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The Fear of Not Getting It Right
I didn’t think I had a story but the further I read the more my memory recalled what I stuffed away in order to push along and be okay. We had our first child almost eight years ago and that pregnancy revealed that I had hypothyroidism. While we stabilized that quickly during pregnancy, resulting in…
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Don’t Take Advice From Someone Who Hasn’t Walked the Path
I have yet to bring a child earth-side so I can only speak from my experience of the loss of my first pregnancy and then the gruelling two years and eight months wait to get our rainbow baby (actually six weeks pregnant TODAY). The years following my loss, I lost myself. How could my body…
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The Joy in Between
When I was nearly 12 weeks pregnant, I started bleeding heavily one night. Right at the point we were starting to feel ready to share the news wider with friends and family, everything was going wrong. The bleeding was heavy along with cramping and my doctor agreed, it seemed like a miscarriage. She referred me…
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A Reasonable Hope
At a checkup at 31 weeks I was told they couldn’t find my son’s heartbeat. I texted my husband at work to tell him he had to come to the doctor’s right away. We waited two hours for an opening at the ultrasound lab to confirm that he was gone. I think I screamed when…
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120 Days of Summer
“Don’t research. Make this decision from the heart,” the doctor said. How can my husband and I possibly listen to this advice when we are scientists, and scientific research is what we do for a living! And we are about to make the hardest decision of our lives: Whether or not to end our unborn baby…
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A Not-So-Perfect Story
I have two teenage daughters and as a mother with introverted tendencies, I still remember intense feelings of exhaustion, overwhelm, and frustration of trying to raise two amazing little humans. I felt suicidal at times. I checked out. I threw myself into my business to cope. It’s taken me years to forgive myself. There’s so…
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Space for the Grief and the Joy
As I hold my youngest baby in my arms, watching her sleep, I feel such joy and love for this precious little person. I feel so much disbelief that she actually made it across the finish line and into my arms and I am beyond grateful that I get to be her Mummy. But the…
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Grateful and Grieving
I’ve always known motherhood was an experience I wanted for my own, as many do. I dreamed of the moment when I’d meet my child for the first time. Just like on TV or in the movies, they hand you your precious little bundle, all wrinkly and new with a strong set of lungs. I…
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Use Your Support System
I feel like there’s a lot of talk about this topic but I still have yet to see a streamlined program to help people in the immediate postpartum period. Feeding was a huge issue for us until we eventually switched to formula. Then it was a year of constant spit-up. An image that stands out…
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A Diary to My Babies
There are so many hormones circulating during all of these periods—trying to conceive, pregnancy, the first year following childbirth, and beyond— that we often displace our truest emotions, anxieties and agitations as related to these shifting hormones. Though hormones definitely play a role in it all, all our feelings are completely valid as we adjust…
Connecting Threads 