Hi everyone! The people of Instagram had their say and there were a number of you said they would be interested in reading my blog if I started it back up. So here we are. I haven’t blogged since March, the months have passed in a haze of sleep regressions and teething and I can hardly believe that we are coming up to Florence’s first birthday. I thought I would start by talking about an issue I really struggled with throughout pregnancy and throughout the first months of being a new Mum. Loss of identity. I actually posted about this on my favourite ever Facebook group ‘The Motherload’ and I was inundated with messages from women who said they felt exactly the same, they felt like they had lost themselves on their journey in to Motherhood and had just become ‘Mum’. Life begins to change right at the start of pregnancy. To start with you’re just the sober one at social events, rocking the cute little bump and discussing baby names. As the weeks pass by texts from friends start to become less regular, you slowly to begin to have less and less in common with the people who you previously surrounded yourself with. As your bump gets bigger and you become more exhausted you start to turn down invites, so logically the invites stop coming. You slowly morph in to ‘Mum’. Once the initial madness had calmed, the feeds were a little more relenting and we started to settle in to some sort of routine. I needed to find a way to fill my days. Let’s be honest, a new born baby is pretty boring. I started to feel like I was achieving the square root of fuck all with my days and I wasn’t used to that. People have been quick to say to me that I was looking after my baby and that was an amazing achievement in itself. However, the days I spent in my pjs, having done nothing but feed and change the baby, then wash and sterilise bottles before repeating it all again really started to wear me down. No one prepares you for how lonely motherhood can be. Your friends and family are at work and have families of their own. They aren’t there when you just want a natter at 8am when you’re on your fourth loop of the park trying to get the baby to sleep. Every second of the day is taken up looking after this amazing little human that there isn’t time to think about anything just for you. All of the things that made me ‘me’ had disappeared. Faded in to the background, giving way to the needs and demands of the most important thing in my life. Going back to the gym was a huge thing for me. It’s where my friends are, it makes me feel better both physically and mentally. I also really wanted to make a positive effort to shift the 3.5 stone I had put on during pregnancy. For me, physical and mental health is definitely linked. The longer I was inactive, heavier than I was used to and out of that motivating environment, the more of me I felt was slipping away. There was an amazing few months where I managed to take Flo to the gym in the evenings, slipping her out of the car seat in to the pram. She would sleep for the entire session without making a peep. That phase soon passed and my gym time was limited to when Lewis was at home, which wasn’t very often. The turning point for me was going back to work. Obviously that comes with its own challenges which I will cover separately, but it has been the most positive change for me. I get to drink hot coffee, use my brain, speak to adults, train on my lunch break and most of all I get a chance to just be ‘me’, with colleagues and friends who I’ve known for years. I come away from my day at work with a sense of achievement, sometimes a sense of frustration, but refreshed and reset, ready to ‘parent’. I can honestly say I am a better parent now I am back at work, I know our time together during the week is limited, I’ve had my ‘adult’ time and I’m thankful for it. The hours before and after work are spent throwing every ounce of energy I have left in to my little girl. Slowly, I’m starting to feel more and more like ‘me’. Not The Old Me. The New Me. The ‘Me’ I am right now, but may not be in a year’s time. The ‘Me’ which strikes a (not always perfect balance) between being Abbie and Mum.
|
Categories
All
|