Joy Now, Fear Never.
Hi! I’m Sheena, and I didn’t love being pregnant.
Truthfully, I didn’t get the butterflies, the ‘this is the most amazing thing that’s ever happened to my body’ feels.
I straight up was not having a good time.
I was swollen and I gained a ton of weight. I even went up three shoe sizes the last two months! There’s a thing they don’t tell you about, huh?
I was scared. Holy sh*t I was going to be a mom - Sebastian was a surprise, I wasn’t prepared for this.
I was lost on a personal level. I was so career-focused before getting pregnant. 12 hour workdays? No problem. Pregnancy had me shook - how was I going to succeed when I couldn’t hustle as hard?
And the craziest feeling was the overwhelming fear of being a mother:
- What if I couldn’t do it? Clearly I can.
- What if he never slept and cried all the time? He didn’t sleep but ended up being pretty chill.
- What if I screw him up? This one is still pending so I’ll keep you posted. .
But you see, we are all still here, doing our thing. Surviving and thriving together. The swelling goes down and the weight can be lost (albeit never as easily as we want). You can’t ever be truly prepared whether your baby was planned or a surprise like mine. If we waited until we were truly ready to have children then I’m quite positive none of us would ever have them! I was lost then but I found myself in new and even fuller ways. If you want to hustle and work hard then you find new ways to balance it.
Those fears that I had while pregnant stopped me from enjoying the whole process and journey of being pregnant to the full extent. Honestly, I can say the same for some of the first months of my son’s life.
The fears I had and, let’s be honest, still do were not based on reality. They were blown up and completely irrational. I can blame some of that on pregnancy and postpartum hormones but we all know that fear is never very rational no matter what hormones are or aren’t involved.
See that’s what most fear is…completely irrational. It removes us from the moments while we are in them and creates dread for future moments. We waste energy worrying about things that haven’t happened yet, things that there is no way of knowing. Most of the time, when we get to the other side of it the things we feared either didn’t happen or didn’t cause nearly the struggle we were expecting.
Stop letting fear get in the way of achieving more. Stop letting fear take away the joy of NOW. Stop letting fear take away the excitement of the unknown, the yet to happen.
Save this as a reminder for the next time you’re a little scared. You’ve got this, Momma.
