The night and days before you become another year older I find myself playing a game. It’s always “this time last year”, “this time two years ago”.
On the seventeenth, it’s this was so very nearly your birthday.
On the twenty-ninth…
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There was a song. It was a nice song discovered at 38 weeks pregnant, hurriedly added to a birth playlist in a fit of mild panic and forgotten about. It was a song listened to in labour that took on new meaning, it would swell and swoop and with it my excitement would soar. I would grip onto the fireplace through contractions, knuckles white, and cry at the pain and the beauty of each…
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This is a story that is mine. It is one that I get to choose how to tell. The language is mine, the narrative I craft is mine, and the emotions that run deep and earnestly throughout are all mine too. It is a story that I have held back on sharing because I was scared of marring the face of birth positivity, something that I feel is so important. I was worried that by sharing an experience that is at the very crux and core of me I would be letting the side down. I do not let it define me, but it is inherently woven into the tapestry of our lives. To ignore it is to ignore the yearning I have to share with you, it is to ignore the important message I feel exists in its past and present. It is to ignore the all-encompassing empowerment it gave me now and at the time.
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It’s World Mental Health Day today, something that before having a baby would have been but the minutest blip on my radar.
Sometimes I feel like I have made my anxiety up. That I am undeserving of it being acknowledged at all. I brush it off as an “off day”, and push on until sometimes I break and sometimes I don’t. And then it perpetuates.
I was, and can still be, a person of laissez-faire attitude. Life goes on and I tended to be of the ‘it will all turn out alright in the end camp’, because usually it did. But then I gave birth, and it was pretty bad.
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