Getting older, having a baby. It is beautiful, intense & so different from what you imagine beforehand. We came across the blog below on Happinez.nl & wanted to share it with you.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
How do you get used to putting yourself aside, your relationship changing and your world becoming smaller? When Sarah Domogala became a mother, the blissful haze never came. No matter what she tried: her old life didn't return. It only changed when she stopped resisting. A plea for surrendering to motherhood.
I remember the moment I saw my son’s face for the first time like it was yesterday. And the shock that went through me: he really is someone! I wasn’t looking at a chubby baby like the ones I knew from commercials; I was looking straight into the face of another human being, at a real person with a personality and needs and a destiny of their own. I recoiled. I wasn’t prepared for this. Once my son, who was a bit underweight but healthy, had been placed in a clean bed and everyone had left the room, I smelled his dark hair. I examined that oh-so-tiny, frail human who was sleeping peacefully and seemed to feel at home with me.
A sense of helplessness
I had seen other women experience how having a baby opened up a tremendous power of love and trust, but I was afraid. I realized how I had looked at motherhood entirely from the outside—from the perspective of a crib and clothes, of how many days of childcare, and conversations with my husband about how we wouldn’t change. But now that I was holding this new person in my arms, I was overcome by a huge sense of helplessness. Of course, he was my child, but I had no idea how to do it—being someone’s mother. I had no idea what was required of me; why hadn’t anyone told me this?
What had I gotten myself into?
But during those first few days, when everything was new and scary and breastfeeding hurt so much, I quickly understood why no one had been able to explain it to me: I had to do it myself. Naturally with the help of his father, and even though I loved him so much and he was so desired and welcome, I felt loneliness and helplessness descend upon me. The responsibility that his care was now in my hands forever felt immeasurable. In the weeks that followed, I only saw babies around me who simply slept and drank and waited quietly in their strollers until their parents were done drinking coffee or reading the paper. My son didn’t want to be in his crib, didn’t want to be in the stroller; he wanted to be held by no one but his mother, day and night. And he wanted to nurse, every hour, while it seemed I never had enough milk. Everything was so different from what the maternity nurse taught me, from what everyone said. I desperately tried to put him in his crib, to space out the feedings, to soothe him. What was I doing wrong? What was he doing wrong? I wanted him to be happy, for the blissful haze to arrive, but also to meet up with friends, to go into town. I wanted my life back. Through those sleepless nights with my son on my tired arm, a little voice in my head gnawed away: what had I gotten myself into?
Motherhood – a journey
When I tell Edith Hubers about my first weeks as a mother, she nods vigorously. As a relationship therapist, she works a lot with (young) parents and is a mother of two teenage sons herself. “Motherhood is an incredibly complicated journey you are about to embark on; it is a journey, and you are allowed to find it very difficult. People really want a child, but once it arrives, it turns out to be very impractical in the life they had. There is an image that it is always super wonderful to be with the children, but it is also hard; you constantly have to put yourself aside when you aren’t used to that, your relationship changes, your world becomes smaller. But complaining about that isn't really allowed, because you chose it.
A child comes at a price, but sometimes it seems as if we in this world don’t want to pay that price. Because in a culture where you are presented with the idea that happiness is something you can manufacture, and all the portrayals of parenthood are happy and polished, there is no place for other experiences of motherhood. There are so many moments of not being happy as a mother, in the postpartum period, but certainly afterwards as well. Seeing your child in pain or sad, the enormous responsibility that hits you, being disturbed in your sleep, spending hours thinking about what is best for someone else rather than yourself, the longing for a night out, doing what is best and not necessarily what is the most fun—these are small and large moments of frustration, sadness, fear, and pain. If you can allow those feelings and see that they are part of it, then there is room for the other, beautiful qualities that parenthood holds. Then you make the journey to the heart.”
Text: Sarah Domogala
Laat een reactie achter