Hello! If you are reading this, you have probably just joined legions of woman across the world dating thousands of years back on the glorious road to motherhood. I think if you want to be a mother, you have already joined, since being a mother doesn't necessarily require you to give birth (although it certainly does help! Adoption is a beautiful choice, too). Regardless of how you ended up here, welcome!
In my experience, motherhood is a terrifying, overwhelming, incredibly mindful and ultimately calming decision and experience. Sometimes we aren't sure what we are doing when take those first steps from getting a positive test to setting up that first check up with your doctor (or midwife, or doula, or chiropractor - whatever path we choose). It's very important to nurture yourself while experiencing this new chapter in your life. I'd like to take time to define each of these ideas with much more detail in individual posts, but I mostly wanted to introduce myself here first.
My name is Micah Schlosser, and I'm a 28 year old pseudo-retired Hair Artist with a strong passion for music and the outdoors. My interests spread from the realm of astrophysics, to chemistry, to food and cooking, to mindfulness, to yoga, and beyond. I'm currently involved in a few different and wonderful mommy groups here in Fairfield, Iowa, and I am so lucky to live in such a tight-knit community where so many wonderful and caring individuals just reach out to everyone here in the community that may need some guidance and nurturing along the way of motherhood. For example, I just moved here from Atlanta, Georgia (and Traverse City, Michigan before that, and Phenix City, Alabama, before that, and Atlanta, Georgia before that, and well, you get the idea).
I've always thought of myself as "not the mothering type." Thanks to some very overzealous teenage and young adult years, I felt I was very selfish and had too many problems to be a mother. I had struggled with serious depression, anxiety, obsessive compulsive disorder, and a host of other "conditions." I use quotes because after many years of soul searching and meditating, and one very harrowing nervous breakdown (another post, another day) I found myself. I lost myself in a sea of insomnia and fear (of everything but mostly people) and then I found myself drowning in depression. After I came out of that experience (with the gentle nurturing of my family, friends, and now husband) I discovered I was so much more than I'd thought I could be.
When we are young we tend to define ourselves quickly and succinctly, never looking back to question why we so quickly slapped the labels on ourselves that we did. For me, this was something I'd messed around with in a meta-paradigm (or collection of ideas) called "Chaos Magick Theory." That's another post for another time (actually, 2 whole other blogs, but we'll discuss it later). Thanks to this idea, I'd already had experience of questioning my dogmas and "hardset" ideas about life, the universe, and everything else. What I did not expect was that it had not prepared me as well as I had hoped for the bonecrushing pressure of reality. What I learned from that nervous breakdown and recovery was that no matter how hard you prepare yourself for what you think life is about, there will always be a beautiful or distressing surprise waiting for you depending on your outlook at the time.
That could be the theme of my entire blog here, of my entire life. Whatever you do to prepare for anything it will never replace the experience itself. The only way to gain experience is to actually go through with the act. So as a human being, I am here to tell you I've prepared extensively for motherhood (besides being overweight much to my chagrin - I tried to be healthy while pregnant but I still gained 40 pounds, and I've only lost 10 - well, I initially lost 40 pounds and then I regained 30 in 4 short months so we'll talk about that more later too) and regardless of my knowledge I was overwhelmed at the hospital with decisions I thought I understood but could not follow through with, and I didn't exactly have the birth of my dreams. I was overwhelmed with very quick, very sudden pain, and I was also very much on my back and had some trouble getting her up and out of me - a lot of trouble. I had some serious tearing and I was pretty sore for about 8 weeks. Even after that, I was not 100 percent. To be honest, I still get the random sharp stabbing pain here and there ( at 16 weeks) so we are definitely still learning about our body!
It's not that being prepared does you no good. I've seen some other people go through what I went through with relatively little preparation (compared to the 20 or so books and countless blogs and journals I scoured trying to learn it all) and they had some very tough decisions to make, thanks to our patriarchal over medicated health care system. But they all have beautiful babies and now we get enjoy motherhood together, so I'm thankful to have the curiosity about all of these things and the motivation to share my knowledge and experience with other.
So there we have it - a short little description of myself and my experiences, and here in a little while, I will share more about myself, my pregnancy, my birthing story, and my amazing experience with my beautiful daughter thus far.
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