Browsing Tag

Parenting

To the mum who is struggling to adjust…

The transition to motherhood is something that is difficult to put into words. It is greater than the shift in role and identity and shines a spotlight on every part of you that you thought you once knew. The feelings are intense and often contradictory. And even when you are surrounded by people, it can be a lonely and confusing time. But if you too are struggling with the adjustment to this new role and identity, you are not alone, and as Emma captures in her letter, there is help and there is hope.

Emma Cottam is owner of Isabella and Us., editor and creator of the Positive Wellbeing Zine for Mums and mummy to Isabella. This letter is written from personal experience of the past year of becoming a mum, her struggles with the transition and diagnosis with PND.

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To the mum who is struggling to adjust,

I’ve been there. When my daughter Isabella was born last December, just 9 days before Christmas Day I struggled to adjust to my new ‘role’. I struggled on for 5 long months without asking for any help; I struggled alone with the thoughts racing around my mind. Thoughts that my daughter didn’t need me, thoughts that I wasn’t a good enough mother, thoughts that my husband no longer loved me because he now had my daughter and didn’t need me anymore. I was embarrassed for feeling like I didn’t want to be a mum anymore and feeling guilty for feeling that way after I had longed for a baby. I spent months just going through the motions, never feeling fully present, not enjoying anything.

March 5, 2019 by From The Other Chair

Letters To The Other Chair

To my boys…

I often wonder how I would have coped if I had needed to parent other children when Orla died. How would I have managed my own grief alongside theirs? How would I have explained what had happened to their sibling? Although it may sound strange, I sometimes feel lucky that I had the opportunity to completely immerse myself in those early weeks and months; with no one else depending on me, I had the freedom to just be with my grief. Yet so many bereaved parents have other children to protect and support at a time when they too need the same.

In this letter to her sons, Lucie articulates her experiences beautifully. I am sure that the intensity of love and protection in parenting after loss will resonate with many.

“I’m Lucie a nearly 40 year old mum of five. Beau was our fourth child, our fourth boy and he was stillborn in June 2016. I pine for him every day and I don’t think that will ever change.
We had our rainbow, Seraphina Hope, our only daughter in August 2017. We call her our little heart healer as she’s helping to heal us all.

I’m married to my soulmate and we live a happy, simple but boring life surrounded by our family and friends.
Continue Reading

November 20, 2018 by From The Other Chair

And then she was one

And just like that, she was one.

Except, when I really think about it, it wasn’t ‘just like that’ at all. The first year of parenting after loss has been a complete rollercoaster; a Big Dipper, with the highest of highs and the lowest of lows and one that I have desperately wanted to escape at times. Because, despite what I had hoped, having a take home baby did not fix everything. It did not take away my pain. It just made the hardest job in the world that much more complicated.

Parenting a live baby has changed me. I am not the person I once was, and at the same time, I have come to accept that I am not parent I thought I would be. It has shattered my sense of self and I am slowly piecing the shards back together and getting to know the cracks that exist in between them. Some of those crevices have been deep, dark and quite unnerving to expose myself to, whilst others have acted as a prism and shone the full spectrum of colours.

I thought that when Orla died that I was well and truly broken, but looking back, I had just built up an even stronger wall than I had before. My own emotions have always scared me and I have run from them; finding solutions or ways in which to numb the pain. Working harder. Finding another project. I would bounce from one thing to another as a way of blocking out what was really troubling me, because I feared that my emotions would destroy me. I couldn’t trust that anyone else could hold them; the terror that they would either become overwhelmed by them or would reject me was paralysing. So, I denied that they existed and continued to build my armour of strategies, that enabled me to run away from pain. Continue Reading

April 17, 2018 by From The Other Chair