A Mother's Body

No one tells you when you have a new baby how tired you’ll be, or that sometimes all you do is try to survive those first few weeks. You read about “baby blues” but don’t believe it until you’re sobbing for no reason. No one tells you how lonely you’ll feel. No one tells you how your body still doesn’t feel like your own even after birth. It took almost a year for it to feel like mine again, but I wouldn’t have changed it for the world.

I’m going to take you back to 2013. I was working full time in a dental office. I was a lead assistant, the ordering manager, trained new assistants when we hired them, and was pretty dang good at my job. I loved my job. I loved meeting new patients and finding out what their ultimate goal was and giving them their smiles back. One of the most rewarding parts of my job was having someone come in with many dental issues and once we were done with their work, you could see their confidence increase, and they actually smiled. It was a rewarding, enjoyable workplace.

I loved my job, but kept feeling like something was missing in our lives. My husband and I decided that after being only the two of us for three years, it was time to add another person to our family. We didn’t even know if we would be able to get pregnant because prior to our decision my husband had gone through chemo and radiation for Hodgkin's Lymphoma. Miraculously, after the first month of trying, we were pregnant. It almost seemed too good to be true, but we were excited, and nervous, and ready for this new adventure.

Around the time I was 16 weeks, I woke up one morning to a lot of blood. It was 5 AM, and I called my parents in tears, thinking the worst - miscarriage. It wasn’t until that moment that I realized how much I really wanted that little baby. I remember calling my doctor and him telling me there wasn’t anything they could do until the office opened and if it was a miscarriage, it was going to happen no matter what. We got into the clinic when they opened and to our huge relief, they found everything to be fine. I had a hemorrhage, but the baby was still healthy, and growing, and we were still on course.

Working and being pregnant was comical at times. Things that used to be SO easy, like rolling my chair around a patient’s head, turned into quite the ordeal! I would bump their head with my belly, get stuck, couldn’t bend down when I dropped things, and the swelling NEVER seemed to go away. My back would ache from being on my feet, then my feet would swell more, and I would get hot and sweaty. I was a sad sight. I didn’t remember what my feet looked like. I had to use the restroom what felt like a thousand times a day. My body was expanding and this little human was doing jumping jacks at the most inopportune times. I don’t think I’ve ever had such a huge transformation in my life as I did when I was pregnant, but looking back, I can see how miraculous it was. I grew this perfect little human.

Not only was pregnancy a huge change for me, but the day my doctor decided to induce me was a whole other ball game. I remember going to work that day, knowing I had a doctor's appointment at lunchtime. I went in on my lunch break, and they told me, “Well, we’ll go ahead and induce you Tuesday!” After my appointment, I went in and told my dentist it was my last day and cried. I wasn’t ready to be done, but it was coming. My induction was rough. I labored through the night, and my baby girl was born at 11 a.m. and the rest is history.

It was the most extreme transformation I’ve had in my 30 years of life and I wouldn’t change it for the world.