They tell you to soak it all in.

They say it gently, like advice wrapped in a bow. Sometimes they whisper it over the hospital bassinet. Sometimes they chirp it in Target while you’re trying to remember if you already fed the baby or just thought about feeding the baby. It’s always said with certainty, as if soaking it all in is a choice you simply forgot to select on the motherhood menu.

I remember nodding along the first time, postpartum hormones sloshing around like an open cup in a minivan. Of course. I will soak it all in. I will cherish every second. I will remember this forever.

Reader, I did not.

And it took me years and three children to understand that this wasn’t a personal failure. It was a lie we tell new moms, well-intentioned but incomplete, like directions that skip the part where the bridge is out.

Here’s the part no one says out loud. You can’t fully soak something in when you’re drowning.

When Thomas was born, I thought exhaustion meant “a little tired.” What I got instead was a bone-deep, reality-bending fatigue that made time behave strangely. Days blurred. Nights stretched. I remember standing in my kitchen at 2 a.m., holding a baby who refused to sleep unless I swayed like a malfunctioning carnival ride, thinking, how are people romanticizing this?

They weren’t lying exactly. They were remembering it wrong.

Memory does that. It edits. It softens edges. It highlights sweetness and dims the fluorescent hospital lights and the way your back ached from hunching over a crib at ungodly hours. Memory waits until you’re safe to tell the story kindly.

In the moment, though? In the moment you’re not soaking anything in. You’re surviving.

By the time Carter came along, I was more seasoned and somehow more humbled. I knew better than to expect a highlight reel. I also knew that loving a baby doesn’t magically turn you into a serene woodland creature who thrives on two hours of sleep. Carter was a delightful child with the lung capacity of a professional opera singer. I loved her fiercely. I also cried in the shower more than once because the quiet felt like oxygen.

People still told me to soak it all in. I smiled politely while mentally calculating how long it had been since I last ate something warm.

Then Mackenzie arrived, and motherhood cracked open in a new way. Not because she was harder or easier, but because I was different. I had stopped measuring myself against the version of motherhood sold in pastel fonts. I knew that loving my children didn’t require me to be grateful every second. I knew resentment and gratitude could sit at the same table without canceling each other out.

And yet, even with that knowledge, I still didn’t “soak it all in.”

Because soaking implies leisure. It implies space. It implies a nervous system that isn’t constantly scanning for the next cry, the next need, the next thing that might go wrong.

New moms don’t have that luxury. Their bodies are healing. Their identities are shifting. Their brains are on high alert. Of course the memories don’t form the way people expect. The brain is busy keeping everyone alive.

This is the part I wish someone had told me sooner. You’re not failing at motherhood because you don’t feel present. Presence comes later.

As a photographer, especially one who works with maternity and newborn clients, I see this play out in real time. Moms apologize to me constantly. For not feeling glowy enough. For not crying at the sweetness. For feeling numb, or overwhelmed, or weirdly detached from the moment they were told would be the most magical of their lives.

I want to grab their hands and say, gently, you’re not broken. You’re in transition.

There is a reason so many parents look back at photos and feel emotion they couldn’t access in the moment. It’s not because the moment wasn’t meaningful. It’s because meaning sometimes needs distance. Sometimes you have to survive the chapter before you can understand it.

I didn’t “soak in” Thomas’s newborn days. I remember fragments. The weight of him on my chest. The smell of clean laundry mixed with baby soap. The sound of his breathing when the house was finally quiet. The rest I learned later, through stories, through photos, through watching him become a seven-year-old who still leans into me when he’s tired.

I didn’t soak in Carter’s babyhood either. I remember the intensity. The way she studied faces like she was taking notes. The way she needed me in a way that felt endless at the time and impossibly brief now that she’s ten and independently fierce.

And Mackenzie, now eleven, exists in my memory as a series of moments that grew clearer with time. Her tiny hand gripping my finger. Her toddler laugh. Her current eye rolls, which are Olympic-level and deservedly so.

Here’s what I’ve learned, not just as a mom but as a woman navigating change, loss, and rebuilding. You don’t have to cherish every moment to have cherished a season. You don’t have to feel it fully while you’re in it for it to matter deeply later.

This lesson came back to me during my divorce, in a way I didn’t expect. People talk about soaking in the good times, but they rarely talk about how survival mode rewrites memory during hard ones too. I didn’t fully feel some of the grief when it was happening. I was too busy being steady for my kids. Too busy managing logistics and emotions and life. The feelings came later, when it was safer to feel them.

Motherhood taught me that first. Life reinforced it.

So when someone tells a new mom to soak it all in, I hear what they mean. I hear love and nostalgia and longing. But I also hear pressure, unintended and heavy.

If you’re in the thick of it right now, here’s what I want you to know. You’re allowed to be tired. You’re allowed to miss your old life. You’re allowed to feel bored, overwhelmed, disconnected, and deeply in love all at once. None of those cancel the others out.

The soaking comes later.

It comes when you stumble across a photo and feel something bloom in your chest. It comes when your child says something that echoes who they’ve always been. It comes when you realize you did, in fact, hold it all, just not the way people described.

You weren’t supposed to soak it all in.

You were supposed to get through it.

And you did.

-Mama Withers