Category: Thoughts on parenting

People are advised to keep their pregnancy a secret for the first three months. Safety reasons. In case the pregnancy doesn’t work out, you don’t want to have to go back and announce to everyone that you’re now not pregnant anymore.

My first two pregnancies were easy and my little embryos grew to be healthy and happy babies. I waited for about 10 weeks before I made it public, but waiting was tough.

Why was it tough? The first three months of pregnancy are generally awful. You have to understand that you’re pregnant first. Then let it sink in. Then allow for your perspective of the world to slowly change, with your due date becoming the central point and the future baby turning into the main focus. You’re equally worried and excited. You’re also nauseated, irritable, exhausted – you’re not your normal self. You want to murder everyone, cry about it, lay down and sleep next to a toilet bowl.

Sounds overwhelming and exhausting? Wait, there’s more. While you’re dealing with all these newly discovered emotions AND physical discomfort, you have to keep it all a secret and pretend like everything’s fine (aka lie to everyone).

And then, in some cases, the pregnancy doesn’t work out. When that happens to you, your reality dramatically changes yet again, although no one is aware. You told no one that you were pregnant, you can’t tell anyone that you aren’t pregnant anymore. You’re angry, sad, confused, disappointed, lost, or all of it at once, depending on the time of the day. And still, you can’t mention it when people casually ask you how you’re doing. You’re left to deal with it all pretty much on your own.

***

In the eighth week of pregnancy, we found out that the embryo wasn’t developing properly. Since there was an indication of a heartbeat, it was difficult to make any definite statements. We were told to come back a week later for a checkup.

I barely survived the week. For seven neverending days, I was going back and forth between optimism and deep sadness, with a cloud of worry constantly blurring my mind. I couldn’t focus on anything else. I googled “eight weeks pregnant weak heartbeat”, “eight weeks pregnant embryo too small”, “late implementation”, “miscarriage”.  I read every possible article I could find online. I desperately clung to the positive stories, even though, deep inside, I knew what the outcome of our next appointment was going to be.

A week later the ultrasound showed there was no heartbeat anymore. The embryo had stopped growing. I accepted the news calmly, focused on the formalities: What next? We decided to wait for my body to recognise the pregnancy as not viable and to reject the embryo. In other words, we were waiting for me to miscarry naturally.

That didn’t happen. My body had no idea what was going on. My breasts were still painful and growing. I was suffering from nausea. I gained weight. My belly looked pregnant. I found it mind-boggling how out of sync my brain and my body were.

My brain was trying to convince me that there was a positive side to the situation: “We’re about to move. Moving house will be so much easier without a newborn around” / “There are so many different projects to work on at moment, not being pregnant gives me more time”  / “I’m able to drink again. I can use this time to go out with all of my friends” / …

All the while – my body still believed I was pregnant. It wasn’t letting go. This was, I found out, a missed miscarriage. My body missed the fact that it was supposed to miscarry.

***

Sixteen days after the last appointment, we scheduled a D&C, a surgical procedure.  It was performed under a full anaesthesia so I was unaware of what was going on. I was brave (or numb?) before the procedure. I felt weak and confused upon waking up. I bled a lot and slept a lot for a couple of days. They told me to rest for two weeks. My brain told me to get up and go. Two days after the procedure, the bleeding almost stopped and I acted as if nothing had happened. I decided not to think about it anymore, now that it was all finished. No point in crying.

Blocking the sadness and trying to forget didn’t work, though. You can only force yourself to feel nothing for this long. About three weeks after my D&C, I broke down. Sadness and emptiness jumped at me and caught me off guard. I ended up sobbing loudly for a long time, equally confused and relieved at what I was (finally) feeling.

I realised I never allowed myself to mourn properly. And I needed to. Not only to mourn the baby who wasn’t meant to be but even more importantly, to mourn my happy, excited and pregnant self who lived in a different reality for a while and who seized to exist unexpectedly.

***

I would’ve been 16 weeks pregnant today and I’m allowing myself to recognise the sadness and the loss. Going through it left me feeling very lonely, more than anything. It wasn’t because I felt like I couldn’t / shouldn’t talk to anyone about it. It was because I had no idea how to talk about it. I also didn’t know how to cope on my own with this deeply personal and intimate pain.

I wish it wasn’t socially acceptable (and encouraged) to pretend in front of everyone, myself included, that everything is all right just to save us all from feeling uncomfortable for a bit. There are more women than you know going through exactly the same horror story and it would be amazing to be able to share and get support.

It would’ve been helpful for me to be able to tell people when they ask me how I was doing: “I’m feeling horrible. For a while I was pregnant and happy and excited and I’m not pregnant anymore” and for them just to nod and say “I’m sorry you had to go through it, that really sucks”. That would’ve been enough.

For Molly, on her fifth birthday.
Mama

We decided to sell our campervan by the end of the month. We were sure selling was a right decision: the van was old, it was falling apart and it was costing us a fortune to repair it each time something broke. Which happened often. Besides, we felt that we needed to move on: we needed to grow up, be more serious, more responsible and stable.

We chose France as a destination for our last trip. It was safe, familiar and civilised and that seemed appropriate. Knowing that was our last time in the campervan made the trip far less enjoyable, though. There was a lot of pressure to get the best out of our holiday and that unavoidably left us feeling unhappy with each passing day. We rarely said it out loud, but both of us silently feared that the adventurous, spontaneous travelers in us were being replaced by boring tourists. At the start of the week, we’d take turns convincing each other how important it was not to set our expectations too high. “We’re not as young as we used to be,” “We need to live a calmer and healthier life,” “We should just take it easy, relax and enjoy ourselves”. We were trying hard to make ourselves believe that sitting on a sunny terrace of a touristy café can be as fulfilling as getting drunk with locals in dark bars. We just had to find a way to enjoy doing nothing.

I felt the change in us in the second week of our holiday. By then we completely embraced our slower pace of travel. We started sleeping in comfortable campsites instead of camping wild, we were enjoying getting up early feeling refreshed instead of hung-over, we spent time sitting in front of the van reading or just watching people walk past. The atmosphere between us changed as well: we spent more time focused on each other, instead of trying to find people to hang out with.

It was a Tuesday in April and we had been driving down a long, straight country road for a while. We were both lost in thought, completely silent, listening to the music on the radio muffled by the loud noise of our campervan engine. I was taking in the calming view of the green meadows and tall trees while feeling the warmth of the sun on my bare feet on the dashboard. There was nothing in the distance apart from more road and more meadows and more trees. I was at peace and content.

Suddenly I felt a strange sensation, unlike anything I ever felt before. Was it a pop? Or a tickle? I wasn’t able to define it but I immediately knew what it was. It was you. You moved. I placed my hand on my belly and looked over at your Dad: his eyes were focused on the road and he was quietly singing along to the music on the radio, getting all the lyrics wrong. Feeling me watching him, he looked back at me and smiled.

I wanted to tell him that I felt you move, that now finally everything’s starting to make sense, but I stopped myself as I was about to open my mouth. I decided to wait until we pulled over. I wanted you just to myself for a bit first.
„Isn’t this nice?“ said your Dad with a happy grin on his face.
„Very nice“, I thought.
I still wasn’t sure what we were doing, but at that moment I understood why we were doing it. You finally started feeling real.

Today I’m sick. That means I have a stuffy nose, my throat aches, my head aches and I’m feeling feverish. It also means I’m very irritable and hate the world and myself. Today’s one of those days when I’m aware of how pale I am, how awful my skin looks, how flabby my stomach is, how much weight I need to lose… I feel so disgusting today that I have absolutely no energy to make an effort while dressing in the morning.

I grab whatever’s in front of me. Literally. This leaves me taking kids to the daycare in a dark-blue and white stripey skirt, a black and grey spotty cardigan and a T-shirt with a cartoon character on it (which is never appropriate if you’re 34, I don’t really know why I have it in my closet anyway). My hair’s up in a ponytail which is a not-so-secret code for “dirty”. I desperately need a shower. I smell. I’m all gross. Still, I spend the day without doing anything about it, except complaining to the baby about how lazy I am and how I should go jogging. And then I feel even more miserable and have some chocolate instead.

I dropped Molly off at the daycare and was on my way to register our new camper van when I got stuck in traffic. Which would have been annoying but bearable if Benny had been asleep but he was wide awake and complaining.

Groaning turned into whining turned into screaming. For a full hour and a half, I was trying to sing, shhh Benny and every now and then shove a dummy in his mouth and keep it there. All the while I was driving slowly enough that I was able to attend to Benny in the back seat, but fast enough that I don’t get beeped at. For a full hour and a half Benny was upset and after a while, I was emotionally exhausted.

Five minutes later it was difficult to tell which one of us was crying more loudly. Having a minor hysterical breakdown was my cue to pull over (sobbing while driving across two lanes full of very angry drivers to the only empty parking space I’ve seen for ages) and treat myself to some nice breakfast (or any food, actually!).

The second I took him out of the car, Benny was in a great, smiley mood which made me feel a lot better but it also made me re-think my life philosophy: I realised that we were healthy, we were about to have some tasty food, it was a very sunny day and there was actually absolutely nothing to be stressed about. Everything else could wait. So I forced myself to breathe deeply and enjoy my unexpected moment for myself.
As we were about to get back in the car of course I was hoping for a fast, tear-free and enjoyable drive.

But I knew it was OK to just pull over and find something else to do if either of us got too stressed. And honestly – both options sounded good.

I find never ending discussions about breastfeeding and its alternatives really unnecessary and annoying. Let me explain: First of all, I find the biological side of breastfeeding puzzling. It’s supposed to be the most natural thing in the world, still majority of my friends struggle with it.

So I do understand discussions about breastfeeding in sense of reaching out for help. Online forums can be extremely helpful in those situations and it’s great to hear experts’ advice and encouraging stories from women who went through something similar to us. What I don’t understand is the need to discuss it over and over and over again – because there’s a lot of passive-aggression, judging and, consequently, feelings of guilt.

I read tons of online articles and forum discussions on how to properly breastfeed and why breast is the best and then even more of apologetic articles written by women who couldn’t breastfeed and who felt guilty about it. Aside from usual statements on how breastfeeding is healthier, cheaper and better for bonding, many, many other questions arise, the ones we fear to ask aloud, scared that someone might think that we have no clue what we’re doing: Am I really a better mum if I breastfeed? If so, how long should I breastfeed for to be considered a good mum? Is six months enough or should my six year old also get some breast milk in the morning before a hard day at school? Is just breastfeeding enough? Do I have to stare deeply into my baby’s eyes to form that special bond? How long do I have to look at him for while I feed? Am I a bad mum if I just watch TV while he does his thing?
Am I a failure if I can’t breastfeed? How long do I have to keep trying for it to work before I can give up? Am I selfish if I consciously decide not to breastfeed without even trying? 

It gets even more complicated because women are not just divided into those who breastfeed and those who don’t. There are those women who don’t have a lot of milk so they have to breastfeed, pump and also feed their baby from a bottle. And then there’s a whole world of mums who exclusively pump because their bodies produce lots of milk but for some reason their babies can’t drink from the breast.

After having two kids and struggling with my own insecurities, I consider myself somewhat of an expert. On not breastfeeding.

With my first child I fit into the last category. My daughter, for some reason, couldn’t or wouldn’t drink from the breast and, because breast milk is the best and I wasn’t going to be a bad mum, I spent twenty five minutes every two and half hours, day and night, attached to a milk pump and then feeding my daughter expressed milk. I did this for ten weeks. It made going anywhere impossible – I only had a window of two hours to get us ready, to go out and to come back before I had to attach myself to the pump again to save my breasts from exploding. I was also scared that if I didn’t pump regularly, my milk production would stop and at that point, nothing seemed worse than the idea of my baby drinking horrible, evil, poisonous formula. This meant that I also barely slept. I had to be up every two and half hours and more often than not, Molly was awake between the pumping sessions. This also meant that when Molly was crying or wanted to be held, I wasn’t able to pick her up because I was pumping milk which was supposed to keep her healthy and allergy free.

Due to some complications at birth, I only got to see my second baby a day and a half after he was born. At the hospital they immediately brought in the pump and told me to wake up every three hours and pump for twenty minutes. I was groggy from the anaesthetic, weak from the operation, sad for not having seen my child and worried if he was healthy but still I obediently attached myself to the pump again. When it was time to wake up again at 3 a.m., I already feared I wasn’t going to keep it up. My body shut down and it wasn’t producing any milk. I kept having flashbacks to all the stress with Molly and no guarantee that the breastfeeding was going to work out this time when I finally do get to hold my baby. Then I visited him in NICU where I tried to breastfeed but it was impossible – he was crying hysterically, making me want to cry myself. The second time I visited, I was told it was better to not even try breastfeeding at that moment because Benny was hungry and was already used to drinking 50ml from the bottle – since I had no milk, putting him on the breast was only going to upset him and tire him out. Weak and hormonal, it took a lot of self control to stop myself from falling apart, but that was when I finally made my decision – I will not attempt to breastfeed any more this time and I definitely won’t exclusively pump. I will gather my energy and strength until he’s released from the intensive care and then I’ll give him all the attention, warmth and love I have. And a bottle. It wasn’t an easy decision to make, but once I made it, I felt a sense of relief.

I weighed my options, I thought about what works best for me and the baby and decided to stick with it. There wasn’t as much guilt connected to it as with the first baby, probably because I was more self-assured, but instead came anger at all the women who judge those who can’t breastfeed and sympathy for those who keep up with it out of guilt even though it’s driving them insane.

Ironically, even this post is written out of sense of need to explain the reasons behind my decision not to breastfeed. Even though I’m sure my decision was the right one for us, deep inside me I hope that who ever reads this understands me and agrees with me. And there’s so much wrong with that.

I needed to write all of this down as a message to all the new mothers out there – it’s something I wanted to hear two and a half years ago, but didn’t have anyone to tell me: We’re all very well informed about the benefits of breastfeeding and we all agree it’s the best when it works out the way it’s supposed to, so if someone decides against it, be sure that they had a very good reason for it. There’s no need to discuss it, to question it or to judge it. Sadly, there’ll always be people to judge our way of raising our children and (not) breastfeeding is just the beginning. But I strongly believe that as long as I do my own personal best, I can be proud of myself and that’s what’s important.
We all have the same doubts and feelings of guilt. Be brave enough to do whatever feels right for you and your baby and don’t worry about what people around you think. If you want to / can breastfeed, take that boob out proudly! If you don’t want to / can’t, know that you’re not the only one and that you’re a great mum nevertheless.
Simple exercise: Next time when you’re out on the street, take a look around you and see if you can guess who was breastfed and who was not. You can’t? Strange. What if they gave you a history of their illnesses and told you about their relationship with their mums? Still impossible? Right. Go and enjoy being a guilt-free mum.

And if you think whatever you’re doing is the best and the right way to do it and you’re really great at this being-a-mum thing, keep it to yourself. No one wants to hear you brag about it. There’s always someone doing it completely differently and that’s fine. Also – none of your business.

I never dreamed of a “perfect” birthing experience – I didn’t come up with a birthing plan, I never sat around imagining what it was going to be like.

I pushed it out of my mind because I knew that
a) eventually it had to happen one way or another and that
b) whoever’s in the delivery room with me (nurses, doctors) will know a lot more about giving birth than me, so they’ll be able to advise me on what to do if needed, not the other way around.

Also, giving birth to Molly was relatively straightforward and confirmed my idea that the best way to think about giving birth was just letting nature do its thing. I thought I would just be happy to hold my healthy baby, regardless of how he arrived on Earth.

That’s why the emotions I felt after giving birth to our (spoiler alert: healthy and perfect) baby boy on the first day of the year – sadness, disappointment, grieving – took me by surprise. It took me almost three weeks to work through what I was feeling and to get my mind to stop rewinding what happened that night.

And what had happened was a perfect birthing experience turned unexpectedly into the scariest birthing experience before I could even grasp what was going on.

Long story short, after only 45 minutes of painful contractions (and a couple of hours of not very painful ones), we were in the hospital and in a great mood. I was already 9 centimeters dilated, “our” midwife (who we had known for two years, liked and trusted) broke my water, I started to push, thinking how great this was and how it was going to be the quickest birth ever and I was going to be the boss of births. Birthing queen. OK, I was also in a huge amount of pain and freaking out, completely forgetting to breathe properly, but I knew this was the last stage, the shortest one and everything was going to be over soon. And then I heard the midwife shout “Shit! The umbilical cord!” as she pushed the emergency button.

In a second, there were six people around me. I was told they had to perform a C-section right away, one of the doctors literally pushed the baby back inside me and had her fist up there while they were wheeling me into the surgery. Jay had to stay where he was and neither of us knew what was going on. Honestly, I was relieved at that point because I knew I was going to be knocked out. I was too scared to stay awake for whatever was about to happen.

What actually happened was the umbilical cord prolapse. Not to scare anyone, it happens so rarely that our midwife only knew about it in theory and hasn’t experienced it once in eight years of working at the hospital – according to Wikipedia, it happens in 1% of the cases. I guess we have to consider ourselves special. It basically means that the umbilical cord comes out before the baby (in our case it probably happened because I had a lot of amniotic fluid and the baby’s head wasn’t completely engaged yet). If the woman continues to push the baby out, the pressure on the cord from the baby stops the oxygen flow which can cause brain damage. Or worse.

Surviving the next couple of days is a separate topic and deserve its own blog post (or doesn’t).

Fast forward to me being home and, in addition to my hormones going crazy anyway, having constant flashbacks to that night. The picture that kept coming back to me was Jay’s smiling face as he changed my shirt and dressed me in my new pajamas with buttons which I bought specially for the occasion. That was right after we found out I was 9 centimeters dilated and right before the midwife broke my waters. It was a perfect moment in which I was completely connected to my wonderful husband and felt a strong sense of love for him, for our daughter and for our son who we were about to meet. I woke up an hour later with all the buttons on my new shirt ripped because no one had time to fiddle with them to attach me to all different sorts of machines.

It wasn’t the fact that I needed a C-section that made me feel bad, it was the sudden change from happy and excited to horrified and alone that left me in a state of shock. It left me with a feeling of having been robbed of the “perfect birthing experience” even though I didn’t have an idea of one to start with. Three weeks later I threw away the ripped shirt and finally managed to vocalise all the sadness I felt when I thought back to us being happy in that little room. It felt cathartic – I talked at lengths about it with Jay, we cried a lot and came out of it “renewed and restored”.

In the end, I guess every birth that ends with a healthy and happy baby should be considered a perfect birthing experience.
With some births, though, it just takes longer for that feeling to sink in…

We celebrated Molly’s second birthday two weeks ago. Her Granny and Grampa came from England for a week and on Sunday, which was Molly’s actual birthday, we opened all the presents together, sang “Happy birthday” and went for breakfast to our favourite breakfast place in the whole world – McDonald’s. (You read that right.)

After Molly’s nap, a proper party started. There was a cake (I baked the whole previous evening and was terrified of poisoning our guests, taking my non-existent baking powers into the account), there was a birthday candle (the one from last year, in the shape of the number one, because I forgot to buy a candle this year. Plus, Molly can’t read or count yet so why bother) and since three of her little friends came over, there were even more presents to open. Little neighbour from downstairs brought Molly a home-made birthday crown which she wore proudly for the whole two minutes and there was even more of “Happy birthday” singing.