When I fell pregnant with my son, having a baby wasn't on my radar. But I soon adapted to the idea of motherhood and developed a sense of self in the person I was becoming over the course of my son's growth in utero. I knew the kind of mom I wanted to be, becoming confident with the different parenting tactics, tricks, tips, and styles I wanted to use in my approach as a first time mom. What I didn't expect was the unspoken (and sometimes VERY spoken!) pressure from friends, family, my husband, and society as a whole to do things I felt were misaligned with my mothering instincts. In a busy world like ours, so much of parenting is molded from a convenience perspective rather than honoring our natural instincts and animalistic brain, which I would argue is at its most acute when postpartum and navigating motherhood. I had an extremely hard time both accepting my own desires to sometimes do things the "hard way" if I felt it was right for me, and getting others to understand my "why".