There are many popular beliefs around pregnancy, one of which is that when a woman is pregnant she feels it, she knows it. For me it wasn’t like that. I’m here to take the seventh pregnancy test in 20 days; so far they have all been negative results, but I don’t trust them and so here I am, and indeed… positive. Long live the false negatives! But what happens when a woman finds out she is pregnant?
I’m 28 and it’s my second pregnancy. My daughter is 6 years old, when I got pregnant with her I was very young and, as is normal at that age, very scared. But now everything is different: we are older, we are married, we have moved to London for several years, we have our life and our routine, but in my head once again there are two words “and now ?!”. A pregnancy is an event of a stratospheric entity: the balance and the lives of all the people involved change, the rhythms change, the priorities change, the goals change, but above all a woman changes … A woman becomes a mother and with each pregnancy the process begins again because a new mother is born for every child who enters this land, even if that is not the first child.
My emotions at this moment are many and conflicting: if on the one hand it seems to me the right moment and our possibility of redemption because we can live this experience with more awareness and maturity, on the other it seems to me a brake on every idea and project. I ask myself many questions all accompanied by different emotions: there is the fear of experiencing another difficult and risky pregnancy like the first one and the fear of facing another caesarean; there is the excitement of finding out if it is male or female and starting to fantasize about names; there is the concern of managing the situation with two children and being able to become a mother again; there is the sadness of having to give up, at least for a while, the job that I have been looking for and wanted for so long, of having to put my goals aside once again and find myself looking at a body that does not belong to me again; there is the joy of seeing and feeling a life grow inside of me and knowing that I am part of the greatest miracle of nature; there is the thrill of welcoming a new gift and learning to love it, pamper it and care for it; there is the anxiety of having to rebuild the family balance that will inevitably break to make room for new ones … there is all this and also a big headache! Endless sensations arising from two small and simple lines on a test.
Today begins a new journey, a new adventure that will keep us busy for a long, long time…
See you at the next chapter!
Ale, mum of 2!