Just You Wait

From the archives: 10/29/20

When I was pregnant, my lead emotion was fear.

I was terrified.

Of a lot of things.

I was afraid of losing my independence.

I was afraid of being a bad mom.

I was afraid of getting post-partum depression.

I was afraid I would be seen as less competent at work.

I was afraid that my work wouldn’t be supportive.

I was afraid that I would never sleep again.

Not really, but I was afraid I wouldn’t get enough sleep for at least 5 years.

And honestly, people didn’t really help with that.

It’s a funny thing, but a lot of parents like to highlight the hard parts to expecting moms.

I got so many comments like, “just wait, you’ll never get any sleep once baby comes”.

“Go do the fun things now, because you can’t do that with kids.”

“Oh the baby part is easy, just wait until they can talk back.”

I could go on.

If you are or are soon-to-be a mom, I’m sure you could tick off your own lengthy list as well.

But I can count on one hand the number of women who told me how wonderful it would be.

I can tell you the first time a mother told me that birthing my baby would be okay, that it didn’t have to be scary.

And honestly, that was a game changer.

I had been so wrapped up in using my imagination to think up all the worst case scenarios that I hadn’t stopped to consider, ‘what if good things happen?’.

I know everyone’s experience is different, but none of those fears came true for me.

I mean, the sleep was rough for the first few weeks, not gonna lie.

But what I lost in quantity, I also gained in quality.

Because, real talk, pregnant women don’t get great sleep anyway.

And that phase didn’t last forever.

It turns out, I wasted a lot of time and energy worrying about the bad things that might happen, but didn’t.

I would have enjoyed my pregnancy so much more if I had focused on the good things that might happen.

And there are so many good things that have happened.

Expecting mommas, new mommas, if you’re stuck in worrying about the downsides, let’s talk.

Because while I’m never going to tell you that being a mom doesn’t have hard parts as well as the good parts, I don’t want you to only ever hear about the hard parts.