Hi all,
Apologies in advance for the massive essay.
I'm currently 7 weeks 4 days pregnant, and I'm struggling with the feelings of ambivalence I'm experiencing about my pregnancy.
For context, I am not someone who has always been desperate to have a child. I've always said I'd like to have one, but as the biological clock started ticking my feelings of ambivalence grew. I decided to take an AMH test to reassure myself when I was 32 or 33, hoping that good results would allow me to put off having a baby until my late 30s. Unfortunately, the initial result I got was quite low for my age, and it was a devastating blow as I feared I might not be able to have a child, or that I might have to have one sooner than I felt ready. This experience made me think that I must really want to have a baby, though. I retook the AMH test six months later and got a better result, and that gave me some peace of mind, but I decided that I wouldn't delay getting pregnant until later than 35. My husband and I decided we'd only like to have one child.
As the 'deadline' approached, I grappled with a lot of anxiety and uncertainty about whether this was really what I wanted. I read a ton of books, including a book named 'Regretting Motherhood', a study carried out with women who regretted having children. Although I did sympathise with a lot of the reasons the women in the study gave as to why they wished they hadn't had children, on the whole the book made me feel more confident that I did want to have a child. So, in a way, the books made me feel more confident in my decision to move ahead, although I've never been 100% certain. I'm more like 70/30. But reading books such as 'Matrescence' made me realise that this kind of ambivalence towards having children is actually very common.
In the absence of a really strong maternal instinct, I weighed the pros and cons in a very considered way. What I came to realise is that my desire to be a parent is more about the experience of building a lifelong relationship with my child, rather than a love for babies (in fact, I held my friend's baby the other day and felt nothing different to before pregnancy). I'm just not a baby person, and perhaps that accounts for a lot of my ambivalence. I don't find babies particularly cute. I hate the idea of being infantilised by the world for being a mother (I hate the idea of being called a 'mama' - I'm not your mama!). Of course, I hate the thought of what pregnancy might do to my body, my career, my finances, my independence, my freedom, my creativity.
But I also love the idea of bringing up a person, of bonding with them, of seeing the world through a child's eyes, of playing with them, introducing them to life's wonders, of sharing that with my husband and our love for each other deepening even more. And there are so many other things I do look forward to. When weighing the pros and cons, these desires have ultimately outweighed my fears.
Which is why I hoped that, once I did find out I was pregnant, I would feel happy. Don't get me wrong, I don't feel miserable about it, although I am struggling with nausea and fatigue as well as a rollercoaster of emotions. But I feel ambivalent about the baby, and sometimes even resentful, and I wonder if those feelings are going to go away.
A part of the problem is that I experienced a lot of bleeding in the early stages of my pregnancy and I feared I could be having an ectopic pregnancy (this worried me much more than a potential miscarriage). I was referred to a scan but not given the option of blood tests, which can help rule out ectopic sooner, and I really felt let down by the healthcare system. I wondered if fears around the pregnancy ending were preventing me from bonding with my baby. Eventually, I found out that I wasn't having an ectopic pregnancy, so I hoped I could then start feeling more excited about the pregnancy. But that hasn't happened.
I do wonder if a big part of what's going with me is slight antenatal depression, combined with processing how my life is going to dramatically change, as well as disappointment in myself for all the things I hoped I would have achieved in my life by now, as well as the things that I feel I will never get to do anymore (although I try to tell myself that your life doesn't just end when you become a mother, and I'm trying to challenge those stereotypes). Of course, all this doesn't mean that I don't want this child, of course I do. But it's been hard being confronted with images of mothers ecstatic about their positive pregnancy tests, or telling all their close friends, when I don't even feel happy about it (yet, I hope). It's just been hard to come to terms with all the conflicting feelings I'm experiencing. I'm not regretting getting pregnant, but I'm still feeling a lot of ambivalence and I just wish those feelings would shift. Getting pregnant was a carefully thought-through and measured decision and I wouldn't have done it lightly, so why am I not feeling happier?
Has anyone else had similar experiences of ambivalence during pregnancy, and did those feelings shift later on?