How to cope with the stress of motherhood

can't stop, won't stop talking about the power of journaling

One of my closest friends is pregnant with her first baby. It’s a girl. She’s about halfway there, and she said to me, “There’s so much that you told me about when you were pregnant that I nodded along to, but I had no idea what you were actually going through.”

And honestly, there’s no way she could have known.

I knew that as I was pregnant and sharing my experience with her, there was no way that she could comprehend the complexity and depth of emotion if they found a spot on an ultrasound that could mean something horrible or could mean absolutely nothing.

It’s not her fault. The same thing happened when I walked with other friends through pregnancy years before I experienced it myself.

We can’t know what we don’t know. Empathy only goes so far to match lived experience.

For me, I had never heard the term “mental load” before becoming a mom. Not only had I never heard the term, but I certainly had never felt the weight of it pulsing through my veins and crushing my body like a weighted blanket. All of the invisible tasks and worries that fill our brains, cluttering our minds and spilling into our entire state of being.

My therapist suggested I make a pie chart with all of the stressors that make up that weighted blanket. What are the sources of the weight? How would I categorize the percentages of those stressors?

Journaling is an incredible tool for me to unlock what I’m really feeling. When I start to write, I can see words hitting the page to reveal what’s actually weighing me down. Once I’ve put words to my hidden feelings, I can start to process what I need to feel supported and then I can take the steps to ask for help.

Throughout my pregnancy, I wrote letters to my son in a special journal. I imagine giving him this journal some day, maybe, but really the act of writing it was for me. These letters started in a pink journal because I was convinced we were having a girl. So was my husband. For whatever reason, we thought we would be girl parents and we only had a girl’s name picked out.

In the beginning, I wrote letters every day to my unborn child. I told him all about his family, introduced him to his dad and our story of meeting each other. I told him stories about his grandparents and his aunt and uncle. I told him the story of buying our house and the chaotic state of remodeling it to build him a nursery.

Whenever I had an appointment for an ultrasound or extra monitoring in my high-risk pregnancy, I told him all about my fears, as if he couldn’t already feel the stress in my body. The worries about the unknowns that I carried through my whole pregnancy as I rubbed my belly and sang, “You are my sunshine, my only sunshine.” One evening, I drove home alone after watching my husband play bass in his band at a private party on a farm, and as I drove gripping the steering wheel over my round belly in a thunderstorm with sideways rain and lightening strikes painting the sky, I yelled the words to our song the entire terrifying ride home and could barely hear my own voice over the downpour pelting my windshield. “You are my sunshine, my only sunshine. You make me happy, when skies are gray. You’ll never know, dear, how much I love you. Please don’t take my sweet sunshine away…”

That song, those words, carried me through my entire stormy pregnancy, and I told him all about it in the letters I wrote to him every day.

I can still see the words on the page of the journal when I wrote, “I think we’re losing you.”

I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it a million more times: Journaling has saved my life.

Journaling gave me a safe space to process entering motherhood, all of my fears that my body wouldn’t make it through, that I would never get a chance to meet my son.

Journaling through pregnancy made it all feel real. I had spent 32 years unsure if I would ever become a mom because of autoimmune conditions that robbed me of my health. And then I saw “PREGNANT” on the test one morning at 4 a.m., kneeling on my cold bathroom tile, and on the 8 more tests I took the next several days in complete disbelief.

Believe it or not, he was coming. I would be a mom. I could write letters to him about his life to help myself believe that he was real, not a figment of my imagination.

Writing in a journal helps us see words form on the page that we’ve buried deep inside of us. Writing gives us a private space to wrestle with fears and doubts and unknowns. Writing has put words to my story that I never knew were even there, floating in my brain, just waiting to rise above the noise.

Free Journaling Workshop

Next week, I’m hosting a FREE workshop all about (you guessed it!)… JOURNALING. In this free workshop, I’m sharing all of my best tricks and secrets to writing in a journal to process your needs, show up as your best self, and access life-changing self-discovery.

Find out all the details here and save your seat! I hope you’ll join me, and please spread the word. This is the perfect workshop for overloaded moms who are interested in tapping into the power of writing through the chaos of motherhood.