What Pregnancy Has Taught Me(Part One)

I am currently 18 weeks into my first pregnancy and it has brought more wisdom, challenge, and growth than I ever could have imagined. I have kept most of my pregnancy journey private and separate from my work, thinking that no one would care much about it and it’s an experience so many women go through, so what? It dawned on me how naive that thought process was, as my work is with women, honoring all stages of the feminine, and this is perhaps the most transformative journey a women can undergo. Even as I write this I have tears in my eyes, feeling the power of what this experience truly is. I feel fortunate to be carrying a daughter who will hopefully be able to receive some of this work and do far more than I ever will with it in my lifetime. My prayer is she never has to heal the wound of the feminine, but live, dance, and flourish in the power of her femininity, whatever it looks like.

Since I was a little girl I have longed to be a mother and so much looked forward to being pregnant, not releasing the crucible of Love that it really is. Perhaps because I had such a rosy idea of what it would be like is the reason it has been so challenging for me. Being almost halfway through my pregnancy though, I can say I wouldn’t have it any other way. The opportunity for surrender that God has graced me with is truly a gift and one that I feel fortunate to receive. I have learned so much thus far, and she isn’ even here yet.

Above all else, pregnancy has been hard. I have really tried to be candid when people ask me how I am doing in hopes of normalizing the authentic expression of a women’s inner world. Just for me to be able to admit to myself that it has been hard without an immense sense of guilt washing over me took me weeks of letting go and surrendering. The world expects you to be filled with nothing but joy, excitement, and anticipation of your little one’s arrival, meanwhile you feel like an alien in your own body, are sick, exhausted, and every reason you won’t be good enough flashes before you in every moment. On top of the world around you expecting you to say “Everything is wonderful!” to ease their discomfort with real human emotion, every person has an opinion of what they think you should do and shame you for not having all the answers. All that aside, pregnancy is a true testament to a women’s ability to hold the light and the dark, her beautiful balancing act in the world of duality. Yes, it has been hard, but with that I also have begun to have a glimpse of Love greater than I have ever felt or imagined being able to feel. My sweet little one has come to me in a few dreams and when I wake from them all I want to do is go back to dream so I can be with her and love her. The feeling I feel more than anything is grief.

I believe that grief is the most sacred of emotions that the Divine allows us to feel. Grief is an initiation. Anytime grief has come to me in the past it has been preparing me for something. It allowed me to feel with a depth I didn’t know I had, and prepared me to hold the Love I was about to experience next in life. Grief and joy co-exist; you cannot have one without the other. If anything grief has been the part of pregnancy that makes the most sense to me. You are grieving just about everything. Your past self, your body, who you have been up until this point, who you may have been if you weren’t becoming a mother, your ideas of pregnancy, your ideas of raising your child, who you want your partner to be, and any other expectation that many of us girls have had since childhood when we pushed our baby dolls around in pretend strollers.

I had so many ideas of what it would be like when I got pregnant and how I would raise my child. Very quickly, I realized that although wonderful fantasies, we have almost no control of what this child’s life will be. Yes, we can do our best and as a parent its our job to do everything we can to love and support this soul so they grow into the healthiest and least traumatized version of themselves that they can be, but the outside circumstances are completely out of our control. I don’t know why I imagined it would be any different than the rest of my life where I have been shown countless times that I am not the one running the show, after all. I can’t quite wrap my head around why I believed that as soon as I had a child that would no longer be the case.

The grief started about 3 or 4 weeks in. I had these grandeur ideas that I would not let any food that was not organic, whole, and entirely nutrient dense pass through my lips my entire pregnancy. It seemed easy enough as I have always been a disciplined eater and that was mostly what my diet consisted of pre-pregnancy. Oh boy, was that the biggest ego bashing. Up until about 15 weeks of pregnancy the only thing I was able to consume was fruit, boxed carbs, burritos, and Indian food. It was as if a part of my identity died. As an ex-bodybuilder and fitness coach the understanding of necessary micro and macro nutrients has been imprinted on my brain. I was convinced that my poor baby wouldn’t become a well functioning human later in life because of my inability to just “push through” my overwhelming nausea and crippling food aversions. I actually ended up dropping about 10 pounds in the first trimester because I just was simply not able to eat anything. Then came the surrender, after many breakdowns and a meeting with my midwife, I might add. About 8-10 weeks in I just decided to ask baby what she wanted and to not judge what she was asking for. What started out as grief, became the space I was later able to hold to feel the first connection to the needs of the growing body inside me. For the first time in my pregnancy, I listened to her. I had a vegan wrap and a mango lassi from the sweetest cafe in downtown Phoenix. I devoured it with ferocity as it was probably the first actually meal I was able to consume in weeks. That was when the waterworks really came. In such a simple act, I understood the spiritual meaning of motherhood and the blessing that it is. It was now about her and what she needed and that is where my joy, peace, and fulfillment would come from.