My journey into Motherhood - How it started
George is 9 months old. I think I’m ready to tell my story. This is not a particularly dramatic story, and I’m not telling this story with an audience in mind. Nevertheless, I feel I need to tell it to in some way help me process the massive life event of having a baby and transitioning into being a mother.
I was naïve in thinking that once I had my baby, it would be easy – that all my dreams would come true and the former years of heartache and sadness that comes with years of infertility would just vanish. Well, it’s true, the sadness has gone, my beautiful boy has filled that void, but I could have never have imagined how challenging and exhausting I would find motherhood. It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done, and that competes with undertaking a bachelors degree, a masters degree and a doctorate to become a Clinical Psychologist. And yet, this still leaves me feeling a bit inadequate – after all, so many of us become mothers. People raise children all the time, lots of children, often three or more children. So why do I find it so tough? Perhaps this is something I’m hoping to learn from telling this story.
Anyway, I’ll try and start at some kind of ‘beginning’. On second thoughts, being a Clinical Psychologist, the beginning would for me, be at my birth, or even prior to that, in my mother’s womb. But that really would be a long story. So, I’ll give a brief background to my struggles in finally becoming a mother myself.
George was conceived by IVF. We were ‘lucky’ (if that’s the right expression?) as I fell pregnant on the first attempt. I know this isn’t the norm, and many couples can struggle through numerous failed attempts and repeated heartaches. I believe it was the effort I put into ‘making it work’, that literally ‘made it work’ – but more about that later.
So, I’d had a diagnosis of ‘Unexplained Infertility’, which means that a physical cause for my difficulty getting pregnant naturally, couldn’t be found. Being a Psychologist, to me this meant that the cause of my infertility was psychological in its origins and I have developed my own ideas and understanding of these factors. To use the language of Psychologists’, perhaps the ‘precipitating factor’, for my infertility was the abortion I’d had when I fell pregnant as a 17-year old A-level student, leading to the unresolved sadness and grief that I tried to ignore for the next 15 years. I feel that my body carried this as unprocessed trauma, making it inhospitable for future babies to nestle in. I won’t go into to the science of these ideas here, but we are understanding more and more about the body’s response to psychological trauma – Bestle Van Der Kolk’s book ‘The Body Keeps the Score’ is a good place to start.
Of course this isn’t the only factor, there is a whole multitude of other aspects of my life and upbringing that contribute – one has to be predisposed to the effects of such life events, by temperament, attachment styles and early parental relationships. For instance, the reason I’d found the abortion so traumatic, is because I didn’t allow myself to be supported through the experience. Having been described as someone who was/is always so independent, I felt it was for me to deal with alone, and to go about the whole experience in secret.
