
At the beginning of this year, we began IVF for a second child.
We had done IVF before for my first child and despite a rather harrowing experience, got pregnant fairly quickly.
What happened next turned out to precipitate perhaps the biggest realisation about myself so far in this life.
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I’d always wanted kids.
Probably two, I thought.
I imagined a big noisy, chaotic dinner table when they all came home, grown-up, every Christmas. I started getting broody at about 28, but we waited - I had a job I’d wanted since I was 10, touring constantly, and my partner (to be husband) and I, with a shared love of adventure, had some travelling to do.
We came home from our honeymoon and got to it.
Conceiving turned out to be a bit more complicated than we had hoped. Due to a completely unforeseen issue, we had to go down the IVF route.
It was a total kick in the guts shock for both of us, but we got through it. In all its science experiment-like weirdness, we fell pregnant, and soon that side of things was a distant memory.
I loved being pregnant, and the high-achiever, never-sit-still part of me revelled in how self-indulgent with my time I could be.
Walking instead of running, slow, easy yoga instead of pumped up heated classes, actually giving myself permission to sit down for lunch instead of gulping it on the run.
When it came to the birth, I also loved my labour, and was in awe of what my body could do. All that stuff was beautiful and challenging; for the most part enjoyable.
What nobody can prepare you for (as any parent will agree) is what comes next.
Once my daughter was born, I was hit in the face with the proverbial New Parent Brick.
Coming from a highly successful, high-profile job, my expectations of myself were extremely high - too high in fact - and it wasn’t long before I plummeted hard into post-natal anxiety, overwhelm and a giant sense of failure as a new mum.
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