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PART I:

Mother’s Day Special

05/10/2020

Dr. Lydiana Garcia

 

Today, I have the pleasure and honor of sharing this special blog post for mothers on Mother’s Day. First of all, I just want to say Congratulations. I hope you're celebrating today regardless of how you're celebrating. We are all going through unprecedented times, and this Mother's Day definitely feels bittersweet for me... 

I want to create this special blog post in which I’m going to tell you a little bit of my journey of being a mom, and some of the important things I have learned via the interviews I’ve done in the second season of The Beyond Resilience Life Podcast. When I was doing the Mother’s Day Special episode for the Podcast which I recorded on Wednesday, it was like one of those days when this whole sheltering in place and being at home everyday with your kid, has been taking a toll. So for moms, especially the first time moms who have all this expectation of how idealized this day is, if today is one of those days that you really would have preferred just to be alone and have a break, I hear you and I’m with you.

While today is a celebration of the sacrifices and the many amazing things only a mother can do, this is also a very interesting day of mix emotions. This could be a really sad day for those moms who no longer live with their children for any X, Y, and Z situation. They don't have the access to their children so today can be actually a day of mourning and just wanting to be with them. We also have the other side of the ones who are mourning the loss of their moms, or their caregivers, or their grandmothers. I’m also thinking of moms that have little ones or have children or adults that require a lot of attention. And for all the moms who have lost their babies, who are probably expecting today to be this day but then it came in just reminding you of what you don't have. Wherever you are, I just want to honor you. 

My Struggles as a First Time Mom

I remember some Mother’s Day when all I wanted was just for me to be by myself. During my second birthday after having my son, what I asked my husband was a night out by myself. I just went to a local hotel and did a spa. It was so relaxing to be by myself the whole day and night and then I came back refreshed. So, whatever you choose to do today is perfect.

I know I've shared my story in several episodes and in other interviews that I've been part of but this time, I want to focus a little bit more on the lessons that I have. My son made me a mom back in June of 2015. It was just months after we came back from our first fun international vacation and that was the first time that both of us were earning good money so we are saving a lot and paying off debts. We were barely getting back from having a really hard time financially. And then I got pregnant. The birth in itself was very, very peaceful for the most part. I had a home birth and everything went kind of as expected. 

The piece that I was missing was the aspect of how much my child was very ‘high-need’ as they call it. He had something in his back so whenever you lay him down, he would scream bloody murder. For the most part, some of the things I struggled with are:

  • Feeling so overwhelmed that I couldn’t necessarily do anything. I was in the paralyze mode for several months.
  • Making appointments. I was breastfeeding on-demand and people kind of forget that at the beginning, moms don't have a schedule.  I couldn't plan anything and I was completely in a surrendering mode.
  • Being too exhausted to get my ideas and things done.
  • Feeling a lot of guilt and shame because of how my body has changed and because of all these kind of comments and comparison from other people.
  • Experiencing everything postpartum in my body. There’s a whole piece of not cute feeling of secretions in your body and healing from my vaginal birth. 
  • Feeling the urgency do to things. That everything for my son was an urgency I needed to resolve now. This was something that was passed down from my mom, to be honest. 
  • Having my physical health compromised. Now that I was in the low zone, a lot of my old stuff surfaced back, like having a really bad stomach. 
  • Feeling like there was something wrong with me. I was struggling with this whole image of motherhood and moms feeling so in love with their children and "I'm so happy, I'm so tired, but I'm so in love" kind of messages. That was not going on for me. 

I felt overwhelmed with birthing the mom in me and with grieving my old self. It was especially hard because I was a very go-getter kind of person, I was very driven, very determined, which I still am but I was way more back then. I went from being in a high zone to automatically being put all the way down. That took a lot of the space and it was so hard for me to get passed through that, that that also, I would say, impacted my connection, at the beginning, with my son. I was going into baby blues or how we kind of label it as postpartum depression.

There was this conflict. That's the best way of putting it. It was definitely a conflict of me wanting to continue to be the driven person and then on the other side, also feeling the pull of actually being with my son, connecting and mothering. I think this is part of the journey that a lot of women go through. Especially when we live in this society that we got the message, or at least my generation got the message that as women, we can do anything that we want. I was under the impression that I could do anything that I wanted and thought mothering would come intuitively. But it didn't. And this was also linked to some kind of generational trauma patterns that were passed on from my grandmother to my mom and then me. 

To get some insights on how I managed these struggles, read PART II of the blog HERE.

If you want to listen to the full episode, please visit https://www.thebeyondresiliencelife.com/blog/bonus-mother-s-day-special.

 

With love, 

Lydiana