Motherhood Expenses: £100,000 and 8 Years in the Making for this Woman’s Birthing Experience.
The journey to motherhood was nothing like I had imagined. After a planned C-section due to my age and the baby’s size, our son arrived. While Alice Mapp opens up about her dreams of being a mother, she candidly reveals how that dream turned into a “nightmare.”
The intersection of chronic sleep deprivation, shifting identity, and unmet expectations seems to be at the heart of this emotional struggle. Psychologist Catherine Hallissey sheds light on the commonality of such feelings among new mothers, emphasizing the lack of support and societal pressure to unconditionally adore motherhood.
Alice’s experience reflects a common phenomenon: the gap between societal expectations and the lived reality of new mothers. Her journey is a testament to the complexity of emotions that often go unspoken. She finds solace in connecting with other women who have navigated similar struggles. Through candid conversations, she unveils the intricate layers of early motherhood, reminding us that every individual’s journey is unique.
As time passes, Alice’s narrative shifts. With sleep, support, and the baby’s developmental milestones, her perspective evolves. The baby transforms from a source of misery to a source of joy. The story is a poignant reminder that motherhood is not a monolithic experience but a tapestry of emotions and experiences woven uniquely for each woman.
In closing, Alice acknowledges that the struggle is real, yet she finds hope and resilience in knowing that motherhood, with all its challenges, can ultimately become a source of happiness. Her story speaks to the power of shared narratives, offering a hand of understanding to those who may be navigating the turbulent waters of early motherhood.
After finally winning my own personal game of fertility snakes and ladders, the realization that it was a hollow, upended victory felt as though I were betraying all of them as well.
However, according to chartered psychologist and parenting specialist Catherine Hallissey (catherinehallissey.com), the way I was feeling wasn’t as unusual as you might think.
“It’s difficult to talk about how common this reaction to the culture shock of motherhood is, as it’s so taboo to admit that things aren’t how you thought they’d be,” she says.
She believes that the combination of chronic sleep deprivation and the loss of identity felt by many career women when they have had a child contributes to many new mothers feeling this way.
“I really feel that what is at the heart of it is the lack of support new mothers feel in the absence of the parenting village our mothers, and especially our grandmothers, had,” she says.
Alice opened up about not feeling seen or heard, recalling a well-meaning mother who ‘started waxing lyrical about how I was about to experience a love that I’d never known before’.
Adding to that, ‘the binary thinking that creates the idea that being a good mother means loving every second of the experience, and you deny women the complexity and range of human emotions that’s inherent in being a parent, resulting in guilt and shame’.
She sums up beautifully how I felt, although it wasn’t the first time I’d been plagued by a sense of disconnection from the women I’d grown to think of as my people. Having spent so long as a fully paid-up member of the childless-but-not-by-choice community, when I finally did get, and stay, pregnant, and later when I had the baby, I had a strong sense of survivor’s guilt.
After all, these women had been my sisters-in-arms. Not just the ones I didn’t know who had supported me through the blog, but the ones I knew in real life. The friends who, like me, had gone through the very specific angst of dating post-40 and knowing you still wanted a child.
But once I was visibly pregnant, it was as if a switch had been flicked. I’d suddenly joined another club. I’d become one of the women that other women told about their pregnancies. Suddenly everyone from close friends to strangers in the street would strike up conversations about cravings, and kicks, and elasticated waists.
Only none of it felt entirely real. There was a cognitive dissonance to it that I couldn’t reconcile. Maybe it was partly because acknowledging it felt like tempting fate. Because I knew how easily it could slip away from me.
You can’t spend nearly a decade mired in the stats and stories of infertility and assume everything is going to be fine.
It had taken me so long to get to that point that I was never able to wholly shake the sense that I didn’t belong, that I was still on the other side of the fence.
I imagine that it’s rather how it feels to have lost a lot of weight and suddenly be one of those skinny women who gets treated differently because they have an enviable figure. The outside world reacts to how you are now, but in your head, you’re still the person you were before. I was a pregnant infertile person, straddling two worlds and not belonging in either.
I clearly remember a well-meaning mother who waxed lyrical about how I was about to experience a love that I’d never known before.
Someone else told me that I’d fall in love with my partner in an entirely different way when I saw him become a father. And when I heard those things I nodded and smiled, while clenching my fist so hard that my fingernails made indents in my palm.
“But I think all those years of not knowing if I’d ever be a mother made me realize that there are many ways to live a life and find joy in it,” Alice concludes.
Because I’ve always hated that narrative, that idea that you never really know love, tiredness, or whatever emotion until you become a parent. That suggestion that, without a child, you are a fraction of the person you could be… and so I bristled silently on behalf of the woman I was before I became pregnant, and all the women like me.
I’m sure this fetishization and deification of motherhood, which has always made me uncomfortable, contributed to the guilt I felt about my feelings in those dark, early weeks.
Back then I couldn’t imagine how I would ever enjoy, rather than endure, motherhood. People said things would get better — at six weeks, at ten weeks, at three months, at six months… and while that’s scant comfort when you don’t know how you’re going to get through the next six hours, they were right.
As our son started to smile, and later laugh — and crucially as we all got more sleep — he began to become a source of joy, rather than misery: the way his face lights up when I walk into his room in the morning; seeing him learn new skills every day, piecing together the world and his place in it; the rituals that we have developed as a family.
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