Three Years in the Making
My imperfectly perfect journey to motherhood, and what comes after.
Welcome to Reset Learning Studio, a newsletter to help you reach your greatest potential.
Timelines. Synthetic hormones. Injections. Hundreds of injections. Bad news. Bills in the mail with too many zeros. For two years, my life was consumed with fertility treatments.
My coping mechanism when things get tough has always been to critique myself. Every time we tried an embryo transfer and it failed, I told myself that I must not be doing enough. Over time, this meant an unrelenting increase in doing more and more and more. I gave up sugar, caffeine, and dairy. I took all the supplements and did all the exercises. I went to acupuncture and Maya massage. For the 20 weeks before I got pregnant, I tracked my habits obsessively in my journal, from sleep to mindfulness to steps walked to diet. My life revolved around doing everything right so we could have a baby.
Then, I got pregnant, and I kept up the same punishing cycle of pushing myself. Going through IVF, I’d developed a lack of trust in my own body, and I didn’t believe that it would naturally do what it needed to maintain this much-wanted, long-desired pregnancy.
With fertility treatments plus pregnancy, that’s three years of me feeling like I had to fix myself, do more, and strive for perfection to reach my goal. Three long years of feeling like I wasn’t good enough or doing enough. Three years of thinking that the only way to get what I wanted was to fully change who I was.
One of the best things about baby Taia arriving is that I’ve finally been able to let all of this go. I am lucky. She’s an easy baby and we’ve been able to find our rhythm together seamlessly. My milk came in on the second day and breastfeeding has been a joy. She doesn’t cry much, and I innately understand her language of squeals, mews, and squirms. Taking care of her feels intuitive and instinctual in a way that IVF and even pregnancy never did.
Taia makes me feel like I was always supposed to be her mom, and that I’m doing a great job, just as I am. There’s no striving, pushing, or second-guessing myself that I need to do right now. I can just be here. Present with her. This baby has helped me feel whole again.
The other morning, she was dozing on my chest in bed. Dev was still sleeping, so it was just the baby and I awake, and I could feel how in sync we were. I started to cry big wet tears that I’d been storing up for three years. I took out my phone and this is what I wrote:
We are so connected, she and I. As I’m falling asleep my leg startles as it’s always done, and within a second, her whole body startles, too. She feels what I do.
She tells me how much food she needs, and I make it from my own body, with no thinking or effort required. After she finishes a big nursing session, I am thirsty, too, so I follow her lead and also take a big drink. We are the same.
I had a bad dream while she was sleeping on me and my fast heart rate and breathing disturbed her so she started thrashing, and it woke me up out of my nightmare. She saved me.
Pretty soon she’ll grow up and we will be two completely different people. She’ll get mad at me because I don’t understand her. I’ll be upset that she doesn’t see how I’m trying to help her. But for now, in these short weeks and months, we are more one than we are separate. My daughter. My Taia. Who needs me so much, and who I need, too. - January 24, 2024
If you were to observe my daily activities, on the surface, my life looks quite boring. It’s a monotonous cycle of diaper changes, feedings, and swaddles on repeat. But look a little closer, and you’ll see that what I’m really doing is healing and moving on from the “not enough” feeling of the past three years. Today, Iin this early motherhood journey, I feel okay exactly as I am.
I’m so grateful that Taia has helped me to move onto a new mindset and this next phase. I look down at her and I know that it doesn’t get any better than this.
As my life has changed dramatically in the past few weeks, I wanted to mark this transition with a refresh of the Reset you know today. Expect some changes to the branding and name of the podcast and this newsletter in the next few weeks!
Finally, here are some of the resources I loved during pregnancy.
Over the 9 months of gestating Taia, I read and listened to over a hundred positive homebirth stories. This, plus hypnosis, helped me rewire what society and culture had told me about labor and birth and replace it with a new, empowering, intuitive frame of reference.
Book- Like a Mother: A Feminist Journey through the Science and Culture of Pregnancy ** Thank you to my friend Char for introducing me to this book <3
I can’t wait to share some changes to the podcast and this Substack with you in the coming weeks!
Love,
Liz
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Thanks for sharing Liz <3
This is so wonderful to read. I know it's an older post, but it spoke to me closely. I'm coming out of a cycle of "not enough" - though a different phase of my life, the story sounds so familiar. Going through relocations, job loss, business pivot, and identity shift as I moved to a new place, I lost so much of trust in my own abilities. What if things happen naturally when the time comes? It does not mean we need to do nothing, rather doing the best we can and let the rest work out. Thanks so much for sharing.