I wanted my  first post to be about where motherhood begins . My  immediate thought was : Birth . In actuality, I have learned that it starts as soon as those pink lines show themselves. 

When that positive test appears or for me in all cases ,  before then, I could feel my body changing . Not to mention that if I even looked at meat, I was repulsed.

I felt like an alien or I was being inhabited by one.  I was a new more bloated version of the woman I once knew. In all three of my pregnancies my first few weeks were filled with night sweats , psychedelic dreams and of course the dreaded nausea. For anyone who hasnt experienced it, I can only describe it as a tide of disgust towards most foods. I survived twelve weeks on a solid diet of toast.

The aspect I want to tap into most isn’t any physical change or moment spent clinging to a toilet bowl , it’s the emotional changes. That is where you start becoming , whether you realise it in the nauseous fog or not.

Most of us know ourselves pretty well , we understand our own ups and downs but pregnancy really disrupted anything I thought I knew about my mental wellbeing. I weathered my first and second pregnancies with a sprinkling of confusion and emotional roadblocks but this time around I have honestly seen myself saying I can’t ever do this again and that’s purely down to how my mood has been.

The first twelve weeks of this child’s growth journey sent me on a mental spiral,  at first I thought I’d forgotten what it was like . I told myself “you have two children to watch now , not one” . I said “it’s probably just the exhaustion of the nausea” . Gradually I realised it wasn’t.

I would lie awake at night crying uncontrollably and I didn’t know why , I snapped at my children for every little thing and I would find myself on top of the world one minute and then curled in a ball the next , much like my unborn child.

I told my midwife at my twelve week appointment : “this is the closest I’ve ever felt to being not in control of my mind “. I felt a knawing that I was on a precipice , but all of the time.

What I found most bizarre was that by around week fourteen it had started to dissipate and now at twenty three weeks I can barely remember how intoxicating those feelings were. I find it absolutely baffling the ability of the human body to forget that much anxiety and distress because nature wants you to keep reproducing.

It also taps into the strength with which women carry children , I cried , I vomited,  I spiralled internally but each time I picked myself up and did all the ‘mum’ things that have to be done.

Some would sound a round of applause lauding us as “supermums,” and others would remind us of generations past raising multiple children without complaint.

But here is a different view point , does it highlight a problem with how we view women in pregnancy and the importance of thier maternal journey.  I keep reading that being pregnant is like running a marathon every day in energy terms. It resonates with me not because of the very literal energy expenditure but because of the load that woman is carrying. She’s expending that energy whilst working , caring for other people , doing daily tasks . I wonder whether we should be calling her supermum or whether we should be saying “you’re not supermum , let me do those dishes “.

I wonder if perhaps we did more of that collectively, the load that women carry would lighten if even only slightly. 

“Such a mysterious business, motherhood. How brave a woman must be to embark on it.”―M. L. Stedman