My Motherhood Journey: Lessons Learned from Pregnancy and Birth (Part 1)

Catherine A. Wood  05:00

Aren’t yet and gosh, a year ago today, we were a year ago today, we were just having rented a winter rental north of Boston, right on the ocean, really wanting to buckle down for the winter while we cut some clarity around what was next for my husband’s career and where we wanted to live next, where we wanted to buy a home, We hadn’t settled down yet we hadn’t even decided whether we were going to settle in Massachusetts or somewhere else. Like, gosh, we were in so much life transition, and I can recall like I was really trying to just embrace the journey and lean into the discomfort of just how much we didn’t know. We didn’t know where we were going to move. We didn’t know where my husband was going to find his next job. We didn’t know if we could conceive a baby naturally. We didn’t know if that was possible for us, or if we were going to have to consider IVF, there was just so many questions we had, and I can just remember that was a really, really hard time for me, and we, gosh, a year ago, October, we also hosted our very first unbounded mastermind retreat, and I’ve shared about this on one of our prior episodes in the recap from that first retreat, but I shared that during my own hot seat during the mastermind retreat, I asked for support around just surrendering that advice script, that attachment I had over my desire to get pregnant and how hard it was to surrender and to let go and let God and during that retreat, one of my masterminders shared with me a an insight, but it was really a message from the Divine. She’d had kind of a download that I didn’t need to worry that I was going to get pregnant, and that she’d seen my baby. And it was it meant everything to me at that time. It was the reassurance. It was the voice of God. It was the reminder of possibility. It was the reminder to hold the faith that I needed, and it completely changed my relationship over the next couple months to how I was holding the possibility of getting pregnant. And ironically, a year ago, December, we were gearing up to spend our first Christmas in my sister in law’s new home in Chicago, and I definitely was having baby fever. I bought, I bought some Christmas mugs for my husband and I that said Mama and pops, and I told Parth that when he opened them on Christmas morning, I told him, these are for these are for when we’re parents, and we can save them and use them when the titles are true. So that was kind of just like a glimmer of where I was a year ago around this time, also last, a year ago, last December, my husband and I drove to Michigan, and we stopped at Frankenmuth, which is the largest Christmas themed store in the world. It’s in Michigan, it has, it’s like part of it’s like a Bavarian style town in Michigan. There’s a huge German population there. And this Christmas store is epic, if you haven’t been anyway, so we stopped at Frankenmuth, and I also got us a Christmas tree ornament that had a picture of a white mom and a brown father, and the mom was pregnant, and I, I don’t know, I just felt so called to get that Christmas ornament. And it’s not like I went into the store kind of with that idea in mind, but when I saw it, I just I had this intuitive pull to buy that ornament. And that’s actually how we let my family know that we actually were pregnant a couple weeks later because. As it turns out, we were pregnant last December, and we were pregnant last Christmas, and we did not yet know it. We found out that we were pregnant the day after New Year’s so January 2, which is so cool, like, right? It’s so cool just imagining how you intuitively know things that you don’t medically or intellectually understand quite yet, and we were certainly preparing for pregnancy last fall and winter as the end of the year approached. So you know, I’ve shared a little bit about how my pregnancy has gone over the past year. You know, I think that at a really high level, I had a magical pregnancy. I think that for me, my breakthrough was in really conceiving. It took us a year to conceive our baby, and I was really controlling the process like it was. It felt, it felt challenging. It felt I was really attached to getting pregnant. It was really hard to embrace the process and trust the journey. You know, all the things that I coach my clients around, this was an area of life where it felt particularly hard for me to let go of control just because of how badly I wanted it and how badly I’ve wanted it for so long. You know, when so many of my friends and colleagues found out that we were pregnant, I think one of the first things that I heard back just across the board was like, oh, cat, you’re gonna be such an amazing mom. And I think that’s something that I’ve always just yearned for my life. And, yeah, I said I just always wanted to be a mom. I think I knew I wanted to be a lot a mom long before I knew I wanted to be an entrepreneur. It’s just a title I’ve always yearned to hold. And at the same time, once we got pregnant, it really helped. Once we got pregnant, it really helped me compartmentalize in my mind what needed to get done when because truly, the year of 2024 has been a massive year of life and career transition for me, for my husband and for our entire family. My husband got a new job at the beginning of this year and through the first half of this year, we didn’t know where we were going to live. We had got a winter rental because we wanted to buy ourselves some time for Parth, to look for a new job and for us to just gain some clarity around where we wanted to settle down and and that felt like the priority, right? We had to find the new job for Parth, I was already remote. I’ve been self employed for almost a decade now, and, you know, remote in the business for years and years. So that wasn’t as important as it was for us to, you know, figure out what his next work environment was going to look like. So we gained that clarity during the winter, and then, you know, and then we were really looking at, okay, where do we want to settle down and and welcome our baby into the world? Right? Like that home that you create for yourself to welcome your baby into is that also feels so important. And we, you know, we had some really bad luck with our first home, which we’ve been healing from emotionally for a while now, so it was a lot to kind of trust the universe and trust ourselves to to find the next home for us that would be our first family home, and we had our winter rental through May, so we essentially had until spring to decide where we were going To live, and not only where, but like, I mean the state where, but also to pick out the house or to find another rental. And we were both really wanting to buy a home. But if any of you are listening, and you’ve been in the house market, like, it’s a very competitive market. Now interest rates are sky high. We were also looking in Massachusetts, which is one of the most competitive real estate markets in the country, and the supply of homes was like pretty minimum, especially on the North Shore, which is the area north of Boston where we were looking. But I you know, after getting pregnant, I really did have this complete relationship shift with surrender, and there was just this part of me all spring that just knew we were going to find the house. And we did. We found the house after we had moved out of after we’d officially moved out of our rental and we were essentially between homes for a month while we negotiated. We actually put in offers in on two homes. The first one didn’t feel like a hell yes to me, but it was workable. And you know, fortunately, we didn’t get that house, but we, we got our second offer, and it’s been the it has been a perfect family home to welcome Micah into. And, you know, as soon as we got into the house, my husband had work travel, and fortunately, we were so close to my parents that they essentially helped us move into our new home in a week’s time, which is kind of wild because, because when we moved out of our home in Maryland, we had our possessions in storage. A lot of our possessions in storage for the past two years. So when we were unpacking and getting settled into this home, I was unpacking items and boxes of things that I hadn’t seen in over two years, which is wild and was also really challenging for my minimalistic personality to to reckon, to reconcile, right? Do we actually need these things if I hadn’t used them in two years? But, but at so as as it would turn out, essentially everything we got moved and unpacked into our home fit perfectly, and we were able to settle in and unpack the lion’s share of the home again in that very first four days and Then, and that was when I could really start preparing for baby, and that happened in June. Now we delivered at the end of August. So I am a planner. I think y’all can imagine that I’m a planner, given some of what I’ve shared about on the podcast over the past couple of years, and it was so challenging for me to embrace so much unknown, trust the process that deeply to know that we really needed to get part situated in his new job and then find a new home before I could make that mental space to prepare for welcoming a baby into the world. So that’s exactly what we did. We moved in again at the end of June, and then over the next two months, I really got to focus, to my heart’s content, on educating, preparing and getting settled to have a baby, which was so fun. You know, community is one of my top values, and I was really wanting to create a community to to have a family in right like, I wasn’t wanting to go this alone, and we found this beautiful early childhood education center that has a doula agency. So that’s where we found our labor doula we also did our new parent education class there. I took a spinning babies class there. I did a virtual breastfeeding class there. I even was able to take prenatal yoga classes there and just meet some local moms. And then, even more, luckily, and I don’t think it was luck, I think it was fate, but in my neighborhood, there’s all these young moms. I live in a part of Massachusetts where, wait, I don’t, I’m gonna cut that line out. I live in this beautiful neighborhood where there’s been a lot of turnover of homes recently, and younger families, actually older parents. Yes, I live in a part of Massachusetts where there’s been a lot of turnover in the real estate lately, and fortunately for us, we have a lot of older moms who are having children later in life, after they’ve already started and established their careers, just like me and and it’s been so cool. There’s like, all these babies in our neighborhood, and I’ve already made friends with some of the other mamas, and it’s just been so beautiful. And and I’ve loved it. I think some of what this pregnancy has taught me and just really helped me embrace and embody is something that I talk about a lot with clients in terms of business, and it’s just this reminder that every season of life and business is important and it’s meant to teach us specific lessons, and until we’re willing to surrender, to let go, to welcome change, we likely will not energetically shift from one season to the next. And for me, I think that this reminder of trusting the process and focusing on what’s important was so much of what I was intended to learn during this pregnancy, and I had so many golden opportunities to practice, I think another important highlight and lesson from this pregnancy is that it’s really required me to lose some of the rigidity and rigor, which I’ve historically approached goals with. You know, earlier in the winter, when I was doing my daily cold plunges in the ocean. I loved it, and I also knew that I really wanted to get pregnant, and maintaining a daily habit like swimming in the ocean in New England year round may be challenging for my whole pregnancy, and while I started that daily habit, gosh, last October, and I maintained it through most of the winter, through our 10 day winter holiday to Chicago for Christmas and New Year’s when we returned home from Chicago and and we got through those early winter months in Massachusetts. You know, my body was just really wanting me to slow down and to be a little more gentle on myself at the beginning of the pregnancy, I was, it was, it was a joy to get up early every morning and maintain my beautiful and extensive morning routine. It was a joy to do my daily cold water plunge in the ocean, and it was a joy to wake up early and work out and take Luna or Molly for a run around the neighborhood. But as I was really entering that second trimester, I started having and really, like towards the end of the second trimester, I was having some pregnancy insomnia, which insomnia is not anything I’ve ever experienced in life. I’ve always been a deep sleeper and and just naturally woken up after eight hours of sleep, which made going to bed at nine and getting up at five like a real natural circadian rhythm for my body for years and years. But once I was nearing the end of the second trimester, my body was really telling me to slow down and to lose the rigor, give up the daily cold plunges, shorten my morning routine, and even to stop working out, which, you know, I think my head knew that working out would be great for me while pregnant, but my body was really telling me to stop and to slow down, and I I stopped a lot of my runs and walking for a few weeks there, because I was just having some pelvic floor plane, some pelvic floor i. Was having some pelvic floor pain, and I was really trying to be gentle on my body. And that was a really beautiful part of my pregnancy journey, just to lose that, that that competitive part of me that loves a goal, that loves consistency to really like put those down and trust the feminine, the feminine flow. Trust that intuitive wisdom of my body to lead to tell me what I needed. And I really enjoyed my pregnancy. I can only imagine a lot more than I would have had I tried to maintain all my pre pregnancy habits and typical ways of operating. It was so lovely to just be gentle and um, it was so lovely to be gentle and really to be tender with myself, and I think that that was such a beautiful way of taking care of myself as I prepared for birth and As I prepared for welcoming a son into The world. So my birth story is A I had intended to share my birth story with you in today’s episode as well, but as I’m thinking about what I want to reinvent in My business as I come back from maternity leave, one of the areas is actually in the podcast and wanting to record shorter episodes moving forward in order to just honor all my commitments and also make sufficient spaciousness in my schedule and my day To day for being a mom and getting to wear all the hats that I choose to wear in my life. So I’m gonna pause, uh, today’s episode here, and I hope you’ll come back and join me next week where I share all about my birth story, some of the lessons we’ve learned, some of the things that I was absolutely surprised by and delighted by in my birth story and the experience since, and also some of The lessons that were really hard to stomach and I and also some of the lessons that were a little bit harder to stomach and that I’m still reconciling with. I hope you enjoyed today’s episode. If you are a new mama or a mom, I salute you. I have a new found appreciation for moms and mompreneurs that I think you can only really have either once you’ve become a mom or a parent. Thank you so much for tuning in. We’ll see you next week. You.