My Pregnancy And Motherhood Was Nothing Like I Was Told – I Felt Nothing

January 4, 2019, my period was supposed to have started, it didn’t. I waited ten days in hopes to see a little speck of blood, nothing. After work on January 14, 2019, I took a 7/11 pregnancy test. Positive, I cried, not tears of joy, tears of sadness, and fear.

I didn’t want to be pregnant. I wanted to live my life for me, go anywhere whenever I wanted, sleep whenever I wanted, do whatever I wanted, I liked my body and I knew it was going to change forever. On top of that, I had overdrawn $20 dollars in my bank account, I was not financially responsible enough for a baby.

There was no joy for me in seeing those two pink lines. I called the doctor and I told them I needed to come in right away to see how far along I was because, in all honesty, I was weighing my options, abortion, adoption, or motherhood.

I went into the doctor’s the next day for my first ultrasound. And to my uncomfortable surprise, I learned that day that not all ultrasounds are done on the outside of the stomach.

“Oh goodie” I thought as I undressed and laid there totally vulnerable and spread open. During the ultrasound the doctor told me I was about 5-6 weeks pregnant he asked if I wanted to see, I said yes.

I looked at the screen and had no idea what I was even looking at. To me, there was nothing there. I then noticed this little pulse motion and I asked what that was. The doctor told me before there is an actual heartbeat, there is a heartbeat motion and that’s what I was looking at.

At that moment with tears of sadness in my eyes, I chose motherhood not because I wanted to, but because I had to. The next 14 weeks consisted of awful nausea, throwing up before work, being late to work, throwing up during work and throwing up after work.

I hated it. I finally stopped throwing up on the day of my gender reveal party. I didn’t care too much about the gender but I just kinda wanted a boy over a girl. We popped a balloon and out came all this blue glitter. It was a boy! It was what I wanted! And I still couldn’t cry tears of happiness like I had seen countless times in videos on the internet.

I was happy but not THAT happy. Throughout my whole pregnancy, it was kinda happy emotions and not happy emotions, it also didn’t help that every person out there told me this was the “easy part” and it only gets “worse from here” “get your sleep now cause once the baby comes you’ll never sleep again”, like you really even sleep at 8 months pregnant anyways.

My due date was September 13, 2019, on that day I went out to the kitchen around 4:00 am to get a glass of chocolate milk and my water broke, at the same time my heart sank. I was TERRIFIED of labor.

I wanted to be one of those people that pushed three times or sneezed and the baby came flying out, I was wrong. I was in labor from Friday to Monday morning. I pushed for 4 plus hours and my epidural wore off long before the second hour, I had a 104.3 fever and I had already barfed all over myself.

At 8:30 am the doctor came in and told me he would give me two more pushes so he could try to basically vacuum him out or I had to go for a c-section. Jack was born at 8:57 with the help of a vacuum.

When they placed him on me for the first time I waited for that instant love everyone talked about, I waited for the happy tears that were supposed to be building up for this moment, it never came. Quite honestly I don’t even remember holding him for the first time. I knew I loved him, it just didn’t feel like what everyone told me it was supposed to feel like.

I felt so guilty that I didn’t have this surge of love that I read about. To this day I still envy those pictures of the mom bawling holding their baby for the first time because I didn’t cry once, not even watery eyes. Just relief when my placenta came out that I wasn’t pregnant anymore.

As the first month of motherhood came and went I still didn’t feel like a mom. I felt like a constant babysitter waiting for the real parents to come pick him up. I reached out to my doctor around the third month postpartum and explained to her how I felt, “Aren’t I supposed to look at him in awe? Isn’t he supposed to feel like the biggest blessing in the world? Isn’t my life supposed to feel whole now?”

After that phone call, she sent me to a mother’s group. I sat there in a circle with mothers dealing with postpartum depression, mothers pregnant with their second child bawling terrified of the mental struggle they may go through again, I felt my problems were so small.

It was my turn to speak and I didn’t want to because I thought we were all on different pages with our struggles but I did, I told them everything I felt since day one. With tears in their eyes and none in mine everyone looked at me and said that’s OKAY.

Then came my waterfall of tears I waited for. I didn’t realize how heavy this burden was until someone told me it’s ok. There is no one way or right way to feel about pregnancy, labor, or motherhood. If you don’t feel all those emotions we grew up reading about, seeing on social media, or even what you expected your emotions to be, that is OKAY.

Pregnancy to labor to motherhood is a HUGE mental change and needs adaption whether it is planned or not, that’s why we women have so many resources to help with the motions of this new life.

I started to bond with my son around 4-6 months and that’s OK. I love him unconditionally and he has changed my world positively in ways I couldn’t even imagine.

That doesn’t mean there aren’t hard days, days where I wonder what I would be doing with my life if I didn’t have a kid. It just means I’m normal and that’s ok. I want you to know just because your pregnancy, labor, and emotions involving everything doesn’t look like the fairytale we’ve all watched, doesn’t mean it’s any less beautiful. Give yourself time to adjust.

YOU ARE A GOOD MOTHER! YOU ARE STRONG! YOU GOT THIS!!

Follow Sarah Roberts and her beautiful family on Instagram @trisurahtops.