Let me start off by saying I am not an expert. I do not claim to know how every person feels going through this type of situation. I only know what I go through every day. I have only been doing this for a year and a half and I’m still trying to find my footing. Every single mother has a different situation, and a different story to tell. My story is that I am single, living with my parents, trying to go back to school to become a teacher, while also raising the most perfect little (almost) one-year-old boy, Cody.

I can start out by saying all the cliché’s you hear are true: this is hard, exhausting, truly life-changing and you’ll permanently have the smell of poop in your nose. But even the most cliché things have their contingencies attached.

Taking care of a baby is painful and exhausting. Besides the obvious pain you think about when you hear the word pregnancy, carrying a 10+ pound baby everywhere all day long will make you sore in muscles you never knew existed. When you finally get the chance to relax, it’s time to get back up and get back to it. Then you add exhaustion to the mix. You get up every one to two hours every night and try to get as much sleep as you can. I’ve pulled my fair share of all nighters for midterms and finals for school, but nothing compares to the exhaustion that is taking care of a baby. You’ll also exchange your night owl tendencies to be a morning bird.

But these few things aren’t the point. They are just small adjustments when it comes to really looking at the big picture.

When I found out I was pregnant, I was living 600 miles away from home, with my sorority sisters and had just turned 21. I was nowhere near any huge step like this; my maturity level was far too low to figure out how to handle a pregnancy. So the second that test came back positive it all became clear to me. One second I was a single, 21 year old only living for herself, and the next I was single and about to have a baby on my own. There are many options when it comes to pregnancy but there was only one for me. I didn’t even consider anything else. My whole life became providing for my baby.

Within two weeks I had taken finals, told my whole family I was pregnant and moved back home. Then within the pregnancy, I heard its heartbeat, felt it move and truly giving butterflies in my stomach a new meaning, then it went from an “it” to a “him” to “Cody”, and then I finally met him for the first time. All these external changes are happening over these seemingly long, but short months that when you stop to look back you realize something major is going on.

You’re not you anymore. The person who had sleepless nights out with friends now has sleepless nights in soothing a newborn. I’m a parent now, raising a baby on my own. I was this new person in a blink of an eye and I had no idea how to handle it. It’s a challenge to find a balance between the person you were before and the person you are now. It’s startling how fast this change happens, you can’t keep up, and neither can the people around you.

The relationships in your life take a huge hit. As much as you don’t want them to change, there is no way they won’t. You don’t mean for it to happen, it just does. You now have to make sure every restaurant you go to is kid friendly and that you aren’t out too late. Over the course of time, it weighs down the friendship. It’s not on purpose or for a lack of trying, it’s just that you are in a very different part of your life than your friends. You can’t be the person you once were. While you do genuinely want to spend time with your friends, you also want to curl in a ball and get reacquainted with the inside of your eyelids. And because of that, people will say you’re boring, and decide not to hang out with you anymore. It makes you realize who your true friends are and, sadly, who aren’t.

Then your family dynamic changes too. You start to view parenting differently and take notes on how the closest people in your life parent their kids. You view them through a new scope. Living at home also has its challenges because you can’t go at the pace you once did or do things the way you’re used to. It’s no longer accepted and you’re forced to change even more. Some relationships grow stronger while others fizzle out. You want to stay in touch and keep up all the relationships you once had, but you can barely remember where you feet are at the end of the day. You desperately want to keep all your friendships, but the sad reality is that it might not happen.

Then comes scrutiny. People are always ready to step in to tell you what you’re doing wrong. I don’t know why having a baby makes people feel they have the right to tell you how you should parent or care for your child. Strangers off the street are ready to jump in and tell you how to parent. I’ve had a woman tell me flat out I was wrong about my sons hair color. Then, a checker at the grocery story lectured me for five minutes on how my son was too small for his age. “He must not get enough food, you need to feed him more, honey!” She even called another worker over to confirm her word. Then you have your family, all meaning well and more knowledgeable than you, telling you what to do and how to do things. As much as you appreciate it and want the advice, it still ends up feeling like you don’t know what you’re doing. If there is one thing worse than being scrutinized by everyone you encounter, it’s the feeling that you don’t know what you’re doing and don’t know how to care for your child correctly.

And while all of these things begin to pile up on you, you start to feel this empty feeling. You realize you’ve never felt more alone. You have to readjust your relationships, learn how to parent while under a microscope to be picked apart. There is so much change that occurs that leaves you so confused about how to handle your life. Your confidence is depleted and you’ll feel yourself wishing another close friends birth control won’t work so you have someone to confide in, and they will really get it.

You go through these huge changes, then need to change more according to many people that you reach a breaking point. You finally have to stop and realize that you need to grow on your own, and at your own pace. You have to gain your own confidence in all the change, to find yourself in all the criticism. You have to find your own way to do things and not let people make you feel bad about it. The balancing act becomes too heavy to bear sometimes and you break down. I always thought that made me weak, but it only makes me stronger. You can bounce back from the low points and have the ability to be better than before. Finding these little realizations didn’t happen overnight. In fact I still struggle with these issues daily. I couldn’t go through all these things or realize all of this without one simple thing: Cody.

I never knew my heart was capable of loving someone this much. When I had Cody, all the hate in my heart vanished. Through the loneliness, change, and even child birth, I still would choose this life over any life I could have had. Sure I think about how nice it would been to have continued on the way my life was headed. I would have my degree and ready to begin my career as a teacher. But this is the way my life was meant to go, I got my boy out of it. Cody has made me a better, brighter person. He makes me strong and gives me the courage to be the person I want to be. Going through all the really rough parts is worth it every time Cody smiles at me. Most days are hard work, but it’s easy to love someone as much as I love him. All I want to be in this world is a good mom for my boy, and I’ve never felt more capable of anything in my entire life.