BECOMING A MOTHER

Nobody prepares you enough.

You will never be ready. I swear. 

You can imagine this moment millions of times, dream of every little detail, adjust it according to your mood or the moment it comes to your mind.

I, for example, thought I was going to cry out with joy. 

I have to admit being quite a cliché, I imagined myself full of emotion, going to announce to a man who didn't exist that our little family was finally starting.

I imagined laughing and crying and all the yada-yada-yada, glitter and hearts like in the movies.

Well, it didn't happen that way. 

Thruth is, I knew it: the call to the family, the emotion of my siblings, my parents ... I knew that I would not have all this.

It must be said that I started badly: I was arrogant enough to propose a white man to my mother - a woman who has the mental elasticity and religious tolerance of Al Qaeda - obviously it was not very successful; I can easily say that it was a catastrophe.

I lost my mental health, my job, my ambitions, months at a psychiatric clinic and probably a good chunk of my dignity too.

I have to say that having a baby was not in the Top Ten of my to-do-list after all.

Taking back my self-confidence and having a stable job would already have been a great victory.

Why dare to dream!

I had just been diagnosed with bipolar disorder after four years of psychiatric violence during which I had been used as a laboratory guinea pig bleaching my brain with fifteen something different brand of antidepressant drugs.

Long story short, after years of suicidal thoughts and concrete attempts that, as you can well see, did not work, I had finally accepted the idea of staying alive. 

So, you must understand that the concept of hosting another life in my body sounded to me as a paroxysm bordering on ridicule.

I need to emphasize the negligence of some doctors because no one had ever told me that lithium combined with the pill - and apparently also with antibiotics my dear ladies – could be as a successful contraceptive strategy than a mint candy.

Anyway. After a sleepless week, sore breasts and a very disturbing immaculate underwear - I was expecting to have red Niagara Falls - I decided to do it: I peed on the famous stick!

It was 7am, I saw the purple line drawing slowly and the darker it went, the more a flood of questions passed through my head.

How do I tell him. Who do I tell. How will I do with work. How. Will. I. Do. This?   

Too much.

I decided to do the thing I do best: ignore the problem.

I flushed the toilet, wrapped the stick and its box in so much of toilet paper that I could have made Tutankhamun's mummy with it, threw everything in the garbage.

Done. Problem solved!

Obviously, I dealt with the situation then. It was a practical matter.

It took me a while to accept what was happening to me.

I observed with a perv look the pregnant women in the street, the babies in the strollers.

At the time I was working in a childcare social center - kind of a nursery for slightly unlucky children - ironically! I looked at the babies with new, almost scientific curiosity, analyzing their movements, the way they clung to the furniture to slowly attempt walking before falling on their full diapers.

I lingered on the round and beautiful faces of interracial children, imagined my little girl - I was sure it would be a girl - drawing her features in my mind.

And then began the long wait. Nine months. Nine months are very long.

The fact is that as a woman there’s a social pressure that stipulates the obligation to be happy and to show that you are happy while being pregnant. No sadness, it's not good for the baby!

The pain, the stress, the doubts, the alienation ... "it's all for the good cause!".

Showing even a slight of negativity can only mean that you are a defective woman, an unworthy mother ... Well damn ... I was not in a good place to begin.

“What are nine months in a lifetime!”. I have often heard these words and even more often from the mouth of men and women without children. Words that haunted me throughout my pregnancy.

Nine months are long. Very, very long.

It’s at least 60 days of anxiety, the fear of a miscarriage

At least two seasons, maybe three

Hundreds of showers

A ridiculous number of injections, blood tests, trips to the hospital

At least three ultrasounds

Lots of hormones

It’s hours and hours of telephone calls

Days of inexplicable pain in parts of the body that were unknown to you until then

It means constantly asking yourself if you will make it

It is a lot of forced smiles

As I have to say it: No, it was not the best time of my life.

I felt lonely.

A deaf and icy loneliness, a fluid and constant sensation at times so powerful that I felt like I was drowning in it.

During these months in which my body has turned into an envelope and I have lost all authority over it, loneliness has been my best companion.

It insinuated in reaction to my family’s attitude, outraged by this child conceived in sin. It decided to move as a permanent resident when I started showing a strange mechanical smile every time someone said to me "Oh how good it is to be pregnant" or "These are precious moments, then you'll see ...!" and other very fascinating considerations.

You have to separate my aversion to pregnancy and the love I feel for my little girl. It's not like I’ve never wanted to be a mother.

I would say quite the opposite.

As the eldest of four siblings, I grew up among children and have always wanted to have mine.

BUT, I thought of it as a concretization of my future life. Later.

You know, when I grow up.

(I became a mother at twenty-nine. I don't know how "adult” I was already)

A ring on, a successful career, the logical succession of things, didn't ask for anything special.

I know.

My life has been a succession of absurd situations so you must forgive my romanticism a bit sparkles, sparkles.

I loved her right away.

My body was the first to love her, the weeks before the famous "pee-on-stick" episode I was surprisingly healthy and almost obsessive about hygiene: no alcohol or occasional cigarettes, lot of rest, as if in a certain sense I already knew.

I loved her fiercely, viscerally, deafeningly.

I talked to her from the beginning, I caressed my belly and told her about my days, my anxieties, my doubts, my desires.

I told her my promises

To always be there for her .Never judge her. Never. Being the mom I wish I had

I thought it before, I'm convinced now: being a mother is natural, being a mum, you must deserve it

The first time I saw her little body move on the sonographer's screen, everything stopped. Time. Thoughts. My breathing.

She really was there.

My life has taught me to never expect positive things

I had no idea how almost disturbing happy I would feel seeing her.

I was afraid.

I'm a bit ashamed to admit it but until the end a part of me kept believing that my daughter would never arrive. Sometimes I was deeply convinced: I was about to f**k it all up; my body couldn't do it, it was going to betray me as it had always done until then.

Don't worry: my baby is here with me. She fills my whole existence.

My solemn task is to fill hers.