Embracing Change, Even In The Midst of Challenges!

Congratulations you are pregnant”, were the words my doctor said to me after patiently awaiting confirmation of what I already knew. I’ll never forget those two bold lines plastered across the screen of the drug store pregnancy test I had taken the night before because it left me in total disbelief.

I thought I’d never hear those words because, in mind, I wasn’t able to have children. I had declared myself physically and mentally unable to have a baby, so receiving confirmation that this was happening, made me have mixed feelings. I quickly realized I was embarking on a new chapter that evoked a lot of feelings I didn’t know how to handle.

I was 31 years old and for the first time in my life, I was going through life events I thought I’d never experience, especially not at the same time. Everything in my life was happening so fast and so unexpectedly that it took away my joys of pregnancy most women experienceduring this time in their lives.

I thought I’d be excited to learn that I could indeed have children, especially after being in a 16-yr. relationship where I never ended up getting pregnant, but with everything going on around me, this moment seemed to be overshadowed by hurt and uncertainty.

I not only found out that I was pregnant by a man I barely knew, but I was also dealing with a bad breakup from a man who I had known most of my life and thought I’d be experiencing this moment with.

I have to say that both experiences forced me to step into a new chapter of life, that for me, was scary as hell because of the fear of the unknown and the changes that ensued. I was no longer in a relationship with the man I thought I could never live without, I was trying to find myself and now I was no longer able to focus on me because my focus was now on becoming the best mother I could be even amid my brokenness.

The resistance I was having with embracing this new chapter was due to the difficult time I was having with adjusting to the challenges I was facing as a new mom-to-be. I was experiencing changes with my body, changes with how I normally did things and changes with how I functioned overall. I was already losing weight due to stress, but now I was battling horrible morning sickness to the point that I couldn’t eat and all the clothes I had once fitted perfectly, were falling off my body. I didn’t like the way I looked or the way I felt and couldn’t understand how women could go through this chapter in life and still be happy because I wasn’t. I found myself crying every day and it even got to a point where I was praying for a miscarriage because I couldn’t bring myself to get an abortion, but I was struggling with embracing this new chapter in my life.

I later learned that what I was experiencing was resistance to change during what was supposed to be one of the most amazing and life-changing chapters of my life. I should have been joyful that I was able to bring another life into this world because so many women wished they were able to do so, yet they can’t. Although, I did experience challenges with embracing motherhood, I did learn the importance of embracing new chapters in life, even amid adversity.