Mothers

When I think of mothers I have this vision in my head of so many different kinds of mothers.  I envision my mother, my grandmother,  women from the beginning of time, the number of people on the planet and how they all came from mothers.  I think of feeding, suckling, nourishing, and giving non-stop until the end of my days and that thought uplifts me.  When I am sitting and relaxing at the end of the day, feeling my baby roll around, kick, and stretch inside of my tummy I realize that this is what mothers do and have done.  This beginning of human life is such a miracle, I feel so special and then I realize that I am just experiencing something that millions of other women have experienced.  When I look at all these other mothers I feel like I understand something that I did not understand before.

This experience of feeling another being develop inside of me has left my spirit feeling suspended.  My thoughts are slower, felt and digested through my third eye, my heart seems to tingle and sparkle, I feel so light and happy, my reactions are more thought out, my love for Darren has engulfed my entire midsection at the thought of what we created together.  I have no real understanding of what it is that I am feeling but I do not need to because I am in it.  The rounder my midsection gets the more I realize that I have taken the plunge, never again will I go back to who this person is that has developed over the past 35 years.  Everything is going to change and I have never been more ready than I am now.

Letting Go

During the process of trying to get pregnant I heard so many stories and experiences from a number of random women who did not get pregnant easily.  The only thing I found to be consistent in their journey is that they all seemed to get to a point where they had to let it go. I would repeatedly hear that they stopped trying and finally started having fun sex again, or they got drunk and crazy and just fucked, or they started looking into adoption and took the pressure off.   I knew in my head that I needed to let go but how do you let go of the one thing in life you have always wanted?  I do not have any idea how you really let it go but I do know that temporarily letting it go is what worked for me each time I got pregnant.

During my journey to motherhood my yoga practice stepped up considerably.  In my yoga practice I continuously meditated on letting go.  I would chant "let go" in my mind, I would visualize letting go in my mind's eye, I would create artwork of birds flying, I tried everything that I could to train my mind to be in the moment and to let go of whatever the future may hold.  I feel like my yoga practice really helped to train my mind to be aware of my thoughts and to be able to free from them the circle of rethinking the same thought over and over again but I couldn't really let go of trying to get pregnant until I became frustrated with the process.  The last two times I became pregnant I had reached a point of feeling hopeless, Spring Break was right around the corner and I wanted to just have fun and not think about what my body was or was not doing.  My heart was tired of the 2WW, the let down, assessing all my PMS symptoms and thinking they were pregnancy symptoms, I wanted to just have some fun.  Sure enough, having fun interpreted into having fun, wild sex.  The fun sex ended up getting us pregnant.

Now that I am pregnant and have just entered my third trimester I feel like the letting go is going to be tool that I will need to have sharp and ready at all times.  Now I am learning to let go of the fear of birth, the pain of contracting and pushing, the fear that baby might not be okay, the fear of my midsection getting bigger and bigger, the fear of stretch marks, the fear of not having everything we might need for baby, the fear of not having enough money, the fear of not sleeping.....  The list goes on and once baby is born then there will be a whole new list of things to hold onto, to think about, to "let go"of.

History

Currently...28 weeks pregnant.  Age...35 years old.  Years it took me to get to this point in my life...seems like forever.  


When I think back to when I decided I wanted to be a mother I end up back in my sophomore math class in high school.  I was 15 years old and had just decided that I wanted a tattoo.  I wanted a tattoo of a lily on my lower back because I wanted to name my first little girl Lily.  Thank the stars that my mother told me to get on birth control when I became sexually active. I did get that first tattoo at the ripe young age of 15 and it was a lily on my lower back.  A lifelong reminder of the little girl I always wanted.  


Fast forward 20 years...Here I am, finally pregnant and getting bigger by the day.  28 weeks ago I discovered that I was indeed pregnant again.  I do not have any children but I have had 2 prior pregnancies that ended in miscarriage. I was really beginning to give up hope.  I always thought that as soon as I was ready to have babies that I would get pregnant and have a baby but that is not how it happened.  


Rewind to age 32.   I was ready to have a baby.  I had a loving partner who was ready to start trying.  Darren and I had been together a solid 7 years, been through some ups and downs but had a stable, supportive, balanced and loving relationship.  We bought a home together, we were raising a lovely little pug dog together, and we were ready to try for a family.  I had a great job teaching art in an elementary school and everything was in it's right place.  I was shocked to find out that we were pregnant the second month of trying.  My mind raced ahead of the moment, all I could see was this baby, being a mom, I was so excited.  At 9 weeks I went in for my first doctor's appointment just to discover that there was nothing there.  A blighted ovum.  I had never heard that term before but learned that it is when the baby does not develop but the placenta does tricking the body into thinking it is still pregnant.  Also called a Missed Miscarriage.  Of course we were crushed.   I miscarried at home and would never wish that on anyone.  It took my body some time to recover.  We were finally ready to start trying again 6 months later.  It took us 5 months of trying to get pregnant again and those 5 months felt like 5 years.  Pregnancy #2, I had hope because I thought there was no way that I could loose another one.  Sure enough, development was slow, saw the heard beat at 7 weeks and at 8 weeks the fetus had died.  This time I had a DnC at the hospital and that was a lot easier to recover from than the natural miscarriage.  Even more devastated, wondering what is wrong with me, how many times can I go through this before I loose my heart and mind.  Not to mention the hormonal insanity that my body went through.  So we recovered and decided to try again.  This time it took 7 months of trying to get pregnant and those 7 months felt like 7 years.  Pregnancy #3...This time I just expected to loose it, I was just waiting to find out that it was not going to work out again because then I was going to give up on being a mother and live life with this empty place in my heart.  But this one stuck, everything has been perfect since the beginning.  The baby has always measured ahead and now at 28 weeks I can see and feel it rolling, kicking, stretching, hiccuping, etc.