About those first few weeks and months of pregnancy and montehrhood…
The motherhood has been a great journey, and continues to be. It’s been filled with love, cuddles, smiles, more love, challenges, hospital visits, tears and cry (seriously a lot of crying), did I say lots of love? But first of all it has been a time where I have learn lots about how to care for a little human, how to care for myself and how to don’t care for things when they go utterly wrong.
When I first share the news about me being pregnant, it was all joy and jubilee for the family. I mean: me, the travel auntie, the black sheep who left hometown to live abroad, the crazy one, the reckless one, it was me having a baby. Me, that I’ve always said I wouldn’t have kids because they were so demanding. My family and friends went into the hype of happiness. The common thing to hear back then was: “Becoming a mother is the biggest, greatest of the blessings, in the world, in the whole universe”… Well, it is, but it’s also one of the scariest things you happen to ever live.
During all pregnancy, I was continuously wondering when the mom-to-be status was going to start feeling a blessing and a marvelous thing. I did suffer from all the ugly symptoms you can suffer while pregnant. All the nasty pains, I had them all: Symphysis Pubic Dysfunction, Carpal Tunnel, Sciatica, back pain, nausea, tiredness, joint pain, cramps. The whole 3 trimesters of my pregnancy went by with at least one of the not wanted illnesses associated with gravity status. As I’m always saying, I won’t complain at all, the pain didn’t stop me from enjoying the journey and at times I was kind of getting used to it.
My point all the time is: why do moms never speak about this?? why did no one ever prevent me that I will have this or that ache and it was going to be annoying to some extent? To make it worse, if I ask around, every single woman will tell you “Oh no, my pregnancy was amazing, didn’t suffer at all”, so I ended thinking “WTF is wrong with me then? Is it my age, is it fate, am I the 1 every 10,000 cases”…
Any time I visited my GP and talk through the list of things I was suffering from, he would go “oh yes, it will all disappear when you give birth”, “that’s not common but few women suffer from it, give it time and lots of rest”. The good news all the time was that regardless of the pains, my baby boy was growing healthy and strong. Yep, that was all I cared for.
One thing that’s real is that when you see the journey retrospectively, you absolutely think it was “grand” and tend to forget the downs and focus more on the ups. Nothing wrong about that, but I want to encourage to people reading this post to share with others how the parenthood experience develops, while it’s actually happening.
