I called a dear friend this week to congratulate her on her first pregnancy.
We laughed about normal pregnancy things, and she joked,
“How did you do this TWO times?”
It’s funny how your body forgets the physical sensations of pregnancy as time goes on. It’s what I like to refer to as pregnancy amnesia – you conveniently forget the crappy parts, otherwise you would never voluntarily do it again.
I was a pretty calm pregnant person with straightforward pregnancies. I learned to trust my body and hand myself over to the process. But the next part, the actual baby part, was not easy for me.
I told my friend that for me, the second pregnancy and resulting child were much easier. Proof of concept and all. I’d done it once and survived, so in some ways, it was less scary. And with the second, I already had a child to take care of so I didn’t have the novelty of time or brain space to overthink it.
And then she asked me “Why was the first one so hard?”
“It was isolating,” I told her. I explained how I was one of the first of my friends to have kids. My family was far away. We had just moved to a new city, and my support network was small. And after the baby arrived, the days seemed impossibly long.
And that’s true. Even with the coffee dates and the lunches and the new mommy groups I had in my schedule, I was often alone. And sure there’s the sleep thing. But for me, it wasn’t the lack of sleep that got to me. It was the unpredictability of it, and my inability to control when my baby slept that left me feeling inadequate and helpless.
After we got off the phone, I couldn’t stop thinking about her question, “Why was the first one so hard?”
There were bigger things that I couldn’t see at the time, but are now as clear as day. My first one rocked my foundation. It was like an earthquake had shaken my core and flattened who I thought I was or wanted to be. My first one tore down the walls that I spent years building and perfecting. My first one cracked my heart open. And once my heart cracked open, I had a choice. I could stuff everything back in and sew it back up and say, “Well that was a mess.” Or I could take a good look at what spilled out, and say, “Okay. Let’s sort this shit out.”
And so after my first child, it was really messy for awhile. Like really messy. But with time, I started the very long process of putting the pieces back together. And as much as it was about me, it was also about this new family I found myself in, my marriage, and figuring out my identity as a mother.
With the first one, I didn’t trust myself. Not just as a parent but at a more fundamental level. I didn’t trust that I had the foundation to make sound decisions about an entire other life.
I didn’t trust my husband as a father. Or maybe I just didn’t allow him the space to be a father. I wanted to. But with the first one I didn’t know how to relinquish control. There was a constant push and pull and scorekeeping between us. Who did what, and when.
I was scared of screwing up. I was so scared about developing the wrong kind of habits. About not following the right timeline. About being a certain kind of mother. About not being a certain kind of mother. The love was so big and the stakes seemed so much higher, and I always felt one step away from an epic screw up.
I didn’t know where I ended and my first child began. I didn’t have any trouble bonding. I may have bonded too much. I was so bowled over by the enormity of the love I was feeling. It was like a constant boulder on my chest. I often felt like I didn’t have enough space to breathe.
My sense of purpose was completely embedded in this tiny human. I had few other outlets. Nothing of my own. And because my foundation was shaky to begin with, I just handed myself over in my entirety. And I waited to be fulfilled. And I wasn’t.
With every childcare challenge (in the early days it really is childcare, the parenting doesn’t come until later), I thought I could solve my way out of rough patches. I read. I studied. I Googled. I strategized. I joined groups. I listened and took notes. I approached my first the way I had approached every other project in my life: work hard, prove yourself, and you will find success. This did not work. This lead me to believe that maybe the way I had been doing things all along was flawed.
The faith and calm I had in pregnancy and my ability to trust in the outcomes, dissolved when the first one was placed in my arms. I couldn’t let things just be. I wouldn’t, couldn’t, give up control. And I wouldn’t ask for help. I was striving. Even as a mother, I was striving waiting for the gold star, to be recognized for what an amazing job I was doing. The harder I tried to make everything just-so, the more things slipped out from under me.
The universe has a way of straightening itself out. It turns out, these had always been my issues but becoming a parent amplified them. It was like motherhood took all of my hang ups and insecurities and incompetencies and projected them on a big screen for me to see playing before me.
Until I could learn to move past them, I would be banging my head against the same wall.
Eventually, after my second child, I evolved into the more laid back go-with-the-flow parent that I am today. But I wasn’t always like that. Now I can look back on that transformation and see that I had a lot of shit to deal with and becoming a parent was the catalyst for moving past it.
Over time, I learned to share the responsibility. I had to, once one child turned into two. And I started to see the bigger picture. It was better for myself and for my children if they had other people in their lives sharing in their care and development.
I don’t write any of this to scare my friend but from a much more hopeful place. You can have all of those feelings and more, and your family will be okay. You can listen to your heart and your gut and open yourself to a whole new world of experience. The first one is loving at a whole new level, one you never knew was possible.
The first one is about the birth of a child, but it’s also the birth of a mom.
And both can be messy.
PS Here’s another piece I wrote about pregnancy: The Secret Recipe, and one about my postpartum mess: Newton’s Second Law.
When Kaly doesn’t have her nose in a book, she wrangles and referees two elementary age boys and blogs about her humorous efforts to lead a mindful, connected life. She’s the author of Good Move: Strategy and Advice for Your Family’s Relocation, a book about the craziness of moving with kids. Her writing has been featured on sites such as Mamalode, The Mid, In The Powder Room, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and Scary Mommy to name a few. You can find her on Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and Twitter.
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