How Becoming a Mom Makes You Give Literally Zero F*cks

I used to care what people thought of me, even people I barely knew. I dressed a certain way to impress people I had only had the most surface-level conversations with. I wanted to be liked by everyone, as if that was an important or even vaguely possible notion. I read the New Yorker and Vanity Fair on planes and trains and saved my US Weekly for home because I wanted to be seen as an intellectual.

And then I had kids and discovered the most liberating side effect of motherhood: it transformed me into a person who gives literally zero f*cks.

If I feel like wearing yoga pants and no makeup because it's Friday and raining, then I do it, even if it means I'm the worst-dressed mom at preschool drop off. If my song comes on the radio, I dance and sing my heart out while driving, even at the stoplights, even when my daughter begs me to stop. If she forgets her hat, I have no problem running across the street to her bus stop in my robe and nothing else, despite the side-eye those b*tchy fifth graders always give me. If onion rings and a glass of Sauvignon Blanc sounds like a good lunch to me, then that's what I eat.

I watch trash TV while I'm on the treadmill, then strip down in the locker room without an ounce of embarrassment about my stretch marks and cellulite; I order a beer when I feed my kids dinner at Chipotle, even though I know the teenager behind the register is going to have to find his 22-year-old manager to retrieve it; and I go down the twisty slide at the park in a sundress just to make my son laugh because how many f*cks do I give? Zero. My kids have beaten the formerly image-obsessed version of me down, and it's kind of awesome.

It's a strange but true phenomenon: motherhood will crack open your heart, but close it to the bullsh*t. Sure, getting older probably has something to do with it, but really, I think pregnancy, childbirth, and raising tiny humans are the bigger influencers.

After having two C-sections, watching my first baby get rushed off to the NICU, witnessing my 18-month-old have a febrile seizure that I was positive in the moment would change my life forever, breastfeeding two babies for a combined 26 months, suffering through countless sleepless nights, and surviving all of that and so much more with my healthy, beautiful family intact, why would I give a f*ck about what anyone thinks of me? Answer: I don't.

But strangely, while becoming a mother has made me care less about what the world thinks of me, it has made me care so much more about the world my children and I live in. When our president decided to remove guidelines that help transgender children survive the halls of their schools, it broke my heart. Despite my own kids being about as gender normative as two children can get, I hurt for those kids and their parents, because aren't their lives difficult enough?

I couldn't even see Lion because I couldn't handle watching a scared, lost 5-year-old without thinking of my own being in the same situation. Add in the fact that there are actually 80,000 children who go missing in India every year, and I can't even go there. When two 13-year-old girls were recently murdered in broad daylight near my hometown in Indiana, I suffered more than ever, not just as a human being but as a mother who can't imagine the horrors those girls' parents are going through.

My heart has not been hardened by motherhood; it has been split open, and the process has allowed me to feel all the world's atrocities so much more while learning something huge about the small daggers that are thrown at me because of what I wear, eat, read, say, or look like. They're just not worthy of giving even a single f*ck about.