la petite maman.

So, I know I seemed like a diva, right? Last night, I said I was mad because we had to pay for a portion of our baby shower (~450$). It’s honestly not really about the money.

What it’s really about:

• Family drama
• Lack of control
• Hormones
• Feeling/looking enormous
• Stifling anxiety over being a good mom
• People not doing what they said they would
• Having to be part of planning for my shower
• Fear of being in debt again
• Shame/guilt about previous debt (even if it was over 5 years ago)
• Not being a “model” pregnant woman
• Seeming ungrateful
• People being really insensitive
• Did I mention anxiety?
• Lack of sleep/severe insomnia every night
• My birth plan totally going out the window during labour
• Regret

As I told my husband, after crying like a ridiculous baby, “just thinking about being a mom drives me to tears lately, and I feel so overwhelmed. I want to do all I can to raise a son who never, ever has to endure what I did- financially (whether real or imagined poverty), emotionally, and physically.”

What I mean by that last sentence is this: When I was growing up, my mom was obsessed with coupons and rebates (she could have been on “Extreme Couponing”- no joke). We bought EVERYTHING on clearance sale, and our clothes came from the Goodwill (which my sister and I had to share- even underwear, up until I was maybe 13 or 14, because my body shape changed). She had us dumpster-dive for UPCs for her rebates, which she created fake receipts for on a secondhand cash register so she could get money back on items she had never even bought. In fact, during a couple of these dumpster-diving events, we were offered money or a warm meal (the latter incident was the day before Thanksgiving). My mom often told us stories about how she grew up dirt poor, would eat dog food as a child, and how she only made friends with people who ate “good food” (for example, she’d go over to one of her friends’ houses because she was the butcher’s daughter and they always had meat- something they “never” had in my mom’s household growing up). The thing is, though… my family was never poor. We lived in a HUGE house, with three cars, and my parents even bought a beach house on the coast when I was around 9 or 10 years old. My dad is a mechanical engineer, and my mom has not worked since I was 3 years old. My mom did all that penny-pinching because she was afraid that she might just be poor again. As she has always said, “I felt like the wolf was always at the door.” Basically, what that means is that she always felt like our family would suddenly be poor, and she’d have to go back to what she dealt with as a child.

Anyway, I think you get the point. I never want my son to feel like he is a financial burden. I want him growing up with whatever he needs (no, I don’t want to necessarily spoil him!), and I think the pregnancy hormones are blowing things out of proportion. We used to be so in debt due to me not being able to work (plus the constant buying of food- I would TRY to eat and keep food down, but I’d always end up purging it), and I don’t want to be a financial burden again (like I always felt I was to my parents) to my husband now that I am going to be a stay-at-home mom.

(As for the emotional and physical part of that sentence, I don’t want to be an abusive mother. I had to endure that… but yeah, I am not going to go into detail about that, because I’ve forgiven the abusers. But I am still frightened by “child abuse statistics,” even if everyone I know says I will be a great mom. I’m also still scared that I will neglect my child due to my eating disorder past… but I won’t go into that either.)

That’s a lot of writing, but I needed to let it out. Make no mistake, though- I also just bawled my eyes out to the hostess of the baby shower, my husband (through text, since he’s at work), and all alone here at home. Good grief, will the pregnancy hormones ever get better?