Losing Myself to Motherhood - An AMMA Mama Story

You are AMMAzing and so is your story.

Sharing your experience is not only brave, it helps our community love deeper and heal faster.

We are honored to share a story written by an AMMA community mama, Lynn Lai.

Pregnancies = 2, Live births = 0 was not something I ever expected to see written on my maternity notes.

I always thought motherhood was just something that would happen naturally, and naively, easily.

It’s all over Instagram and Facebook, right?

The baby announcements, bumps and gloss.

Little did I know. I wasn’t prepared for the guilt, feeling like I had failed in my one task as a woman, to bring life into this world.

I had also discovered this new place between expectation and reality which was a very lonely place to be in.

I shunned all social media and news of friends’ excited pregnancy announcements. How do they make it look so easy, I wondered.

How do they not worry? I feared I had opened a door into the unknown where being casually optimistic was no longer who I was, I had to find a new identity and means to cope with how I would become a mother, and how I would now embark on that journey.

Living in that chasm between expectation and reality, it felt like there was no way out. I couldn’t let anyone in, How would they understand? How do I explain how I feel? Even doctors would say just wait for the next one, it’ll happen again. But how do I know for sure that it will?

Losing myself to motherhood now would be a privilege, some threshold I’m waiting to cross but not knowing until I do, whether it will turn out ok. I want to run full tilt towards it and yet I hesitate. I don’t know if it’s a race that I can win, will I be able to cross the finish line. I worry about the most mundane things, is my bump growing big enough, why aren’t the kicks huge ones that make my belly ripple, must be the layers of insulating fat… I hope.

Even now, six months into this pregnancy, my Instagram and Facebook remain silent. No #babybump posts, just silence.

If I didn’t know then what I know now, would I have been carelessly posting pregnancy update photos complete with gender reveals and baby showers? Probably. But then I stop and think that I wouldn’t have realized how precious this journey has been. How it would have been so easy to take for granted the milestone of becoming a mother. After all, it’s something that just happened, right?

I guess I never really reflected on the fragility and messiness of life until this happened. I don’t think I would have created the inner space for myself and my baby that I have now, if not for the setbacks along the way. When it’s just you and your bump without the rest of the world weighing in, I feel like there’s now an inner calm which didn’t exist before.

Now, I don’t think I want to lose myself to motherhood so much as relax into it, like easing into a warm bath, and letting life take its course, because after all, there is only so much I can think and obsess about. With the rest of this remaining journey, I just have to feel and give myself up to the unknown and hope that in the end, I will finally be a mother.

 

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