Next Exit: Motherhood

Words from before & after birth

Apr 08, 2024

I wrote the following ready to post on the one week countdown to my planned c-section. But a few days later I went into labour and gave birth earlier than expected. So here is what I thought before with the added bonus of what I now know to be true.

In one week I will finally meet my son.

Motherhood is now a visible area on the map. It’s the next exit off of the motorway. Each passing day is one less mile, one less minute until my destination arrival time.

Thankfully, it’s been a perfectly normal pregnancy, which after years of complex struggle to conceive was exactly what I needed to experience.

Providing him with his first home without any problems, has begun to restore the faith and trust in my body and myself I had lost to infertility. I’ve never hated my being, except for in the depths of my conception challenges. The last nine months have helped to heal that fractured relationship, but also highlighted just how much I had to unravel around re-learning to accept joy and success.

It’s not been easy to be pregnant after loss and with my only miracle embryo, all whilst in the knowledge that I pretty much have no more chances of a genetic child at my age with severely diminshed ovarian reserve, raised killer cells and our financial position after multiple failed IVF rounds and expensive immune treatment.

This time was THE time.

The weight of such expectation is hard to describe, but in essence it has felt like I’ve been holding my breath, and that when he is placed vibrantly pink and wriggling onto my chest, I will finally exhale into such a profound sense of relief, I may need to cry for a full 24 hours. I can sense the processing to be done, the trauma to be released, the letting go of all that doesn’t belong with me anymore, so that I can truly be with him.

Overall, I think I did well to embrace my pregnancy as much as possible. I’ve shared about it online, had a maternity photoshoot, had a sculpture made of me gestating and enjoyed a joint baby shower with our family and friends in attendance.

I’ve done the things, but I’ll admit, always with a slight reservation around tempting fate. Maybe if I did this next ‘thing’ something bad would happen? Thoughts like “don’t be too happy because he’s not here yet” have sadly intruded into all the special moments.

It’s been like straddling two universes, and being yanked in and out of their opposing realities, not completely confident I am living in the correct one so never totally present, always looking for the glitch, the evidence of what type of future I will be permitted to live.

Recently I have had a real struggle with waking up in the morning and thinking that he hasn’t survived the night. I wake early and start poking and prodding him to reassure myself with the thump of a limb. In all honesty, even writing this piece has fed the fatalistic mindset, but I refuse to live within fear.

I’ll live with it but not within. That has been my distinction.

I suppose from the ‘feel the fear but do it anyway’ school of existence. Doing it ‘despite’, doing it ‘in light of’, doing it ‘even though’.

And I’ve very nearly done it, this bardo of infertility and pregnancy after loss, this significant in-between of my life.

In a week, I’ll bid it goodbye and exit onto the road to my next one — the in-between of a transitioning identity from maiden to mother. The beginning of the potent birth and death cycle that is the fourth trimester, ascending and descending through the liminal space of the newborn dreamscape.

Until then, I’ll be holding my breath, ready to finally exhale into his and my own safe arrival.

You have arrived at your destination…

It’s been 2 months since I finally met my son, Quinn. Reading back over my expectations for that time it was surprising to note that, there was no huge cry and emotional release of the last four years. No surreal disbelief. No difficulty accepting my new role as a mother, after so much of my fertility experience had pointed towards this never happening for me.

Welcoming him has just felt normal.

Like I was returning to a place I’d been before, recognising it as the life I started living back in 2020 when I first fell pregnant. I have simply stepped back into that abandoned existence.

Friends and family assumed it may take time for me to adjust, that I may find it so hard to believe I was finally a mother that integrating with him could be a slow process. One dear friend had already told me she would be on hyper alert to me suffering postnatal depression, such was her appreciation of my fertility past and its potential impact upon bonding. Right now, the only way I can explain how it has been is feeling like the life I was living before him was the hard one to believe and reconcile with—so the life in which he is present isn’t strange, it’s just simply how things are meant to be.

Quinn’s arrival has been hard to put into words but years ago (before I’d even re-met Joe) I wrote a poem about becoming a mother to send to expectant friends. It sums up my lived experience perfectly — it seems I’ve always known how this time in my life would feel after all.