We featured Chas’ blog on Tuesday. Today, we’re sharing his wife Audrey’s perspective on parenting after infertility. This post does contain images of babies and parenting. Thanks, Chas and Audrey, for sharing your story.
– Elizabeth

“My baby, my baby, my baby!” That’s all I could say after the midwife put Ella skin-to-skin with me right after she was born. I remember feeling Chas touching my head, and feeling Ella’s feet in my hand, and thinking I was still in a dream. Obviously throughout the whole pregnancy the goal was to get to this moment, but even in labor it still didn’t feel real that I was going to get to be a mommy.

Because of our infertility journey I feel like we celebrated every single milestone with vigor. We had a gender reveal party, weekly bump pictures, 2 baby showers, maternity pictures, baseball games, a mother’s day trip to Disneyland, the whole shebang. We knew this was a gift, and we knew the fragility of it, so whatever we could celebrate we did. In that celebration though I realized I was losing a lot of the ladies I had become friends with through infertility.

Being in an infertility support group is a hard thing. You are there to shield yourself from the outside world of pregnancy, and babies, but unless you’ve chosen to live childless the whole group wants to be in that outside world. After our announcement I noticed a lot of people started to pull away, and I understood. My joy was their pain. I had been there. I had watched over and over again my infertility sisters become pregnant and deliver their miracles all while wondering when my turn would come. When you really delve into the community, so much of your identity is wrapped up in infertility, and trying to figure out how to balance your new future of parenting along with your past struggle to get to this point is tricky. When people would ask me how my pregnancy was going, and I told them I wasn’t feeling so well I was labeled as ungrateful.

I threw up my whole pregnancy. I don’t mean I had some morning sickness in the first trimester, I mean I carried the green vomit bags with me everywhere, went to the hospital for fluids, lost a lot of weight, and had a whole throw up routine with Chas (he would bring me water to rinse my mouth, and pull out little strips of toilette paper to wipe my face). I stopped telling a lot of people because every time I did the number one response I got was “you wanted this” or the always classic “be careful what you pray for”, and they were absolutely right. I had wanted this and prayed for this more than I had ever wanted anything, but the throwing my guts up wasn’t in the plan.

Once Ella was here my anxiety was at an all time high. For the first 2 weeks every day at 5:30 I would cry for half an hour. I was so mad at myself for experiencing baby blues because in my mind I had wanted this so much that my want for my daughter should overcome any hormonal changes that I was going through. I couldn’t put her down (which later developed into a nasty sleeping habit we had to break). Every time I would lay her in her bassinet to sleep I would feel guilty that she wasn’t in my arms. If I had worked that hard to have a baby then that baby was going to be in my arms! I needed help from Chas, but I didn’t know what he could do, or how to ask for it. It took a few months of developing a rhythm before things started to settle into our new normal. I had to let go of what things “should” look like, and comparing myself to other moms, and just let myself be the mom I wanted to be.

Parenting is more everything than I thought it would be. It’s more love, more worrying, harder, more rewarding, more overwhelming, more joy, more nerve-wracking, and this list goes on. I always knew that I would love being a mommy, but I didn’t know how much I would love being Ella’s mommy. I look at her and think about the struggle it took for her to get here, and know that that struggle shaped Chas and I into the parents that she needed.