An extract from my pregnancy journal, sharing an honest and open account of our journey to baby No. 2

Please note that this is a real and open blog post, there is talk of pregnancy anxiety and therapy.

I met a friend today for a coffee at soft play, she has a 3-week-old baby and she was talking about how other new mums on Instagram seem to be breezing through the newborn phase, I assured her that there are also a lot of new mums who will not be breezing through, it’s just that we don’t see those who are struggling because Instagram is at the bottom of their to-do list.

It was at this moment, after months of deliberation that I decided I will share extracts from my pregnancy journal, I realised in the middle of soft play that it’s so important for people to hear honest and open accounts of things like conception, pregnancy, birth and motherhood. It might be an overshare and of course, some people won’t want to do this but I feel comfortable letting you all in.

So here goes, an honest and raw account of our journey to baby no.2…

Part 1 - Let’s start with the reason why we have such a big age gap (almost 6 years).

If you’ve followed me for a while now, you will know that I experienced a really high-risk pregnancy with my daughter back in 2017. I’ve been really open in the past about my struggle with anxiety throughout that pregnancy. I dedicated a whole blog post to it so it might be worth reading that first, you can access it here.

I often talk so much about how hypnobirthing saved me during labour and it really did, even though I had this awful pregnancy, I had such a wonderful birth and I will forever be grateful that I found hypnobirthing for that reason.

The rest wasn’t as plain sailing…

What I’ve never really touched upon, is how that difficult pregnancy went on to impact me as a new Mum and how it still affected me 5 years later.

We didn’t know if Lucy was going to be ok when she was born, she had holes in her heart and we didn’t have a definite answer as to whether she would be born with Down syndrome or if the holes in her heart would cause her any long term issues. For those of you wondering why tests during pregnancy didn’t determine this, there’s a whole host of reasons why we couldn’t have further testing. So basically, after this incredible birth, I was then left wondering if my baby was ok or not, one of the worst feelings in the world. I thank my lucky stars every day that she was fine but I was still left with crippling anxiety. I’ve never experience anxiety as intense as this before and to this day, almost 6 years later, I’ve still never experienced anything so crushing in my life.

If you are reading this whilst pregnant, you might want to come back to it once you have had your baby as I am about to talk about our tough experience of the newborn period.

The newborn period…

Don’t let this picture fool you, Lucy was not an “easy” baby, in fact she was the complete opposite, she was a nightmare (awful to say I know) but we had a really rough time. She used to cry for up to 20 hours a day and she never slept for more than 20 minutes at a time, looking after her was one of the hardest things that I have ever done. This photo was captured in between her taking a breath to start crying again, we got 2 images from this shoot.

I remember really vividly one day, ringing my Mum, crying on the phone. Nothing was settling her, I had slept for a grand total of 40 minutes in 3 days, I had drove round Castleford 6 times to see if the momentum of the car would help, I had Lucy in a sling swaying from side to side for hours, I just didn’t know what was wrong with my baby. When they say sleep deprivation is a form of torture, they aren’t wrong.

For 6 months, I had a really unhappy baby that just cried and cried.

It took weeks for us to realise that Lucy had silent reflux, she was bringing up sick and bile into her throat but was never actually sick. She was in so much pain, the poor little thing. We tried everything under the sun to help her, medication, stopping breastfeeding, reflux formula, allergy testing, different bottles, different feeding positions, winding for an hour after each feed, tilting the cot, and seeing different GPs. You name it, we tried it but nothing helped. When I speak about her crying, it’s not a usual newborn cry that you would expect from a baby, it was a painful cry that never stopped.

I was well and truly put off having any more children

Pair together, the high-risk pregnancy, the crippling anxiety, the worry, the crying (from me and Lucy), the additional heart scans and the silent reflux and it’s enough to put anyone off wanting more children. I thought I was done, no more babies for me thanks, I just couldn’t put myself through it all again.

What I didn’t realise at the time and it only came to light 5 years later when we did finally decide to try for baby No.2 was that everything I had gone through had actually caused me to suffer with suspected PTSD. One of my lovely friends and past clients brought it to my attention. I’d been telling her that we had been trying for a baby for the past year and it just wasn’t happening.

Part 2 - Our journey to conceiving baby No.2

What started to transpire was that I was actually scared of being pregnant again for the fear of going through another high risk, anxiety fuelled pregnancy. Just thinking about being pregnant would leave me with a racing heart, sweaty palms and adrenaline would flood my body. The thought alone of falling pregnant, actually put my body into a state of panic.

I’m not sure if I have ever come across anyone before that has felt this way but I said I would be honest, so here goes.

A very honest account of thoughts of baby no.2

I wasn’t stressed about not falling pregnant, I had this idea in my head that if it didn’t happen then I was okay with it and I actually was, I wasn’t lying to myself. I was so blessed to have Lucy and if things didn’t work out and we didn’t fall pregnant then I felt fine about it. I was actually anxious to fall pregnant more than anything, I felt so worried about it. I knew I wanted another child but I just wasn’t sure how I would cope if we had another baby with holes in its heart, another baby that just cried all the time. I was more anxious to fall pregnant than to not fall pregnant and I think my body knew this. It was only when I told my friend how I was truly feeling that she said it might be worth talking to someone and she mentioned a type of therapy called EMDR.

I was really fortunate that my friend knew someone who was a specialist in EMDR, I won’t go into too much detail about how it works (you can Google it if you want) but essentially you use your eyes to follow a dot on a screen which helps you to reprocess memories, taking away the heightened emotions that are attached to specific memories you have. The idea is that you still have the memory, just not the negative emotion that comes with it.

Guess what happened…

After just one session of EMDR, I found out that I was pregnant. Now, I’m not usually someone who believes in things such as the universe or signs (until very recently) but I honestly think that after accepting how I was feeling and knowing that I was going to let go of all this ‘stuff’ I had been holding onto, my body was able to relax. Please don’t take this as me saying that falling pregnant is as simple as going to therapy and relaxing, I know that’s not the case for many people but I really do think in my own scenario, it helped me a lot.

Finding out that I was pregnant

I’m not going to lie, getting that positive pregnancy test had me feeling all sorts of emotions, happiness, joy, love, excitement but I was also feeling anxious, apprehensive and nervous too. The therapy hadn’t completely got rid of my worries and concerns but it had helped me to conceive and actually it’s helped me to have a calmer pregnancy. I finished the EMDR after a few weeks, it helped me massively in such a short space of time, I would really recommend it. We have another high risk pregnancy this time round but I’m able to deal with it far better, with less anxiety and more confidence.

So there you have it, a slightly complex pregnancy story…

But one that I really hope can help anyone in a similar position who has also experienced a difficult pregnancy. The impact of pregnancy, birth and parenthood can last such a long time. I never thought a pregnancy could impact me for 6 whole years but it did. Fortunately, I’ve been able to deal with it and at the time of writing this (33 weeks pregnant), I can genuinely say that I am excited to give birth (this has never been a question for me, I loved giving birth last time) but I’m also enjoying pregnancy (not the pelvic pain), that’s something I never thought I would say and I feel prepared to become a new Mum and deal with any challenges we might have.

It’s all thanks to hypnobirthing, my wonderful friend (you know who you are) and a little side of EMDR.

To continue reading my tips for labour, head to the Bump, Birth and Baby blog below: