(Diary) Week 35: I Lost Control

Of my emotions, my positivity, and my bladder.

Welcome to my diary. These are entires I wrote during my own pregnancy. What you’re about to read is unfiltered, unedited, and perhaps a bit uncanny. But these are my raw feelings written in real-time. Everyone’s perspective and journey is different. This is mine.

You brag about how good you’re doing these days.

I’m snuggling up to my positive side!

I’m officially surrendering to it all!

I’ve committed to letting go of what I can’t control and focusing on what I can!

Surrender is my word of the week!

You sound like you swallowed a library full of self-help books. But they are not digesting very well inside of you.

Because after only 12-hours of convincing yourself, your best friend, 13,000 strangers on Instagram, and the insurance representative who is helping you order your breast milk that you’re finally ready to give birth and be a mom, you have a full-blown mental breakdown at 1 o’clock in the morning.

It’s been a while since you’ve had one of these but that doesn’t matter. When it starts, you know how it goes, you remember it all so well.

First comes the heavy panting, then comes the rolling roars from the bottom mush of your gut, and then the tears.

And just like any good old run of the mill breakdown, your thoughts steal the attention, they want to see their name in lights, they want to go down in the history books as putting on one heck of a show.

Your mind pulled out the worst words it knows. It has formed them into poetic sob story about how awful you are, how terrible you will be at all of this, how this precious little life of yours that you’ve worked so hard to create will pack up its bags and head west, without you.

Your baby won’t love you. You’re not capable of loving a baby.

You can’t do this. Nobody believes you can.

You’re not the first to give birth but everyone before you was stronger, smarter, less of a baby when they had to deliver their own baby.

You’ve done everything you could to isolate yourself from help. You’re alone in this. It’s your fault.

You got a dog to love it fully and now you’re about to ruin her life. She’ll never forgive you for that.

You’ve been warned about postpartum depression. Hear that? You’ve been warned.

You pace around your apartment. It feels awake inside of there because of the moonlight. You just want it all to be dark.

You think about waking up your husband.

You think about running away from it all.

You wonder what’s outside of this place.

You wonder who you could become if you still had time left before becoming a mom.

Let go of what you can’t control. Surrender. Relax. Survive.

You slink into bed. You don’t invite your thoughts. They come anyway.

What will destroy you is never what you worry about, it’s the worry.

You’ve memorized a self-help book. You’ve written your own horror story. You refuse to believe any of it will turn out like the last 5-minutes of a rom-com.

Your head rolls on the pillow like a heavy marble.

The thing about any classic breakdown is that it never lasts until tomorrow.

By then, you’ll feel something else, something new, some other way.

And what do you know.

24-hours later there you are:

Bragging to your best friend that you have once again leaned into your positive side.

For now, at least, just for right now.