The transition from maiden to mother

Today I thought it might be interesting to touch on the journey to motherhood.

I recognise that it’s not always a straightforward path for everyone – my own journey can confirm that. What I have noticed is that we put a lot of emphasis on the pregnancy, but then after the baby arrives, it’s a bit of mystery – especially for first time mums.

I had a really tough

induction into the “mum club.”

Let’s start from the beginning…

In 2019, my partner and I started the discussion around trying for our first baby. We were both in our early thirties and I guess we sort of felt like it was “time.” We’d spent our twenties building businesses and working out how to be grown-ups.

For me, it’s hard to explain, but the prospect of having a baby terrified me at a soul level. I had no explanation for the fear I felt, but I know it was real.

So anyway, we were that annoying couple that fell pregnant almost straight away.

And right from the beginning, I could not shake this overwhelming feeling of dread.

Contrary to the scans we were having that kept telling us everything appeared “normal,” I was subconsciously detaching from the pregnancy.

I wasn’t planning ahead and this little voice in my head kept saying this baby wouldn’t be apart of our future plans.

It was awful and so lonely.

Everyone said I was just experiencing first time anxiety and I was just over-sensitive.

I felt like I was existing in an abyss.

Wanting to embrace the pregnancy and connect with this growing baby boy and feeling like it was hopeless.

It wasn’t until our twenty-week scan that the “issue” was detected.

The sonographer detected an “abnormality” in our son’s heart, which actually turned out to be a major heart defect that would severely impact the quality of his life – IF he even survived the first few hours after birth.

Our hospital system failed us repeatedly through this pregnancy, including making us wait two weeks to get an appointment with a specialist in a tertiary hospital.

It was the most horrific two weeks of our lives, living in a state of limbo, waiting to find out the fate of our baby. Feeling him kick began to feel bitter-sweet.

The news was even worse than we expected, with other major parts of his heart affected and the prognosis, cripplingly poor.

We were given our options – none of which were good – and ultimately decided that the kindest thing we could do would be to have an early delivery, knowing we’d never get to meet our son.

The process was as brutal as it sounds.

After 27 hours of labour, our son arrived. He never took a breath and he never opened his eyes. But he never had to suffer through invasive open-heart surgeries, breathing tubes and a short life.

I contracted into survival mode, to be honest.

I knew the intensity of emotions was going to be too much, so I shut down to get through it.

Two weeks later, I was readmitted to hospital with severe abdominal cramps, due to retained placenta. That was the moment that broke me.

I’m a spiritual person – so looking back – I feel like this was the defining moment where I was thrown to the bottom of the pit and have never felt more broken in my life.

But I do believe that God or the universe uses broken people.

When I was told I’d have to go back to the SAME hospital that I’d left my son behind in two weeks prior, I disassociated.

I felt like I left my body.

I was standing outside of myself, watching myself have a break down.

The healing process was tough.

I had never experienced such intense emotion in my whole life.

It honestly took me couple of years to work through the layers of my pain, trauma, anger, sadness… but the very last thing – the biggest thing that I couldn’t face – was guilt.

My logical mind knew all the reasons and rationalised the situation, but I carried the burden of guilt like a weight that I deserved.

I kept myself closed down – afraid to reopen to love and joy. I retreated so far into myself that the prospect of FEELING anything terrified me. Because I had been in agony with what felt like unending sorrow and pain.

Working in fitness for years, I’ve experienced my fair share of injuries and strains – physical pain – and I can say that emotional pain was just as confronting and way more confusing. At least with an injury, you know roughly how long the healing process takes and can initiate a plan for recovery.

The grieving process – also a process I see as unravelling – is not linear and opens up to you as you’re ready to move through it.

As Queen Elizabeth said, “Grief is the price we pay for love.”

My nervous system rewired itself into survival mode – a reactive state – later diagnosed as complex PTSD. I personally don’t subscribe to labels – I didn’t want to let it define me and invite It into my identity.

My body felt constantly wired. I was looking for threats that might pop up and even now, if I am over stimulated, I am learning to recognise when my system is overloaded.

It feels like I can’t relax. I am jittery and even when I try to slow down, I feel like I struggle to stop.

I’ve since learned that’s my bodies way of sending me a message that I have unresolved emotions that are being held and need to be FELT. The more we push back against them, the stronger the message has to become.

Anyway, I went through a huge spiritual awakening during this time. One where I experienced the dark night of the soul.

I had moments where I was brought to my knees, begging God or the universe to help me. I couldn’t bare it alone and it felt like no human being could lift my burden.

And I realised that break through can only come you stop fighting against the pain and sit in it. FEEL IT.

You gotta ugly face cry. Snot bubbles. Punch a pillow. Scream. The lot.

I was so afraid the weight of the pain would crush me. I didn’t know if I was strong enough to get through it.

And it took me almost two years to work my way to guilt.

Then someone said to me – “You did the best you could, with what you knew at the time. You are a good person and God knows what’s in your heart. You don’t need to carry this burden anymore. You made the ultimate sacrifice, and that made you a mother.”

Hearing those words freed me.

What lay beyond guilt, was forgiveness.

Three months later, I was pregnant with my daughter.

Everyone assumed that I would be riddled with anxiety about this pregnancy and yet I felt a peace and calm come upon me.

I KNEW that everything was ok with this pregnancy.

A little side note – deep down, I have understood that my calling in life is that of a healer and guide. I’ve always been attracted to all thing’s health, healing, wellness and when I have been in alignment with my purpose, the work has always found me.

But I have pushed it away. I’ve been afraid to really tune into it all and FEEL the spectrum of what’s possible.

I think in my mind, if I stepped into that space, then I would be immersing myself in the good AND the bad.

It’s taken me a long time to accept that empathy is my gift.

The truth is, I think we all want to connect at a heart level and that is what I can offer to people. Some might say I “push the right buttons,” but to me it’s about actually hearing and seeing the person in front of me.

Pregnancy and a Global pandemic were uncharted territory

I fell pregnant in the middle of a global pandemic.

I do feel like it’s important to address the challenges that presented.

The bullying by the hospitals and doctors about the “you-know-what” was confronting. On more than one occasion fear was employed as a tactic in an attempt to bend me to the narrative on the week.

At the time, I honestly felt like I couldn’t say anything about what I was going through, because so many people were being crushed by their own fear and bias, that I was just being attacked.

I still don’t know if I am ready to talk about that yet – actually, I don’t know if people have calmed down enough to hear it either.

But this is my story and I am not looking for validation from anyone else.

This part of my journey taught me that you have to stand by what you believe in, even if you stand alone.

The moral of that part of the story is that I was isolated and bullied, but I stood firm in my beliefs around what was right for my body and my baby. Especially after already having experienced the weight of trauma over losing a baby and pregnancy.

In the end, I simply said to people – “Have you ever had to go through what I did? Have you ever had to live with the grief of walking my path?”

Pretty much everyone who had a strong opinion about what I should be doing with my body had to shut up at that point.

That was tough, having to defend my decisions and publicly explain myself to strangers. In some ways it was like being forced to re-explain my trauma over and over again.

Interestingly, I am grateful for some elements of the pandemic, because it gave me clarity and opportunity to observe people, slow down and have deep conversations, that maybe we wouldn’t have had before.

It revealed how righteous people truly were and how they would treat others who had a different opinion to them.

It was like I was in this bubble, where I was clear and focused. I felt wrapped up in a supreme love and I wanted to share that people.

I honestly created my whole RESET program at 28 weeks into my pregnancy.

Because you know – why not?

I needed to make something that could help people. I had experienced so much pain and had been on such a journey, that I felt called to format what I had learned into something cohesive that could guide other people.

I asked myself – What did I need during those tough times?

And the answer was, more than anything, community and a sense of connection.

I longed to be seen and heard. To be held in my most vulnerable state and loved unconditionally.

We are all trying to do everything by ourselves. The busier we are, the longer the to-do list – the more we must be achieving… yet we feel burnt out and more alone than ever.

What if I could create a space for people to come to and just be allowed to feel held in whatever they’re experiencing – without judgement?

That’s what I set out to do.

….Of-course, then I had my daughter.

It was a HUGE change.

Physically, I did really well. I honestly attribute that to staying active until the final week of my pregnancy. I was still teaching Pilates at 34 weeks. I had to stop because I couldn’t get up and down off the floor quickly anymore.

Emotionally, I did what I always do as outstandingly – I doubled down. I went into a mild survival mode. Because that’s my coping mechanism. I feel safe in the “doing.” I wanted to focus on learning to breast feed, create routines, express milk, change nappies – and I am my own toughest critic.

Breast feeding didn’t come naturally to me. I was surprised by how much I didn’t enjoy it. My daughter, on the other hand, was a natural at feeding, so I was lucky there.

But the cluster feeding was soul crushing. I thought I was doing something wrong and I was exhausted by the constant and unrelenting feeds.

It sometimes felt like I had no room for me.

I would get to the point where I would just be crying and wondering what I was doing wrong.

Parallel to this, my husband was also learning a new skill and it required him to work during the day and then study in the evenings. Which meant, he was not making himself available on an emotional level.

He too was operating in a survival mode.

This need for him to be physically affectionate and emotionally attentive was also new to me. I have always been pretty independent, so he was unaccustomed to my needs shifting too.

His version of survival mode meant he was focused on “providing” and securing us financially.

It meant we were reading the same book, but were interpreting it totally differently.

I think as a new mum, you feel like you’re just constantly giving yourself to everyone else all the time and that little bubba needs a lot from you physically. So, I needed that safety and support from my husband.

And it felt like I wasn’t getting it.

In my mind, I retreated further and tried to power through on my own – but it just meant that my resentment was festering.

Eventually, I broke down. Something inside me snapped and it meant we have had to have some difficult and confronting conversations.

One thing it has made us both realise is, that relationships change after a baby too, and they are living things. You have to be intentional with each other and decide to put the work in.

That’s meant that we have done a marriage counselling course, which I would suggest everyone do at least once a year. We quite enjoyed setting aside an hour or two on the weekend, after the baby went to bed to focus on our relationship and tune into each other.

Having a baby has brought out the feminine side of me.

I thought I had done a lot of work before she was born, but once I acknowledged that my needs had drastically shifted, I realised I had to step into this part of myself wholly.

It also became apparent that I am so out of my comfort zone here.

The feminine is neurotic, chaotic, emotional, but also playful, sensual, creative.

And I felt called to explore that.

That process has left me feeling like I tipped myself upside and shook out the bottom.

A lot of us don’t feel comfortable feeling “out-of-control” and I mean I understand that control is just an illusion – yet I also had to confront some of own self-limiting beliefs here.

There’s a bubble of anxiety when we feel our bodies getting agitated or nervous. We wonder if maybe there’s something wrong with our thoughts or with the way we feel.

It is so difficult to stay centered when all this chaos feels like it’s moving around you.

Often our bodies are having chemical reactions and our brains are trying to interpret them. Our minds conjure up explanations – thoughts -and that can often land us in anxiety.

But again, said a different way, emotions are felt in the body, NOT the mind.

Our bodies are always trying to communicate with us, we just have to slow down long enough to listen.

I can only say, that I am so grateful for the tools I had before my daughter. I honestly think we are given the experiences we need in order to grow and to light our path.

That said, those tools were called into use after becoming a mum. I used them all and have even learned some new ones.

The saying – “It runs in my family, until it runs into me” has stuck with me. I feel like I made a pact with myself that I would leave no stone unturned to make sure that I would not pass my trauma and my pain onto my daughter.

Unfortunately, that means allowing myself to step into the discomfort over and over, until it becomes a habitual practice of catching the emotion in a given moment, processing it and then letting it go.

That awareness is how we remove triggers and anchor ourselves in the chaos.

Existing in the world, but not being influenced by it.

It’s been such a big journey and I am not perfect. I don’t claim to be. I swear and I make mistakes and it’s all part of life.

The RESET program I have created embodies my own lived experiences and my education. If you’ve come this far, then something I’ve said might be resonating with you.

This has been my journey from maiden to mother and if I can build a tribe, a village for other women like me, then I feel an obligation to use what I know to do that.

I am currently taking applications only for my 2023 RESET program. I am not going to accept any payments at this stage, I just want to connect other women and see if what I have to offer the right fit for them.

I am going to drop the link below and maybe get to know some of you a little more in the new year.

CLICK HERE to find out more about the RESET program.