Mommy’s Groove

The downside of all the sharing we do with our pregnant sisters is that it’s really hard to filter our advice and experiences as so not to allow negative emotions — fear, sadness, guilt or regret — in our own experiences to seep into the conversation. I found when I was pregnant, I was so open to everything floating by that it was easy to absorb the emotions behind the stories that were being shared in good faith (hence I donned the emotional flak jacket). How can you stop your cervix from pulling in when you hear about 32 hours of labour, petocin drips and tears which seemed never to end? It kinda burns a hole in your no-yet penned birth plan!

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“Cookie Baking Mum” is not one of the handles I imagined myself adopting. Somewhere between a desire to avoid excessive refined sugar in my family’s diet and a judgmental snarl at behaviours reminiscent of June Cleaver, I have stubbornly avoided having “Baker” become part of my Mummy tool-box.

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I found an enormous sense of excitement in wanting to be part of the collective consciousness of motherhood as the baby inside me began to grow and my body showed signs of change. I could hear the little girl in me saying, “Here I will belong. Here I will be welcomed”. But it was as if old wounds were being brought up to heal because while I yearned to belong, there was that old companion, nervousness in my stomach. Hoping to avoid the let-down of feeling different again, I began approaching “the news” with women cautiously, listening to the personal stories while filtering for gems of knowledge and common values.

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