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ch-amomiletea · 1 year ago

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@nataliaspotts

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ch-amomiletea · 2 years ago

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in honour of mother’s day i’m going to share some words i wrote through the night on january 18th 2023

it’s 5:30 am

i’m waiting for my baby to wake up so he can help relieve the discomfort of having two full boobs and i’ve already pumped once tonight! he’s only four months old. four months that feels like years and four months that feels all the feels of ‘we’re leaving the hospital already? right now? are you sure?’

my younger self used to want a baby all the time. it was something i knew i was 100% of and i made sure my partner of the time knew that. i was 20, i was 22.. i was wrong. those relationships could never have handled the weight of a child, those versions of me were not ready in the slightest. i went through a major change at 23 years old, a life altering change that completely rerouted my course ahead. it felt like i started going through the process of reconstructing myself and i had to start at the beginning. it took two years and by 25 i felt fresh air in my lungs for the first time in a long time. i felt a sense of purpose and connection with my true self, the self i wanted to grow and be closer to. my life was starting to feel truly like a basket of blessings made just for me. and honestly it was! i put in the work emotionally to heal wounds, to rethink previous thoughts in new light, to revisit memories and go over them with insight and clarity. in doing so i was able to clear out the junk in the way of my life’s offerings. things started to feel ‘lucky’ you could say, but i knew deep down it was because i was deserving. i got to a place where i was able to make a five year plan with actual attainable goals and that felt really great. on that list sure enough was ‘have a baby or start having one by 30’. at this point i wasn’t trying to have a baby, i was very comfortable leaving that part of life to future me and i knew i still wanted to be a mom someday. i felt comfortable in waiting until i was 30 to start because i thought i would have x y and z ready by then. i’ve realized now you might have x and y, but z never comes. you’re never ready for the shift it brings. i was 26 years old when i became pregnant for the first time. i can’t remember how many pregnancy tests i’ve peed on in my life just because my friend did it too, or i missed my period (which was never accurate anyway due to pcos) or because i was just full of hope that maybe, it would be positive. with a sea full of negative results i wasn’t expecting any different in the middle of the night that july. i was rushed with a feeling of so much excitement that it felt blurry. there’s no way, two lines? am i sure two lines means positive? i double checked the package and everything. it’s a fever dream. chad and i were so happy. we felt whole. we felt more love around us somehow. it was so exciting knowing we created life together and we going to grow our family. a fever dream.. lasting two weeks and three days. i can remember talking to my brothers girlfriend at the time, one of the only people that knew, asking her questions about what i should expect. how do i know if everything is okay? is it normal to feel the way i do? she reassured me it was but that it’s different for everyone. she only had her experience to offer as all women do, and it’s never the same. the feeling of excitement faded as fast as it came. all the anxiety and worry set in. what do i do? what can’t i do? is it safe to eat sesame oil? what vitamins should i take? google on google on google. an awful thing to do i don’t recommend. none of it mattered though because a deep feeling of concern was set in my core that something was wrong. everyone was trying to be supportive saying that i should wait until my next appointment, it’s normal to have a little bleeding, try to be positive. typical responses but all i knew was that i didn’t feel positive and i wanted someone, anyone to validate that yes things could be fine, but to me, i knew it wasn’t. i finally decided to go to emergency outpatients after passing a really large blood clot and while i was there, waiting to have confirmed what i knew to be a miscarriage, the real bleeding started. it was nothing like what i expected one to be. it was comparable to a period, just a very heavy, very crampy period. i was still waiting for the doctors words to make it real. i was there for two days total by the end of it all.

after hours of waiting, i was told my pregnancy was over, i indeed had a miscarriage. the doctor came in said his piece and left all within five minutes. i wasn’t ready for the open space that was left when i went home that day. it feels like a daze. i wasn’t able to process what really happened. one minute, my dream had come true. i felt more like myself than ever, i felt beautiful. i felt radiant, closer with my partner, excited of what was to come. to feeling numb, confused and lost. cuddled up in sweatpants and a dark hoodie over my head i felt lifeless. why would this happen? how could a dream come true end so abruptly? me, a spiritual being, tried to go over what i missed. what lesson didn’t i go through, am i being punished? i wasn’t able to convince myself at the time it was for a higher purpose. i felt angry in my faith and angry with myself that i was silly enough to believe i deserved a baby, that i deserved to be happy. all the work i had put into myself in the last few years seemed to not matter in the slightest. the darkness i had contained was leaking. it was creeping into my veins, my every thoughts. like simon and garfunkels hello darkness my old friend, i let it in with open arms. i wallowed. chad and i went from feeling high to an uncomfortable silence. a piece missing between us. for different reasons we felt as if we failed before we started. everyone else’s lives remained the same and somehow ours felt tainted. one thing we did know following is that we wanted to feel that joy again. we wanted to have a baby and this time we were going to try.

the only good thing that came from going to outpatients that night was having my blood work done. during that time the doctor on call was able to notice my blood type was a negative. the third most rare in canada. with this blood type my body only accepts a few others. this meaning depending on the blood type of my growing a fetus, if it isn’t the right one, my body thinks it’s infectious and needs to be eliminated. so i start creating antibodies to get rid of whatever is foreign inside. he told me this is most likely what happened in my situation. i was given a needle there called Rhogam. it’s a blood culture injection for the next time i was to get pregnant, it tells my body that i am safe and it is able to recognize a fetus growing safely. i held on to this information as my hope that next time will be different! a small light in my tunnel. and so chad and i started to ‘try’ to get pregnant. it turns out the anxiety was just as bad. writing down cycles, tracking ovulation, is that discharge good or bad? oh we didn’t have sex yet, let’s schedule it for this time. so much mental consumption it’s exhausting. during this time, everyone was being forced into taking the covid vaccine. i work at a private school and for me, it wasn’t an option to go without, so against what i truly wanted, i had my first shot. i had heard some stories about woman having messed up cycles after receiving their vaccines but so much misinformation was spread i filed it in with everything else covid related. time went on and we continued to try. then i miss my period. overly excited for a positive pregnancy test i get chad to pick one up on the way home and i take it right away. it was an electronic test and it was positive. wow that was fast! i don’t feel any different. my boobs don’t hurt this time, i feel literally nothing. but it’s all happening again! i see a positive sign on a small plastic stick. within two days after the test i’m bleeding and my world shuts down again. all i could think is why me? how on earth is this possible? all that work for this, again. was it the vaccine? what am i doing wrong? i made a doctors appointment and when i showed up i said i’m having another miscarriage. he got me to pee in a cup, tested it and told me without emotion i wasn’t pregnant to start with and asked if there was anything else he could help me with. i felt stunned. wow. no second miscarriage. i walked in there the most depressed i had felt in years and left 10 pounds lighter. something about that experience instantly changed my entire view.

something just clicked inside of me. all the worrying, overthinking, questioning, it was all useless. i have zero control of this. and for the first time in months, my faith was with me hand in hand. “what’s meant for me will not be missed” became my mantra. i said it everyday. when we are truly ready for change it is given. it isn’t what we expect, it isn’t pretty or fun at times but it is crafted for exactly what we need. i apologized to myself for giving up. i apologized to my spirit guides for thinking i was ever steered in the wrong direction. chad and i decided to stop trying and i felt for the first time in a while, able to go on with life again baby free. i didn’t know quite what that looked like though. for months i had gone through major change, felt so empty. who was i now? things between chad and i became distant. we both knew we weren’t trying anymore and were okay with that, but it didn’t erase what had happened. we were both on our own now battling a sadness we had never felt before. where do we go now? i will admit things got tough. by december we weren’t doing so well. i remember feeling like maybe we were ending our course together. if we weren’t meant to have kids and can’t get through this, what can we get through?

chad is truly a blessing. the way we interact has always been open and flowing. that didn’t change throughout this hard time and we were able to fully communicate what we could put together as valid emotions and thoughts. we were on the rocks, trying to figure out what in the hell life’s next move was. now it’s christmas. we have to put brave faces on for our families. we decided we can deal with this when the holidays are over. we were at my mothers for another round of christmas dinner and i felt so awful. i had acne in places i wasn’t used to, feeling so full and nauseous. i couldn’t eat another christmas bite. on top of feeling absolutely exhausted, i was convinced i had appendicitis and that it was going to rupture ruining everyone’s holiday. then out of the blue my mom says to me sarcastically ‘maybe you’re pregnant’. words i truly hadn’t considered. words i hadn’t thought of in a long time. there’s no way i thought. chad and i weren’t doing the best, we weren’t having nearly as much sex as normal. though once she said it, the gut feeling came back. this time, it felt full of truth. we return to our one bedroom city apartment, not sure what to do with ourselves, and i decide to take a test in the middle of the night. positive. i took two this time and neither were electronic. positive both times. i didn’t feel excited, i didn’t feel happy. i felt shocked. i felt like here we go again and i crawled back into bed and said to chad, “so i am pregnant” and i’ll never forget his low muffled, saddened one word reply of “yeah….” and we both went back to sleep. the following morning was quiet and soft. where do we go from here? what does this mean for us now? months of ups and downs about pregnancy, thoughts of the future and our relationship, all the questions seemed to come to a head. we took it as a sign that it’s not over for us, clearly. now i’m not advocating for getting pregnant to try and save relationships, that isn’t what happened in our case- as i believe, our child chose us. we were shown that we can handle dark times, we stayed open, honest and true to each other. we remained supportive even though the conversations were hard to have. we kept each other close and life gifted us our greatest treasure. from there we decided to embark on the journey of pregnancy together.

i had my first ultrasound at 7 weeks, it was an amazing experience but yet i still felt far from being pregnant. i was waiting for confirmation from something, anything. i needed to know i was progressing. we waited until 12 weeks to tell anyone. i didn’t want to raise hopes if this wasn’t going to go well. they say if you make it out of your first trimester, your chances of having a miscarriage go down, but for me having had one already, my chances remained higher than the rest regardless. i kept looking for signs that it was happening again instead of enjoying the changes that were happening to me. of all the time wanting and waiting for a baby, i wasn’t prepared for what pregnancy really felt like at all.

the first few months i felt so far from myself. i was just dealing with a life crisis, my relationship with chad, my identity and now my hormones are at an all time high. i felt gross and confused. i was distant from everything that felt normal to me. i was able to come out of my funk in the second trimester and i learned this is normal for most women. the second trimester is a beautiful time. your belly is round, you feel more confident in yourself, everyone is giving you compliments, you’re so excited to meet the small human you’re creating inside. you really start to feel connected to being a woman. you understand all the cliches, the movies, the sayings about being pregnant and how amazing it feels that you are able to grow a human being from seed. a body, a home that soon a beautiful soul will inhabit and walk the earth along side you. then the third trimester hits and you’re unable to see your vagina, sore every night, getting out of a car is a task, and you find yourself wearing the same two outfits because nothing fits. the compliments have stopped and now it’s “get your sleep while you can” , “are you sure there’s not two in there?” and my personal favorite as i was pregnant through the summer, “you must find it so hot”. it’s overwhelming, annoying and you’re ready for it to be over.

i went over in my pregnancy by 11 long, awaited days. my birth plan didn’t go as planned, like most. though i wouldn’t change a thing and am super grateful for how it all played out. finally after years of wanting a baby, one miscarriage and a lot of highs and lows, i got to meet my baby boy, obsidian. my very first thought when seeing him was “his arms are so chubby” and my second quickly after “oh my god he has hair”. it’s a wild phenomenon to go from months of wondering, what will he look like? what have we created? to seeing a face that somehow you feel like you’ve always known. i look at him and feel as though i’ve known him my whole life like there hasn’t been a day i’ve lived that his face hasn’t been known to me. it’s overwhelming. this type of love is smothering and it hurts. it touches parts of me i didn’t know i had. i only showered once a week in the first month he was born and i cried in every shower. i cried because i had a baby, i cried because i felt so heavy inside, i cried because i already longed the life i used to have, i cried because i had no idea what to do or where i was going next. i will never forget the moment i touched my stomach for the first time after birth. i was a ginormous pregnant lady. my belly looked as though it could have been an attachment piece. i swore i would never miss it. and then it hit me. the instant i touched myself and expected to feel comfort, to feel something round and full of life and energy, felt completely empty. i felt hollow. there was no signal being given back through my hand, just nothingness. the tears swelled in my eyes, i was shocked to feel so sad. there i was with my beautiful, healthy baby boy laying across the room from me, yet i felt so alone. there are so many moments you aren’t prepared to feel. it’s astonishingly magical. so here i am, writing this and feeling all sorts of ways. thinking that having a baby is like crossing a bridge except the bridge never ends. you don’t someday get to the other side, you just keep going. the wind is strong, it can be hard to breathe but you keep going. you can’t see the end but you keep going. the water below can be calm and some days it’s raging full of power but you keep going. i’ve had many what if moments, but i know now, i was meant to be obsidians momma. this version of me today, this stage of life i’m in now. it all makes sense. i don’t believe that i had a miscarriage and then became pregnant again with a different baby. i believe it was him all along. he was ready to join us but only he knew at the time my body wasn’t ready and i had to start with that first. without my first pregnancy i would not have known about my blood type and i would have repeated the same cycle. one thing is true and that is the timing is always right, never question that. question what you’re doing instead and if it serves your highest purpose.

i love being a mother and i love my son even more. seeing him smile feels like im experiencing pure bliss. i never want it to end. i will hold his hand for as long as i can. motherhood is unbelievable. life is full of magic, believe that. thank you for listening. sending out positive vibes to all

goodnight

#mothersday

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ch-amomiletea · 2 years ago

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