Yours sincerely, the Mum in you #2

Dear the Woman in me,

We need to talk.

We’ve been dancing around this subject for a while.

We need to talk about birth; past and future.

I know how terrifying Alice’s birth was for you, I was there. I have watched your experience hold you back for almost 9 months and it is heartbreaking. I have relived those hours with you over and over. I have felt the shame, the guilt, the fear, the anger and the sadness. I was there with you and I am here with you now.

We still have a long way to go as far as healing is concerned but I wanted to remind you of how far you have come.

You are no longer plagued by uncontrollable flashbacks. If you do have any they are minor and manageable. You can talk about what happened, you can be honest when people ask ‘are you having anymore?’ You can work and do your job just as well as you ever did before.

Don’t let people tell you that what you’re working through is like fixing a broken leg in terms of needing help because it’s not. This was your experience and yours alone, no one will know what you felt.

I want you to have the confidence to own your experience one day, to be able to wear it as armour instead of a wound.

I’m not saying it wasn’t horrendous but you successfully went through labour and birth on gas and air! I know you see as labour as the time you lost control and therefore lost yourself and never found yourself again.

This isn’t how I see it.

I see this as the time you transformed into 'mum', don’t snigger you know it’s true. I see it as the time you became so much stronger than you ever were before.

If you keep moving forward I know a day will come when Alice’s birth is no longer a trauma in your past.

But you have to let go.

There are times where you forget or maybe the birth doesn’t seem as bad and you freak out when you feel this is happening. You sometimes remind yourself it was awful just to make sure you don’t get pregnant again! But then you will cry at night because you can’t have any more children as you wouldn’t be able to cope with birth again.

Breathe. Enjoy Alice, no decisions need to made right now.

If how you feel about children and birth changes daily so be it. Embrace all possibilities, possible futures with other children or just with Alice.

If nothing else know that you are a mum now. No one can take that away. Being a mum is wondrous and better then you ever imagined anything could be.’

Yours sincerely, the Mum in you

Why?

When I read other people’s blogs I always wonder why they started and what they hope to achieve from writing it. When I read other blogs (and I am slightly addicted) I like that you can see progression, how neat and linear everything is. If anyone should come across mine I apologise now that it is not like that.

If anyone is interested in what prompted me to start this blog then read on, if not please skip.

A few years ago I was never interested in having children, in fact the very thought made me laugh. Me? A mum?! Not a chance! Then not long after meeting my husband this all changed and I turned into a baby freak. I couldn’t wait to have a baby but feared I wouldn’t have one as my cycles were almost non-existent. If I did get my period I would parade round the house ecstatic, even feeling a little excited and getting to use feminine hygiene products (sad right?).

There were some dark days during this time and for some reason one day I started to write about it, not anywhere public just on my laptop for no one but me and my husband to read.

There were more ups and downs when I did get pregnant and Alice’s birth left me with PTSD type symptoms. I really struggled and ended up being referred to a psychologist who encouraged me to keep writing whilst I waited to start therapy with them.

So I did.

I started writing on my laptop again but this time about how I was finding being a new mum. Writing has been incredibly therapeutic for me and has helped me start to heal and enjoy all aspects of being a mum.

So why did I decide to publish any of this crap?

Whilst I was writing and waiting for CBT (which I am still waiting for) I searched the internet for anyone one else experiencing PTSD symptoms from birth and I didn’t find much. Maybe I wasn’t looking hard enough or in the right places but the little I could find was from professionals rather than mums themselves. It got me thinking that maybe people didn’t talk about it much? Or maybe people thought what was happening to them was PND which I was told I had many a time.

I am not planning to or even hoping to change the world, or become viral but if even one person feels less lonely after reading this mind diarrhoea I will be one happy mama. If no ever reads it then being honest that’s fine too because it is helping me to heal and that’s why I started this.

What I publish here is a selection of words from my personal journal past and present. Because of this the blog posts won’t necessarily be uploaded as when they happen. Some posts might have already happened and some might be current. Take this post for example; this probably should have been this first thing I published instead of the sixth. 

Yours sincerely, the Mum in you #1

If I could go back to just before I had Alice I would tell myself this...

“You are about to go through the hardest, most painful and worst experience of your life so far. I am not saying this to scare you or to be mean, I am telling you this because it’s important.

Your labour with Alice will be the most horrible experience and it will affect you for a very long time, maybe even forever. You will have so many questions, some that will be answered and some that most likely never will.

You will feel lost, alone and undeserving of love. You will cry almost every night for months and you will feel like a failure as a mum.

It will be the hardest time of your life and there will be moments where you seriously question whether you can continue.

However, this is only a part of what is to come.

You will learn that Husband is more amazing then you ever imagined. He will be by your side every night holding you and getting you through each and every day. He will never judge you and you will really see how much he loves you.

You will feel so much love for this new tiny being. You will realise that all that corny crap other parents told you when you were pregnant is true and now you completely get what they were trying to say.

You will feel overwhelming happiness (and fear) because of Alice. You will marvel at her and she will always be called your impossible girl. You will feel so incredibly blessed.

You will worry more than you ever thought possible and you will learn just how resilient you are.You will stay up so many nights when Alice is poorly just watching her sleep, making sure she’s comfortable and safe.

There will be times where you feel so stressed and you lose your temper and shout at her, or swear or even call her names and she will smile at you or laugh and all that anger will turn into happiness and you will laugh too.

You will do anything and everything to make her smile and you won’t give a damn about how stupid you look doing it.

You will grow more as a person in the following 8 months then you have in your 27 years on this earth. You will feel like a mum, take a deep breath, you will get there.

You will become the mum you want to be. Don’t worry about breastfeeding because Alice is going to be a healthy happy child. There will be a time when all you can think about is how you should have breastfed and it will upset you but only for a brief while. After that you won’t even give it a second thought and you will be confident in the decision you made.

You will learn you do not deal well without sleep. You are friggin’ awful! Really bad! Even I don’t want to be around you when you’re sleep deprived! BUT that’s ok; forgive yourself because you’re human.

You will fall in love with Alice; you will also fall in love with Netflix.

The most important thing for me to tell you is that although Alice’s birth will haunt you every day and some days will be so unbelievably hard, there will be moments where you look at her and you think ‘you know what, I WOULD do that again in a heartbeat because she is the best thing I have ever done’.

And you will mean it.”

There's no place like work (said no mum ever until now)

I went back to work when Alice was 7 months old. True my hours are greatly reduced but it is still work none the less. Almost all the other mums I speak to are dreading going back to work and leaving their little ones. They will miss spending every minute of every 24 hours waiting on their baby surrendering completely to the role of mum.

This is not me.

I used to feel embarrassed and guilty about this but these feelings seemed to have disappeared since my first day back at work. Throughout my maternity leave I had periods of absolute dread regarding work and other times where I was counting down the days to getting back on the ward.

I trained for three years to become a mental health nurse, I worked hard for four years to be the best nurse I can. I get strange looks when I say I enjoy work. Why wouldn’t I want to go back? Being a nurse makes me feel great and I didn’t realise just how important it was to me until I had Alice.

Being a nurse is the one thing I feel 100% good and confident about. Not once have I questioned whether or not I am a good nurse because I know I work hard to be better nurse every day and do the best I can for my patients.  I feel like I live and breathe being a nurse. My first day back although busy and shit in some ways was also the easiest day I’ve had in seven months. It all came back so easily, I just slipped back into it like I had only been there yesterday. It felt so good to be back, kind of like taking off tight jeans after a huge meal ha!

Sometimes I don't have much confidence in myself as a mum but I have 100% confidence in knowing Alice and that I will do what is best for her. I don’t feel qualified enough to be a mum and I do sometimes wonder how I would do if there was a motherhood test.

Being 100% honest with myself right now I sometimes ask myself if  I am actually up for the job of motherhood.

In the darkest time which is usually at night especially if I haven’t slept I think and tell myself over and over that I am no good as a mum and Alice deserves a real mum. I have no idea what the hell a real mum is but I ‘know’ in those moments that it’s not me. I cannot accurately describe the guilt I feel in those moments. It’s as if something is slowly crushing my chest and the life inside it. I look at my daughter sleeping and I am overwhelmed with love and devotion for her however, I am also equally overwhelmed with guilt and feelings of selfishness. I sometimes feel annoyed with myself because I remember all those nights I cried and almost physically ached I was so desperate for a baby and now I’m here I feel like I should give up. I don’t want to give up, I want to feel strong and confident about being a mum like I do about being a nurse but the feeling just isn’t there sometimes.

 In some ways I feel extremely confident but it’s almost like it only permeates so many layers of myself before turning to sand underneath. The ‘nurse part’ of me is different; it feels like this is rooted into my very core and nothing can move it. I wish I knew how to plant roots for my ‘mum part’.

Being a mum forces you to look into yourself and take a long look at everything you are or you think you are. I have looked inside and I have not liked what I have seen. There were times I worried that becoming a mum meant sacrificing the one thing I felt really good about in me which is being a nurse. Being back at work has given me part of myself back and that's OK. I enjoy my job, I am confident in what I do and I hope I can have the same confidence in being a mum some day.

I have so much respect for stay at home mums, their job is bloody tough!!!I am by no means saying that going back to work is the right thing or staying at home is the right thing. I think that everyone should make the choice that is right for their family. I am very lucky that I only work 2 days a week and the other 5 I get to spendf with Alice. I get the best of both worlds! 

Feeling good about being a working mum is nothing to feel ashamed about. I think about how I feel about my mum and how much respect and love I have for her. She worked full time, took care of the house and raised me. I don’t know she did it she deserves a medal in my opinion, especially with having the handicap that is my dad for over a decade.

My mum told me that once when I was little, primary school age, I wasn’t very well, I was apparently sat in her en suite toilet and she was pleading with me to go to the childminder because she had to go to work. I went to the childminder and she felt guilty all day, in fact she still feels guilty to this day and that memory is printed on her mind always.

I have no memory of this at all. I would have been old enough to remember but I don’t because it wasn’t awful, I don’t resent my mum and I don’t feel there is anything to forgive because she didn’t do anything wrong. In my mum’s eyes what she did made her a bad mum or was something a bad mum would do but in my eyes she is a bloody super hero and she has never done wrong. We have had our differences and difficulties yes, but she has never been anything less than awesome in my eyes.

 Being a mum is nothing like a job. You can’t train for it, you can’t prepare for it, there are no
practice runs where you can start over if you fuck up. You get one shot and that is all. You make a commitment to love, care for, protect and guide a tiny being you have never met for the rest of their life and yours. I still feel that in many ways it is like becoming a God for a tiny human, maybe not as glamorous though as I can’t remember the last time God had to wipe up shit.