Mothering Yourself When Becoming a Mother is Hard
When the journey to becoming a mother is long and arduous, it can really erode one’s sense of self. Infertility robs you of a lot. It steals joy, hope, excitement, plans and even zest for life. While it’s true that a lot is taken and a lot is given up, there’s also opportunity. There’s a rich opportunity of learning to mother yourself first when becoming a mother is hard.
How you care for yourself now can be fertile ground for what your self-nurturance looks like after motherhood has been achieved. Let’s break down why mothering yourself first when becoming a mother is hard matters and what it can look like.
What Does It Mean to Mother Yourself?
What do most mothers want? My guess is to be a good mother. As good as they can possibly be and there are countless ways to be a good mom.
A good mom shows up, she’s reliable, she’s nurturing, she’s caring, she sees her kids potential and is their biggest cheerleader. Mothering yourself means meeting yourself with the same qualities and care you would for your own child who you desire to have someday. It’s offering that same tenderness inward. Being a soft landing for yourself. Treating yourself with kindness. When you’re going through infertility, which for many people is one of the hardest things they’ve had to walk through, you need to become your own soft place to land. Choosing as often as you can to be for yourself what you hope to be for the child you dream of having.
Why Infertility And Loss Makes This So Hard (But Necessary)
After a pregnancy loss, or failed treatment cycle, there’s layered grief in ways it’s hard to prepare for. You’re mourning so many things that can be hard to name and aren’t easily recognized by others. There’s no ritual for these types of losses. You’re mourning the version of your life you thought you’d have. Many people feel the pressure to perform okay when there’s invisible heartbreak.
In the space of grieving and trying to conceive again, it’s easy to self abandon. To treat your body as a project that needs constant fixing. Or a vessel that has failed rather than a home that deserves care. Sometimes it looks like becoming so narrow in focus you stop engaging in the things that bring joy or feel easeful. You might white knuckling your way through just to get through it. You can end up feeling like your life isn’t your own. Your infertility is running the show, the schedule, the plans, the finances or your relationship. You no longer feel in control of your life.
When these things are happening, this is when mothering yourself becomes more than just a nice idea but a lifeline. The truth is you have already given so much of yourself to this dream. You have hoped deeply and loved fiercely and that love deserves a recipient. Right now, that recipient is you. You deserve to be held, carried, cared for and nurtured. All the things you hope to one day do for a baby you hope to hold in your arms.
What Mothering Yourself Can Actually Look Like
Self-nurturance goes beyond basic self-care. It’s about tuning in and responding to what your whole self truly needs to feel safe, supported and valued. The emphasis is on the relationship you have with yourself rather than the actions taken to maintain well-being.
Here are some places to start.
- Tending To Your Body
Your body is holding grief, loss, disappointment, fear, anxiety and so much more. Emotions are not just mental experiences. They are felt in the body. It deserves to be treated with care, not contempt. Stop thinking of your body as just something to optimize for pregnancy. It’s place where you actually live so prioritize these acts of care for your body.
- Nourish your body with foods that feel warm and kind.
- Move your body in ways that feel good and not punitive
- Rest without guilt. You don’t need to earn rest.
- Tending To Your Heart
Grief is meant to be felt, to be experienced. Not suppressed, contained or discarded. Working with a therapist that specializes in reproductive grief and offers therapy for infertility can be a way to tend to your heart. A safe place to process the grief so you can learn to carry it with more ease. A perinatal therapist can help you make sense of what you’re actually feeling so you don’t have to navigate the complexities of your fertility journey alone.
- Finding Community
The infertility journey can be incredibly isolating. Finding community can be an act of mothering. You may already have a community and finding a new one isn’t a rejection of the one you already have. Sometimes we need more specialized support, and family and friends may not always be the places we find the most supportive in our pain. If you’re pulling away from finds and feeling like no one around you really gets it, you need a community that does.
Community might look like:
- An in-person or online support group for pregnancy loss or infertility
- A close friend or family member you trust enough to be fully open and honest with
- Online communities where women share their stories without sugarcoating
- A faith community, if that feels meaningful to you
- Storytelling
The stories we tell ourselves hold a lot of power. What’s the story you’re telling yourself about where you are in this season of life? How is your journey shaping the way you think about and see yourself? For better or worse, we are narrative beings. We are fundamentally shaped by the stories we tell about our life.
Journaling is a wonderful way to make any unconscious stories you might be carrying into conscious awareness. Journaling can become an opportunity to practice seeing yourself with compassion, empathy and kindness. Journaling doesn’t need to be structured or perfect. You don’t have to share it with anyone, and it doesn’t need to be poetic. It just can be a place where you let yourself be witnessed by you so you can make sense of what you’re carrying and how you’re feeling.
You can journal about:
- An honest accounting of everything you’re feeling without filtering it for anyone else’s comfort
- A list of what you’re grieving, what you’re hoping for, what you’re proud of surviving
The way you care for yourself doesn’t dramatically improve when your hoped for baby arrives. It becomes a part of who you are as a mother. The compassion you cultivate towards your own body, the tools you build in therapy, the courage it takes to build your community, and the narrative you create all travel with you to the other side.
You are not just waiting. You are becoming and part of what you are becoming is someone who knows how to nurture herself well. That is not a small thing. In fact, it may be one of the most important things you ever learn. If you’re ready to learn what mothering yourself can look like in your own life, schedule a consult with me and let’s talk about the challenges you’re facing and how this work can benefit you.
