Before the “Yes” on the pee stick, there had been one “No”.
I’d bought plenty of pregnancy tests with my first pregnancy, and this time I knew I wasn’t going to mess with the “Is that a second line?” speculations of those cheaper tests. This time I would not be squinting, holding the test close to my face, stretching it an arm’s distance away, examining it in different lights. No, no. This is not Mama’s first rodeo. Today on this tricked-out digital pregnancy test, a “Yes” would appear or a “No” would appear. No subjective interpretation.
First came the “No”. The “No” brought relief and brought control. It brought the unfolding of clearer, defined plans for myself. The “No” brought confusion and doubt of my intuition because my body had felt this seasick-tired way once before, and that time it had resulted in the birth of my son. The “No” brought a little disappointment, too, because already the vision, protection, and love of a baby had been planted in me.
The “Yes” a week later brought surprise, despite the weeks of bodily knowing. The “Yes” brought joy–a new human had been created in me, and this human would be forever a part of my life. The “Yes” brought excitement about a future with two children who would be close enough in age to play together. The “Yes” brought so many other feelings.
Fear. Apprehension.
Am I ready for another child? I feel like I’m just getting settled into a life with one child, and he is always changing. Can I handle two quickly changing little beings on top of myself changing and my husband changing?
Shame.
Why don’t I feel like shouting this news from the rooftops? Why don’t I feel happier? I don’t even feel like the mom I want to be to one child, so how will I be the mom I want to be to two?
Mourning.
I’m just now gaining more independence and rhythm in my life and body. Now I will lose it again.
I wasn’t ready for this pregnancy. I felt like I was in the midst of birthing myself, which has taken significant time, energy, and space alone. An infant would depend on me soon, bringing new emotions and challenges that would draw focus away from the process I had begun within myself.
I didn’t feel ready, and alongside the joy has come some grieving. And with the grieving comes guilt because I have friends who are trying very hard to have babies or friends who have lost babies, and I have this blessed little piece of the universe growing inside me. Without effort, without intention, this baby was created.
I give myself some grace and the permission to feel my feelings.
I remind myself that a lot of life has happened in this pregnancy. Pregnancy doesn’t happen in a vacuum of joy. We mothers are not glowing berries ripening toward sweetness, waiting to be plucked. We are humans growing humans. There’s a lot of rich, scary humanity tangled in the process. We are not containers of future life. We ourselves are pulsing life. We are gathering all of humanity in our womb.
Pregnancy happens in the middle of real, messy life. Real, messy relationships. Real, messy emotions. If we’re going to honor mothers, we need to honor their real, complex feelings about motherhood. Even when the biggest dream of your life is coming true, you are allowed to feel other emotions besides joy and gratitude. We need breathing room for honest expression of our feelings, and it doesn’t mean we don’t love or want our child.
This is my breathing room. I am building an expansive room here where we can all take a deep breath and exhale loudly. We can moan the air out of us, letting out everything we’ve been sucking in and holding tightly in our rock bellies. We can soften into the floor and rise up tall.
This is the messy humanity where my pregnancy found me.
This pregnancy began in the middle of accepting the end of my nursing relationship with my son and celebrating the restored freedom of my body. That long-awaited freedom lasted approximately one week. That means I enjoyed one week when my body was not either nourishing a child externally or housing a child internally. One week as an independent, self-contained, self-sustaining body. When I got pregnant, my milk from my first babe was still drying its source.
I did not feel ready to grow another child inside my body. I was not ready to begin this process all over again. I grieved the loss of time to let my body lie fallow and restore rich silt to its lands that had given so much in harvest. I wanted a season for my own harvest.
I was just starting to build a business and an independent life for myself with writing, teaching classes, offering workshops, and building public speaking experience. Then the exhaustion and all-day nausea hit, and my body begged me to slow down. My heart palpitations returned and came to tell me: Nothing extra. Only the essentials.
This pregnancy came at a time when my marriage was in transition. We are both in a place of deep inner change and learning how to love each other well from these new places. We can feel so self-contained as we work on our own inner needs. While I believe this work benefits our marriage and our family in a big picture way, day-to-day we can feel like we are the part of the Venn diagram that doesn’t touch. We are both strengthening our boundaries, and in asserting ourselves and our needs, we sometimes hit each other’s walls rather than finding the gates to territories that we both want to share.The unknown between us feels vast.
We are learning to build emotional and physical intimacy based in the life that we have now, as the people we are now. We are no longer just lovers and friends and co-adventurers and dreamers and partners. We are Mama and Daddy, shifting between butt-wiping and bonding and disagreements and romance, balancing much-needed time alone with building connection.
This pregnancy began in the immediate wake of losing a former student to suicide. I delivered the eulogy at his funeral and watched his parents, now divorced, holding hands as they cried together and said goodbye to their teenage son. I was hit hard by the loss. So profoundly hard that I wondered what else was hitting me other than the loss of this child who hadn’t been a part of my life for years. I realized that in this stage of my life, friends are getting married and announcing pregnancies, and we are building lives and homes and families. I wondered: How soon before it starts going in the opposite direction and what we’ve built starts breaking? Which ones of us will watch our marriages change beyond reconciliation? Which ones will suffer an unimaginable loss? Where will cancer grow, car accidents hit, infidelity creep in?
Life around me started to feel really fragile. Like everything I thought I had wasn’t really mine and wasn’t promised to me for anything but this moment. The ground felt shaky under me.
While I was still working through the early feelings of the positive pregnancy test and trying to return to normal life after Liam’s death, I got really sick. Unable to keep in any solids or fluids, I ended up in the ER. There in the hospital with strangers, the pregnancy was confirmed, and we saw the baby for the first time. I was dehydrated and literally had not been able to control my bowels when an ultrasound tech rubbed cold jelly on a big wand and stuck it up my vagina, veering from side to side like she was driving stick as she pressed hard against the bony walls of my vagina in order to find this little sea monkey inside me. The baby was just a five-week-old yolk sac with no fetal pole, but already life was evident. In the midst of this brief, humiliating, and debilitating sickness, we told our parents. It was an unceremonious moment when I felt weak and pitiful. I was afraid the baby wouldn’t survive. I needed others to know this baby existed. I needed them to know what was at stake for me. I didn’t want to hold all of this alone.
This pregnancy came in the middle of a family rift that I thought I would be ready to bridge before I had another baby. But I wasn’t ready yet. I kept waiting to be ready and working towards it in counseling, but I simply wasn’t ready. I had to come to terms with that. For the first three months of pregnancy, I agonized over how to tell my dad, to whom I had not spoken in a year. I didn’t feel ready to restore contact and open a larger conversation with him. I didn’t want delivery of this news to force me into a situation that could bring me more emotional turmoil. I felt like I couldn’t take on any more emotional weight, and I didn’t want the baby to feel the stress that may come from renewed contact. But I also felt a need to tell my father personally rather than having him hear about the news indirectly.
I found myself in a position of not exactly concealing my pregnancy from the world but feeling closed inward. My husband and other family members kept asking me when I was going to announce the pregnancy, and I always felt too tired or too exposed or not ready somehow. Announcing the pregnancy meant drawing attention to myself when I just wanted to crawl into bed and sleep. My moods dipped and crested, and I didn’t have motivation or enthusiasm for any of the things that I did in my first pregnancy, like tracking the steadily growing fruit size of my baby. I felt like a bad mom this time. I felt like this child wasn’t getting the best of me. I felt like this baby deserved more than all I was feeling. I felt like this baby deserved better care than what I had been able to give to my body, its home.
I compared this pregnancy and its feelings to my first pregnancy. I remembered the excitement of my first pregnancy, and how everyone at work asked me on a daily basis how I was feeling or called me “little mama” and made me feel special. This time I felt isolated and like the people who already knew I was pregnant forgot about it unless I brought it up. Even my husband seemed to forget. I felt alone and invisible. At the same time, I felt like hiding. Not just hiding the pregnancy but hiding myself.
When I dug below the surface of the loneliness, I realized how much shame, anger, and fear lived there. I felt shame in not meaning to make a baby. I felt shame in reckless passion. I felt shame in interrupting my personal and professional goals. While I was watching my partner freely grow in himself and thrive in his career, I was struggling and putting my own plans on hold.
This pregnancy felt like my weight to hold. It is my body that is occupied with a fragile little life and makes me feel like an outsider in my own skin home. These are my emotions that feel more out of control due to hormones. I have a committed, loving partner, but this is my own solitary experience. Marriage can’t save you from this feeling.
In the midst of these challenges and emotions, my toddler was suddenly hospitalized with pneumonia, and every feeling was heightened. All the tension while waiting diagnosis and holding his small body in his fear and pain gathered in me. All I wanted to do was be strong for him. I wanted to be able to provide any comfort and stability I could. My whole system was left exhausted from holding that anchor in place for him while navigating the white-capped waters.
After my son came home and life settled down, I started to feel out of control emotionally.
The pressure was building in me. I had trouble sleeping. I felt restless in my skin and on edge all the time. I felt sad and raging. To let the pressure out of my body one sleepless, desperate night, I wrote:
I feel out of control right now. Like a tumbleweed ball of nerves blowing about. Or a wrecking ball of nerves crashing into my everyday moments. Or an Indiana Jones giant ball of nerves chasing me down. I am the Tilt-a-Whirl. I am the Ring of Fire stuck upside down. I am the swinging ship ride the moment you lift from your seat and hang onto the bar. I don’t like the way I feel. Low, irritable, jumpy, exhausted, sick all the time. It is cloudy with a chance of being sucked out the window of an airplane. Cloudy with a chance of breathlessness. Cloudy with small patches of sunshine. I feel full and empty. I feel invisible and like I want to hide. I keep waiting for weightlessness. But I feel like lead. I am the anchor. I am the anchor sinking heavy into the deep water. I feel like ants are crawling inside me. I want to shake them off, but they are hanging on.
The next morning my son woke up before the sun, and I went in to comfort him before putting him back in his crib. When I returned to my bed, I couldn’t hold back the tears. I didn’t know why I was crying. It was everything. Will I always feel this way? When did I not?
For the first time I saw the seriousness of how bad I had been feeling. I knew I couldn’t keep this in anymore. I had dropped hints to Lloyd that I was struggling, saying things like, “I’m having a really hard time taking care of myself” and “Life feels like chaos. I’m so tired of life feeling like chaos.”
I realized I needed to be more direct about the severity and prevalence of what I was experiencing. I felt like I was on the verge of cracking. I got out of bed and sat on the couch as the sun rose. When Lloyd came home from his run, I told him, “I feel like I’ve been asking for help, but no one is hearing me.” I read him the words I had written the night before when I couldn’t sleep. My voice shook as I showed him what my insides felt like.
We hear about postpartum depression, but my doctor says that she thinks pregnancy anxiety and depression is one of the most under-treated and under-talked about conditions. Our culture tells us we should be glowing. But some of us are on fire. We are walking on hot coals, and every day is a trial.
As soon as I let my husband, my doctor, and a couple other people in my life know how much I was struggling, I started to feel some relief. I started making self-care a priority, regularly exercising, getting in the sunshine, trying to develop a regular sleep schedule, and cutting back on commitments. But my challenges in mental health in this pregnancy haven’t ended there.
I have days or sometimes just hours of lightness, motivation, and joy when I feel really good and like I am in the clear. Then something will hit me, and the emotional turbulence jolts me out of my seat. Just the other day I left the house for “me time” when my husband came home from work, but I didn’t know where to go or what I needed, nothing sounded good, and I was just sad. So I ended up crying in a parking lot by a playground. I felt so alone.
In hours of crying and mental anguish that night, I could feel the baby kicking steadily. Kicking, kicking like a second heartbeat.
Oh, baby. Are you feeling all this? I’m sorry if you’re feeling all this.
Another voice said, Get your act together. Get over this. People are counting on you. Your babies need you.
Now I am stable enough to let the guilt fall away. Instead I say, “Baby, I am working really hard to grow myself into the mama you and your big brother need. I won’t be perfect. I definitely won’t be happy all the time. I’ll make bad choices. But I will always be working to make more conscious choices that show you you are loved, you belong here just as you are, and that no matter how alone you feel at times, you will never be separate from our love.”
Whenever I send these messages to my babies, I send them to myself, too, knowing that I am a child of God with goodness at my core. My love for my children helps me see the love I deserve from myself and the love that holds me always.
I have heard a couple wise mama matriarchs in my community say, “There is a reason pregnancy is nine months.”
During that time we move through the complex emotions of welcoming another human being to this world. It is how we become mothers. The doubt, the confusion, the grief, and the sadness do not exist in opposition to our motherhood; they are a very real and essential part of it.
This child was a surprise. This child was waiting very close to the door of being, close to the surface between the dark nothingness and this plane of our physical existence. This child was waiting there, ready. When the unlikely window of opportunity opened, this babe swam through. I am daily trying to trust this timing.
I remind myself that the last time a child grew in me and was born, a new life began for me, as well. Even as I was struggling to nurse a baby at all hours, I was writing in my journaling app on my phone, overflowing with new ideas and new frameworks of thought. Those early notes from the fertile space my child created in my life was the start of this writing that I’ve shared with you over the past year.
As I took on this sacred and timeless role of creation of a child, the Great Creator spoke to me in a voice I couldn’t ignore and touched my life in new ways. She showed me not just the face of my child but my own face in a way I could never see before. This new child will not take space away from that creation but rather open into more creation. This child is not moving into a room that lay vacant for him of her but is rather building a whole new space that didn’t exist before. Now I respond creatively to this path of motherhood that I am living, rather than the one that was planned.
Joy is beginning to shine through more and more. The joy hasn’t protected me from the darkness, but I am grateful for the moments of peace that I find. I try to hold them as a candle in my hand when the darkness comes over me.
This baby is growing me. In ways I don’t understand yet. It will be a big adventure to be this child’s mother, just as it has been with my first. This baby has already taught me that this is not a mere continuation of motherhood, a replay of what I know and expect. This is something new and different. There’s a new person forming in me, with new challenges, new personality, new beauty.
I welcome you, beautiful one. I accept the challenge and gift of being your mother.
Photo credit: Josh Hailey Studio
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