About a year or so ago, my plan to continue to live a childfree existence was turned upside down. I’d met the love of my life while surfing in Nicaragua six months earlier, he was 41, I was 39, and he and I were on the same page for allllllmost everything... except kids. I’d heard before that sometimes you don’t want kids until you meet “the one”, and then suddenly you do. But this is not that kind of story.
I had met “the one”, that was for sure, but this life-altering encounter did not turn me into a wannabe mom overnight. No, for a long time I maintained that I would have been thrilled if Eddy didn’t want children, and I would fantasize about our dreamlife : me and him, on one big giant surf trip until the end of our days, building our project together in Nicaragua, working in Europe to support our travels and surfboard collecting, no financial pressure other than to house, feed + clothe ourselves, with plenty of time to enjoy food and sex and spontaneous adventure and, most importantly, each other’s company, uninterrupted. Nothing (still true today) brings me more joy than hearing Eddy's car pull into the driveway, when he makes me laugh, seeing his big blue eyes in the morning, a night watching surf movies in bed together : all that sappy romantic stuff sends my heart to the moon and back, makes me feel full and complete and peaceful and happy.
But Eddy was meant to be a dad- this was laid out from the start. He was clear he wanted children, and he wasn't a dad yet. He'd also been living the life full of waves and travel freedom. But here was this clean slate that was being presented to us: we had a chance to create a family together from scratch (albeit with no time to lose). A seed was planted in my mind, and I didn’t realize this at the time, but from the moment that seed was planted, I was embarking on a year-long exploration of my own soul to try to answer the question: do I want to be a mother? Or I suppose it was at that point: could I turn the desire not to be mother, around?
I didn’t realize what I was getting into, how complex the emotions were surrounding this question, how agonizing it would become, how all-consuming, and how deep I would have to go to find the answers.
On the surface, I would sort of tell myself (and Eddy) a kind of half-truth: “I want to have a family with you.” At the beginning, it was clear to me that I would be doing this for him. I would be having a child for him, because he wanted to be a father. And I wanted to be his wife, and around we would go in chain-link cirlcle of happiness, or that is what I told myself. I was dying to talk to him about it, dying to dig deep into why he wanted to be a father. I wanted to understand how he knew so clearly – but it was a difficult conversation to have because he, I suppose, didn’t understand why I didn’t want them. He did say, at one point, that he just felt a desire deep within him. I have observed that people ALWAYS do what they want to do in the end, no matter the consequence, but because I overthink, I have difficulty determining what it is that I want most of the time – so when someone is clear about what they want, I admire that and I envy the peace they must feel when their desires, thoughts and actions align quickly without having to mull around the ‘why’s’ for so long.
There was a long stretch of time where I just didn’t see the point. My spiritual practice started to intensify in June of 2018, and I experienced a powerful moment where the understanding that nothing was separate came physically into my heart and from that point forward, my entire life changed. I started to see the beauty and joy all around me at a permanent level, and life was magical just as it was. Of course, ups and down, of course challenges – but that underlying knowledge about the oneness of everything allowed me to continually drop down into a space of infinite expansion. In infinite expansion there is no element of you that is incomplete.
Without Eddy, I was not incomplete per se. But with Eddy, I got to share the magic that is life with someone, and this is even more powerful and joyful that anything. I didn’t see, other than to proliferate the human race, what having a child was going to bring us or bring the world. On the contrary, I felt it would add strain and stress to our really wonderful and beautiful and full lives. Some people I had spoken to found this reasoning close to selfish – but I would argue differently. I would say that having a child has an element of selfishness, as the world hardly needs another body, and they didn't explicitly ask to be born (as far as we know) – so what then, is the argument, if it is not to have a child so that the PARENT'S lives are more fulfilled, so the parents have a distraction, outside of themselves, that they created, in order to feel more full and whole? What could possibly be more egocentric than that? I found that argument nonsensical.
Nonetheless, one day I looked into Eddy’s eyes in our kitchen in Ibiza, and I had a moment, like my moment in June 2018 when I felt the oneness, also like the moment in Nicaragua where I looked at Eddy from accross the room and FELT, really felt deep in my heart that I had loved him for a very very long time, for a lifetime… I had a flash of a love that I felt FOR Eddy and FOR our baby that was yet to be conceived, and the incredible power this love contained blinded me for an instant. It was this moment that got me thinking that there was some greater force or source that I hadn't tapped into or felt yet.
We started trying in January of this year, sort of. It was the plan, at least - but by January I was already well into a three-month-long health and physical challenge in Nicaragua: multiple infections, sicknesses and one grave accident, two surgeries and a hospitalization... I was so full of medication and antibiotics and stress that I wasn’t surprised when I left Nicaragua end of February not pregnant.
Eddy came home a month later than I, and we doubled down on our efforts for parenthood, but it felt forced. We felt we’d failed to get pregnant ‘as per the plan’ and so we were ‘behind schedule’. It was decided that I was going to spend as much time as possible in Ibiza to maximise our chances of getting pregnant, travelling back to France for work only when strictly necessary. I checked my stuff (I still had follicles and a healthy utuerus apparently), eddy checked his stuff and it was as healthy as ever, and so there was allegedly no reason I couldn’t get pregnant. But we did need to be in the same area code.
April, may, june went by – no pregnancy. I was starting to think I couldn’t get pregnant. Eddy was starting to think the same. And the entire time I was still burdened with the question of whether I truly wanted to be a mother or not. I spoke at length to close friends who had children in Canada and in France, to my business partners, one of whom had also embraced a childfree life, to my surfer friends who were with child and without: I was gathering as much intel as I could while trying to figure out what my heart and soul were saying.
I was worried Eddy had romanticized the idea of parenthood, that he didn’t realize how hard it was going to be. For him it was a joyous prospect, while for me the idea of parenthood was terrifying. I also thought, if I really wanted this, then I would also probably think it was a joyous prospect, so I must not really want this. People see what they want to see.
I went to therapy trying to figure it out, I journaled, I meditated, I read and read and read. I listened to podcasts on motherhood. On the actual stages of pregnancy, on what happens with newborns. It all sounded so dismal: weight gain, exhaustion, nausea, testings, screenings, does my baby have down syndrome, why am I out of breath, why can’t I sleep anymore, more weight gain, more exhaustion. And that’s only nine months in. Then come the sleepless nights, feelings of intense grief for one's old life, very sore breasts, more exhaustion, less intimacy with your partner, this famous 'mom guilt' one feels apparently permanently… I coudldn't find anything good to read! Only blogs online that said when you are covered in burped up milk, that little smile you see is "worth all the sleepless nights". I was secretly just more and more terrified.
End of July I was sorting through some things and came across a pregnancy test that we had taken back and forth to Nicaragua. I was one day late on my period, and for some reason, decided to use the test – more to throw it out and get rid of it than anything else but subconsciously I must have known. The two pink lines appeared and shock set in. I didn’t know what to do. I had honestly started to think I was beyond pregnancy, too old, dried up. I had just turned 41.
I texted eddy, who was at work and exhausted. There was to be no “cute moment” at home later where I place the positive test next to his cerveza at the end of the day with a twinkle in my eye. Nope, there was just a bomb of a text message on his phone as he hustled to prep lunch for his clients. His shock set in.
The shock stayed with us for three full days and three full nights.
On day 4 the shock lifted and something unforeseen happened: I was ECTSATIC with joy! I was PREGNANT and I felt something I had never felt before: a sort of happiness that danced around in all my cells, I could feel it at an atomic level! I was buzzing, literally, and I felt this “super power” that I had heard and read about in my various podcasts and researches into motherhood. Even though I had gained weight after my injury in Nicaragua, had lost all my hair after a stressful period at work, and I was out of shape, I felt beautiful. I felt excited, proud, and generally fabulous. Eddy was so excited. There was a lot of happiness all around. We were PUMPED to be parents.
I decided to celebrate with a surf trip to Biarritz because I wanted to surf as much as I could before I would have to stop. I was so so so happy- so proud to be taking my little poppy-seed sized embryo on the waves I so dearly loved – parlementia, cenitz, the cote des basques. We caught waves in the sun, me and my little magic secret I was carrying, and I was flying. I happily toasted my non-alcoholic beer with friends. I felt fresh and energized and I was still enjoying coffee. I was so excited about everything that I ended up telling way too many people about it.
Almost instantly upon my return to Ibiza, everything changed. I couldn’t drink coffee anymore, I was exhausted and so so so nauseous. I had about 20% of my normal energy levels. The only thing that kept the nausea at bay was either eating carbs, or going to the gym (talk about zero sum efforts). Running was out of the question with my extremely sore and tender breasts. I didn't recognize myself.
I hadn’t known that I kept an internal reserve of ‘Motivation’, capital M, until I could feel it literally emptying away into a puddle around my feet. I hadn’t realized this reservoir is what enabled me to go through life: having a shower required a modest amount of Motivation, making dinner required a bit more Motivation, and finishing the intercompany balance spreadsheets between my 5 companies required a maximum level of Motivation, but I had enough in my tank to do it all.
When this reservoir emptied, life became very challenging. The act of going to the gym, which would normally have been fueled by Motivation, switched to “Survival” as its fuel, getting me from bed into sneakers and to the car in an attempt to escape nausea for 60 minutes while a personal trainer gave me orders and I obeyed.
And all, alllll the fears of becoming a parent came back, and stronger than ever. They came back screaming, banging down the door, because I was on route to becoming a parent so I needed to get to the bottom of this question, and quickly.
This period was hard, and it was hard on Eddy as well as he saw my physically suffering, and mentally suffering. I can honestly say that Eddy is the greatest teacher I have ever had the chance to learn from – I often tell him he is one of the most inspiring yogis I know. He is the living embodiment of yogic teachings, he is equanimity reincarnate. And this is something I am grateful for every single day. So as I was deep into the agony of trying to regulate this dichotomy within, Eddy was solid ground, my rock, my everything. We talked and talked. I sought answers from my therapist, from my brother, my friends. I shed many, many layers of myself to get closer to the truth in record time. And it was painful.
Then two things happened simultaneously, on the same day, two things that would forever change how I would feel in my heart about parenting. The first thing was a letter, that started out as a journal entry but that became a letter when I sent it to Eddy. The second thing was my grandfather dying.
In my letter, along with a lot of other thoughts I will share one day in another post, I shared with eddy my greatest fears:
If I have the child:
- To lose myself (and the greatest journey I have been on is to get to know myself)
- To lose my dedication to learning to surf (the greatest passion I have ever known)
- To lose my freedom (my greatest value)
- To lose my time (my greatest richness)
- To feel tired all the time
- To feel stressed financially
- That eddy and I will break up and that we’ll both be single parents
- That I will resent eddy my whole life deep down in my heart
- That I will resent my child and that they will feel this resentment
- That I will not enjoy my life as a mother
If I don’t have the child:
- To lose eddy (the greatest love of my life)
- To regret it later
There they were, distilled down, simple, the raw + the true.
After getting these out and in the open, I continued on with some important questions, thanks to a resource I had found from an exceptional therapist on the subject of motherhood, especially this question:
What would it take for me to say yes to being a parent, and be authentically joyful about it?
In answering this, I realized that there were ways to organize my life, our life, so that my greatest fears could be addressed, and I could feel supported. I will share the details of these 'condition's if one could call them that, and their solutiuons, in a separate post. In a nutshell, we could make sure I could surf, and we could make sure I could still work and travel back and forth to France to take care of my businesses.
When my pen lifted the paper from the pages and pages in my notebook, the thickness of uncertainty had also lifted, and I had made a decision. In my heart. In my soul. I wanted to be a mom. It was a Sunday morning. I didn’t call Eddy straight away to tell him about this shift in my heart. I wanted to sleep on it, to be sure.
A couple of hours later, my mother called me to tell me my grandfather was dying. He would pass away later that evening. The next day, I would tell my mother I was pregnant. And our ensuing conversation would contain the other half of the answer I had been looking for, but I didn't know any of that at the time. In retrospect, it makes complete sense.
My parents told me the funeral was going to be around the third week of September. The third week of September was exactly when the infamous 12-week scans were going to happen, when we could confirm that the baby was going to be healthy and when we could actually start telling people we were pregnant. I had been terrified to tell my parents that I was pregnant, scared of being met with “are you sure? aren't you too old to be doing this?” or other less-than-enthusiastic replies, but when I told them why I could not come home the third week of September, they were happy for me. And my mother even told me I’d make a great mom!
We had a conversation about motherhood that was just as liberating as the pen lifting from my page the day before. After our exchanges, I felt free to be a mother, in my own way. I had been carrying around the weight of expectation, the weight of searching for her and my father's approval, the weight of never being good enough, and all this weight was creating so much fear about being a mother that I hadn’t even considered – it was not the fears i'd mined in my thoughts and in my journal, it was the fear trapped in the subconscious, in my cells. More on this in another post.
The next morning, I woke up and told Eddy that, from the bottom of my heart, I wanted to be a mother and I wanted a family with him. And that now, we had to pray that our little baby was going to be okay!
By the time I told him this, however, our baby’s heartbeat had stopped, but I wouldn’t know this for a few more days.
The colossal rollercoaster we’d already been on had just taken one more center-heaving swoop and all of a sudden I was confronted with a new concept to deal with : loss. I had known about the risks, of course, and Eddy and I had even said that if we did lose the baby, maybe that was it, that we likely wouldn’t try again. He had started to also see all the 'other', harder stuff that goes along being a parent. Our cursers were closer together by that point. But knowing about the possibility of loss, and then experiencing actual loss are two very different things, especially right after I’d finally felt like I had uncovered the truth about myself as a mother.
Eddy was with me in France as we went through this loss together. It brought us closer than ever: I felt a connection to him and to his strength and to his soul that I had never felt before, and from this angle, this loss had a silver lining. From start to finish, I felt held, nourished, cared for and protected by Eddy. During and after a miscarriage, you feel very very vulnerable. Eddy was my shield and strength during it all.
And for the ten days following my miscarriage, trying to make sense of this loss, I tried to find the reasons and numbers and explanations and some hope that could comfort me. Eddy was back in Ibiza and I missed him terribly. I was alone, which I didn’t normally mind, but this time I was alone, rattled, and I was grieving.
To try to manage this grief, I was devouring the science and statistics, reading everything I could get my hands on, memorizing the numbers: "at 41 years old, you have about a 50/50 chance of having a miscarriage due to chromosomal abnormality, after a miscarriage you have a higher chance of conceiving and going on to a successful pregnancy in the first three months following the loss, after 42 IVF has a 10% success rate etc etc etc etc", I was drowning myself (and Eddy) in statistics, comparing prenatal vitamins online with a sherlock holmes-esque fervour, I was taking appointments with IVF centers in Mallorca, I was trying to control the uncontrollable.
Was it because I blamed myself? The first thing the doctor told me, eyes in eyes, after we did the ultrasound that could no longer detect cardiac activity was: “This is not your fault”. He really made a point of saying that squarely, directly. If you had explained to me the concept of “a miscarriage not being the mother’s fault” at the same time as the "concept" of miscarriage, then I would have understood it from a very practical angle. But when I just saw a lifeless bean on a screen, my heart broke. Of course if was my fault! I had energetically neglected my baby during a full two-week period of questioning whether or not I still wanted to be a mother, my body had completely failed at creating a safe environment for this developing baby, my egg had been bad, I mean, how could this not be my fault?
I understood why the doctor looked at me in the eyes and made a point to tell me it wasn't my fault. He must have looked at so many women and seen the same anguish and despair in their eyes, the self-blame welling up and spilling down their cheeks. So, part of the feverish dive into the numbers was to atone for the loss, to explain it all away… and there was also the element of, could I get this under control again? Could I rig it so that I come out the vanquisher? Could I avoid a heartbreak if I can somehow line it all up right? Can I make a plan, and execute it to ensure success?
Luckily my ever-present hero Eddy always talks me back from the extremes, my yogi, my life force. I put down the calendar, the temperature charts, the ovulation tests. I'm 11 days out from the miscarriage and I’m coming back to equilibrium, slowly (I think?). And when I say "we are going to try again" I’m trying to say it without a trace of panic, without a pain in my chest, without a plan B, C, D, Z up my sleeve.
I have read, and I think it is safe to assume, that motherhood changes you. I have also read (and I love this): you become a mother the moment you find out you are pregnant. I felt, briefly, what it was to be a mother, with all its wondrous heft.
I am not the same person as I was a year ago when that seed was planted, when that question started forming and needed to be answered. Throught this all-consuming journey that has taken a lot of work, space in my heart and mind, and time to sift through, I found great comfort in reading the stories and reflections of other women who went through this process as well, to know that I am not alone in weighing it out with the reverence these themes deserve.
I am so very grateful to every podcast, story, book, article, conversation and serendipitous event that has helped me in this quest to understand myself and the mystery of life.
I am going to dedicate some time to identifying and organizing the resources, questions, and themes that came up for me that helped me find clarity, and share them here. It was such a pivotal experience for me, one that I am still in the middle of, one I am sure will make me an even better mother and partner, and I know I am not alone in this.
Much love,
Julia