When I was pregnant, I wrote about struggling with prenatal anxiety and depression. During pregnancy I managed to get into some really good habits that were helping me manage my mental health. Obviously, when the baby came along, any sense of routine went out the window. Your living from feed to feed and nap to nap and your entire mind is consumed with if they’ve pooed enough recently or if that much sick is normal.
I’ve always been pretty good at checking in with myself and noticing when I need a break either for my mental or physical health, living with endometriosis has forced that upon me. But you forget about your well-being when you’ve got a baby to think about. I’m so lucky that the people around me kept a check on it for me, my mum texting to remind me to nap or my husband making sure I eat properly.
Slowly but surely life starts to feel more manageable, my baby is just over four months now and things are starting to feel more settled. I can start looking after myself a bit. I’m starting to think about getting back to work, I’ve got a bit more energy to socialise and exercise. All things that make me feel like me. And the world is starting to open up more.
So why now is the anxiety kicking back in? I think I’ve worked out it’s because I’m not the me I used to look after. And my life isn’t the same life I used to manage. There’s this huge new part of my life and me that needs to be factored in to all my decisions and relationships. It’s going to take time to adjust, before I can find ways to manage my health I feel like I need to get to know myself all over again.
Unfortunately, I can’t do this the way I did when I was 19 by going to Thailand alone and drinking moonshine in huts, I’m going to have to do it between singing ‘if your happy and you know it’ and cleaning up shit off the rug. And I will do it, it’s just going to take time. We all seem to expect mums to just hop right back into their old lives a few months after going through the biggest change a human can go through. Of course we feel different. Let us adjust and embrace the change instead of making us feel like we’re not coping if we don’t have the capacity for the life we did before an actual part of us lived outside of our bodies.
To everyone who’s got new mum friends, give them time to go through this adjustment and keep listening.
I’m going now cos I’m starting to sound like a shit Instagram quote. LIVE LOVE LAUGH x