Motherhood, my experience. 26-05-2021
By: Tahirí M. Calderón Cabral
The intention is not to make this exercise a technical-scientific article from my training as a therapist, but to share it from the experience of a mother, unique in every woma.
The task is arduous, therefore, you have to rush into one of the few free moments to organize some ideas around motherhood and mental health. One thing is certain, motherhood, and as we women live through the process in these times, it is a real.
Personally it has been, as I have discovered the ambiguity faced from the condition of a young woman who lives from the "freedoms" conquered in recent decades, namely education, work, freedom of thought and belief, in addition to the non-traditional family configuration. It is a situation that requires the same level of activity in all our roles, as we are mothers present and linked to our young, in balance, without even mentioning the displacement of herself and of individuality, relegated to a grey are.
Certainly, a situation with the power to fragment our mental healt.
When my daughter was born, I sprouted as a mother, and I met the girl I was, my childhood, my attachments, my story. I reconnected with wounds of the past that forged this strong, determined, anticipated adult personality, qualities that have allowed me to make a space in society, but that in motherhood have become my Achilles heel. In that sense, to be a mother, is to accept that we do not have control, it is to link with vulnerability, with the loss of freedoms, spaces, relationships and role.
The puerperium, which is much longer than the 14 weeks they give us, is a period where identity is fragmented, merging into processes of "soul alchemy", as I prefer to call it, from where a new, more mature, differentiated identity will have to emerge, aware of itself and its youn.
With motherhood, issues of mental health arise that are not very visible, depression and postpartum anxiety are only a sample that are undiagnosed, they are entangled between the opinions and expectations of others, the fragility of the mother who perhaps does not dare to talk about her own experiences, which most likely differ from those that are considered "normal" by other mother.
Experiencing long periods of sadness, feeling the deterioration and uprooting of life, the loss of creative thinking, strength and motivation, the suicidal idea, and the anxious symptomatology that many mothers experience during the puerperium, are warning signs that must be validate.
After almost two years on this journey inside me that motherhood has taken me, I connect with the need to "mother" myself, to be a woman capable of taking care, first of herself, so then I can take care of and accompany the calf, and finally the others. It is, in short, a challenge from which I would like to invite you to talk, to recognize and to create the appropriate support networks among women. Networks that allow us to live this experience in community, in tribe, with real expectations and in favor of each one of u.
