This is, “The Stories We Tell,” a weekly series of true accounts in all things motherhood. These 100% vulnerable, raw and ferociously honest tales are from the LA-based storytelling event, Mothers Unleashed. This is Pranidhi's story about her transformation into motherhood – and how she learned to mother herself in the process. Pranidhi is a mother, wife, and owner of the Yoga Shala West. www.pranidhivarshney.com

When I was pregnant with my daughter, I didn’t glow. I called her an alien till the day she was born. I spent most of my pregnancy nauseous, itchy, and unable to sleep at night. I also cultivated the ability to burp louder than my husband. I didn’t have warm fuzzy feelings toward my child. I just wanted her out.

So at 36 weeks, about a month before my due date, I stopped turning my body upside down (literally, I’m a yoga teacher) and started walking A LOT. I walked to my yoga shala while it was still dark outside, listening to my birthing playlist. Yes, I made a birthing playlist. I took a childbirth class to prepare me for the type of birth I wanted as well as the chance that that might not happen. Two weeks of these early morning walks, and my daughter had had enough.

My labor pains started on a Wednesday night right after we finished our breastfeeding class. My husband has a picture from that night of me wincing while he grins from ear to ear. The implication is that I was wincing in pain, but really, I just wanted him to turn the light off so that I could get some sleep. The next morning, as it became clear that I was in active labor, we headed upstairs to our bedroom where I spent the next several hours holding onto my husband in all sorts of positions, throwing up, refusing to eat or drink, breathing and moaning through each contraction, wondering how the hell women have done this since the beginning of human life, and thinking that I’d never be able to do it again. No, I did not turn on my birthing playlist.

By the time we decided to drive to the hospital, I started to feel an uncontrollable urge to push as my water broke. After that, it was as if some divine force took over my body. Unfortunately, we still had to make it to the hospital so I had to fight with that divine force to just please hold on for a little while longer. Once we arrived, I got wheeled into the ER, up to Labor and Delivery, and in my delirium, as the staff was asking for my ID and other nonsense, I screamed, ‘I CAN FEEL THE BABY’S HEAD.’

I got wheeled into a delivery room and remember looking at the bed for a second. I asked my doula if I had to lie down and she said, "No, just get on all fours like you have been." So I climbed up on that bed and asked somebody to hold my glasses because, apparently, when you’re about to push a baby out of your body, you don’t want to be encumbered by glasses. Someone else helped take my pants and soiled underwear off, and I screamed the most primal scream of my life as I pushed out my daughter’s head. I was born to do this. Another push, another scream, and she was out. We had chosen not to find out her sex during pregnancy, so as they brought her through my legs and up toward my chest, I asked, "What is it?" The response: "A girl!" And as I held her to my skin, crying at her beauty, I became a mother. No longer was this being an alien. She was my daughter, Tavishi Varshney Singh.

I didn’t enter motherhood knowing exactly the way that I would parent. I didn’t know that I’d be the kind of mom who enjoys reading books about conscious parenting and listening to podcasts about biologically optimal child-rearing practices. I didn’t know how inspired I’d be by hunter gatherer tribes, or my own parents. In a tribe, mother and baby spend a lot of time in close contact, but they’re also surrounded by a village of kin. Babies feel a sense of connection to the whole tribe, and the whole tribe feels a sense of responsibility for the child. Older kids raise younger ones. Mothers and grandmothers always work. My parents, too. They worked when I was a baby, and after they picked me up from my grandmother’s apartment, we’d come home and all sleep in the same bed. So, I don’t see being a mom as something separate from the rest of my life. It’s a natural, essential part of my life.

I’ve built a tribe for my little one, full of lots of visits from her grandparents and extended family, a close network of my friends whom she calls aunties and uncles, and hired angels so I can continue to work and have a life outside of being her mom. Also, because entertaining young children is not my strong suit. Come at me with your most pressing needs, and I’ll make sure they’re met. Come at me with your strongest emotions, and I’ll do my best to hear you and see you and feel you. But ask me to play for hours on end... that’s someone else’s job! ;)

I’m not a perfect mom. I make mistakes, big and small. One night, several months ago, as I was rocking Tavi to sleep for the millionth time, trying to draw upon any reserves of patience that I had left, I felt a rage rising inside of me. I put her down on the bed a little too roughly as I yelled that I was taking a break and leaving her by herself. She immediately started crying, and I felt horrible. The truth is that my daughter has seen me at some of my lowest moments. You can’t really hide from someone who’s programmed to want to be with you 24/7.

I wish I could say that I forgive myself completely for all the moments in which my anger and frustration have gotten the best of me, but when I look inside, that isn’t true. I regret those moments. And yet, I have a choice. I can choose to let them define me, or I can choose to let how I handle those moments define me. I choose the latter. After I walked away for a few seconds and saw Tavi’s face as she cried, I picked her up and held her tight. I allowed myself to cry and told her that I was sorry.

"Mama’s sorry. Mama’s sorry." As her breathing softened, she said, "Tavi sorry," and we sat like that for a while. Then, we continued on with our day. That afternoon, Tavi taught me about forgiveness, and I hope I taught her that I’m imperfect, so it’s ok when she is too. That I’ll love her even when her emotions get the best of her, or when she falls, or fails. That I’ll love her especially in those times.

I’m learning how to love myself especially in those times too. The other day, I was on my mat, practicing before teaching. I’d just gotten through the 9th day of my husband being away for 12 days, and the third night of Tavi having a fever. My level of emotional and physical exhaustion was crippling. In the middle of my practice, a little crack broke through the surface, and I just lied down and wept. I met myself tenderly for a few moments and then continued the work of putting myself together. One of my students and friends was right next to me and saw the whole thing. There was a beauty in that - in being seen.

At the yoga shala, tears aren’t seen as weakness, but as an act of open-hearted courage. We need more spaces like this. Spaces where we can meet ourselves tenderly, have a cry or work through some Mom Rage, and then transform that into strength. Historically, we would have been surrounded by the many moms who came before us. They’d be our source of comfort. But most of us don’t live like that anymore, so we have to first be our own safe space, and then we have to create it for each other.

Everyone says there’s a before and after when it comes to life with children, and yet still, until it happens to you, there’s no way you can fully understand. The surprising part for me, though, has been the way in which motherhood feels like a destiny fulfilled. It’s maddening, and it completes me. Two years in, I sometimes look back with a sort of fond nostalgia at the carefreeness of life before Tavi. In those moments when I feel like I’m drowning in all kinds of bodily fluids (my own and my kid’s) and total meltdowns (my own and my kid’s), how could I not long for a time when things were easier?

At the same time, I don’t know that there’s any greater joy than hearing her laugh, or watching her mimic yoga postures, or singing 90s music together, or teaching her how to dance through her frustration, or feeling the weight of her body on mine when I hold her. When I take a closer look at these last two years, I realize that Tavi has made me a stronger, more capable, more loving version of myself. She’s the clearest mirror I’ve ever had, exposing my vulnerabilities and shining back my gifts.

I want her, more than anything, to feel that she belongs. I want her to know that when she has a need, I will do whatever’s in my capacity to meet that need. And when I can’t, I’ll still hold her hand. I don’t want her to question her worth. I want her to feel supported by a community that cherishes her as she is. I don’t expect that I’ll get it all right, and I can’t guarantee that she won’t experience suffering in her life. She undoubtedly will. What I hope for is that in those moments of suffering, she remembers, or rather, that she knows, in her bones and in her blood, that she is enough.

I’ve spent a lot of my life feeling like I’m not enough. Not thin enough, not talented enough, not smart enough, not spiritual enough. But I’m a good mom. Perhaps this is the first time in my life I feel like I don’t have to be perfect to be enough, because I would never expect that from my daughter.

I treat motherhood as a practice. I see Tavi as my partner, my collaborator, my teammate. And I revere all my fellow mothers around the world, and across time. Mothers who birthed their children, and then birthed gentler, more powerful versions of themselves. Our work, each day, whether it’s outside or inside the home, is heartbreakingly important. This is how we save the world. By mothering ourselves alongside our children. By celebrating each other. You matter. And you belong.