A Mother’s Love is Sometimes Not Immediate
I haven’t felt an embodiment of motherhood until very recently
It is such a difficult topic to discuss and there is significant unspoken taboo and shame attached to it. Some women are suffering needlessly with the difficulties that they face resulting from the monumental change becoming a mother, silenced by the dissonance they feel.
My hope is to normalise, but not reduce the deep importance of these difficult feelings. We need to openly talk about and accept that we, as mothers, have different experiences and that sometimes a mother’s love isn’t always immediate.
My story
Having spent what feels like a lifetime struggling with mental health issues; seeking out help from psychiatrists, therapists, inpatient treatment facilities, innovative treatment methods, a plethora of psychiatric medications, I remained deeply troubled to my soul. Having children didn’t even feel like a hugely desired prospect until I turned 35 years old, my biological clock went into overdrive and I suddenly wanted offspring. I visualised a loud, crazy house with kids running and dancing around, a lot of fun and happiness…I was slightly idealistic and naive, but I deeply wanted to become a mother and feel that bond.
With my mental health issues and being in a same-sex partnership, our choices were IUI or IVF. My partner and I spent a couple of years discussing our readiness to create a family and I spent long hours in therapy discussing the intricacies and complexity of the trauma I had suffered around my mother’s bipolar disorder.
After many discussions our direction became clear. I was desperate to be the one to carry so we decided to embark on the gruelling journey to use my partners eggs (I was adamant in my refusal to pass on my DNA), then create viable embryos and lastly, implant the embryo in me with the greatest hope that they would take. Injections were involved, multiple checks and procedures. We even decided to freeze the embryos for about a year because the time just wasn’t right.
I discussed at length the potential ramifications pregnancy and motherhood could have on my mental health but I was convinced that I was strong enough to weather the storm should it arise and felt hugely motivated to not repeat the cycle; a repetition of what I had suffered at the hands of my mother’s illness.
At the initial stage of my pregnancy, I was overwhelmed with excitement, I recall when we got the call that we were pregnant, it was explosively wonderful. I was in utter disbelief that we had managed to do it, despite all the high-risk elements we were facing. I felt elated and joyous and wanted nothing but to start nesting right away. We were scheduled to have an ultrasound a few weeks after the big news…and this is where my world collapsed.
I remember laying nervously on the examination table, not really able to feel the oxygen in my lungs. My partner was beside herself with excitement and I was experiencing a tornado of emotions within me; fear, panic, realising the enormity of the situation, slightly dissociated… if that’s even possible. I was a mess.
With a calm voice, the doctor carefully said, “oh and there’s the heartbeat”…I was relieved, thank goodness it took, we managed to do it, but there was a looming feeling, why was I not crying with joy, overcome with motherly love, at which point he said… “and there’s another heartbeat”. I went sheet white, I felt like I left my physical body, complete depersonalisation prevailed and I wanted out. No no no, I never wanted twins, I can’t cope with two, what will happen to me…
I was utterly distraught and completely terrified, what started as overwhelming joy had turning into a living nightmare. I was faced with an understandably overjoyed partner who was thrilled to be having twins, while all I could think was, what’s wrong with me?
I tried and tried to embrace these two beings rapidly growing in my belly but there were constant reminders of how insufficient and ill-equipped I was for motherhood. Every time someone told me, “what a blessing” or “you are SO lucky” all I could feel was horror, crippling fear, and trauma. I started to dissociate quite regularly; I was incapable of being present in my life, experienced difficulties in my thinking, challenges with processing things, not feeling grounded and feeling so far from my self.
Frankly, that time period was a blur…I can connect to the soul suffocating feeling and hold certain memories of what happened but it’s all quite hazy. “Isn’t it amazing to feel something so magical”, “You’re SO lucky, especially having two”…phrases like these were like nails in my coffin, catapulting me into a vortex where I felt lost, alone, hormonally fragile, deeply scared, very depressed, and suddenly longing for my deceased mother.
The birth of my twins came a month early; I was diagnosed with pre-eclampsia, my blood pressure was dangerously high and was not coming down and when my son’s heart rate began to drop, I had an emergency c-section. To my horror, this involved a spinal block and after desperately wanting a natural birth, I was unable to experience pushing my children into the world; it should have been a very profound and visceral experience one that I longed for it, and to me, it would have bolted me back into my conscious mind and woken me up to motherhood with a powerful thrust.
My first few years as a mother were fraught with resentment, frustration at my self, emotional pain, and continued dissociation. I loved my children, would have laid down my life for them but with an already fragile psychology and experiencing the overwhelm of motherhood to twins, it was just too much.
I walked through my life like a zombie, and this was not from exhaustion but from being checked out, I was unable to really connect to my children and felt almost like I was a ghost in their life. My partner was a strong, very competent mother who took the reins most of the time, again this left me feeling useless and pointless. I was very capable of looking after them, taking them to a nursery, feeding them, holding them when they were unwell or upset BUT, and this is where it really hurts, they didn’t feel like my children. I sometimes thought I had imagined the pregnancy which was utterly absurd, I wondered whether it was because we had used my partner's eggs and not my own…would that have made a difference? I don’t think so.
As the years passed, it got easier, the fog lifted a little but I still hadn’t really felt an embodiment of motherhood until very recently. I can now say, 5 years after my twins were born, I have burst into my mothering self with unobstructed tidal waves of love for them, feelings of deep connection that leave me feeling as though my life force has been woken up and is burning brightly. I am eternally grateful for my role as a mother now.
I look to them and know deep in my core that they are my babies and that I am their mother, at last! I feel so very moved by this that it doesn’t really matter how much I suffered before this, I’m overwhelmed with joy that I have come into my own, not only as a mother. The “me” now feels acutely present, able to think, communicate, laugh, PLAY, contemplate, and actively parent my children.
In some ways, I feel like my experience of beginning motherhood taught me so much of what I want to become, who I want to be, values I hold dearly that I wouldn’t change any of it… I still do wish I could have physically and emotionally felt them emerge from me into this world and to have been the one they first laid on, but I can hold them now, feeling so intensely their essence and it means that much more!
