mum, it really hits me straight in the chest.