A Familiar Feeling

An old familiar feeling has crept back of late.

It lurked back in slowly, quietly, lodging in the back of my brain and deep in my stomach. It was the feeling of something missing, like that feeling where there is a thought floating just outside of your mind that you can’t quite get a tangible grasp on. Like you’ve forgotten something really, really important.

It’s left me grumpy, and sensitive, and confused about myself and life in general.

You may have noticed.

It’s been a feeling of wanting. Of being in a kind of limbo and not feeling, well, ‘right’. And for a long time I didn’t know what the hell it meant.

I think I’ve figured it out. Actually, I know I have.

It’s hormones.

More specifically, it’s those longing, stomach-churning, completely beyond your control, weep every time someone announces they’re pregnant biological clock-ticking, baby hormones.

I want one. I want another baby.

It started with the ‘almost baby’ in January. Which knocked me for six and left me very low. And since then it’s built, rearing it’s head in the odd, deep twinge as I heard of another friend’s pregnancy, or looked at their new baby pictures, and in vivid dreams where I wake up with my arms aching, feeling like something’s missing. But I’ve been trying to ignore it.

It’s not a new experience, this. Before Kai I had two years of intense wanting. But I was too ill then to make it a realistic decision and we decided to wait until I was better and after we had got married. I’m really glad we did, but it wasn’t easy. I’d go through patches where that longing for a baby was so real and so intense I would feel like a physical pain deep down in my stomach. But I needed to be well enough so I waited and it became one of my main motivators in working to get better.

I never, ever, knew before that time how much my body’s hormones could affect me. It was completely involuntary, nothing to do with logic or reason, just a pure, guttural feeling I had absolutely no control over. My body wanted me to have a baby, and I was pretty powerless to ignore it.

And now it’s happening again.

I know that maybe those of you who have been reading this blog for a while may be rolling your eyes at this point. “Oh Josie!” (you’re probably sighing), “when are you going to figure out what it is you want? Writing? A Career? I thought you found motherhood hard enough already?”.

All of which would be valid points of course.

But part of what I’m finding so confusing right now is the future prospect of baby number 2. We’d always planned another and being in the inbetween of having Kai and a sibling I’m finding that I don’t know what to do with myself. I want to take my writing somewhere but I find myself thinking, what’s the point in starting something seriously if in a year or two I have to stop again to concentrate on a new addition to our family.

Maybe I just need to focus my priorities. Recognise the reality of where I am right now.

Right now I am a mother. A mother who writes, yes, but a mother who writes for fun and for experimentation and, mostly, to test to see if she can do it.

So, if that’s the reality, couldn’t I be a mother of two? Wouldn’t now, in fact, be the perfect time to add to our family? In this time where my writing is just a big experiment, before I am committed to a career, or a book, or a publisher or any of the other things I dream about for my future? Right now, while I have the time and the space? Maybe a sibling would take some of the focus off Kai, ease the intensity of having all our energy poured into such an intense little guy.

Or, maybe I’m a fool. I find Kai almost impossible at times as it is. What on earth would I be thinking adding a new little personality to the mix? I’m already exhausted, feeling torn between wanting to be a mother and wanting to pursue my own personal dreams and ambitions. Isn’t another child just going to make it worse? Just make it harder?

Honestly I don’t know.

But I know what my body wants.

This is either going to be exactly what I need right now, or exactly what I don’t need.

But me and the man, who’s decision this is just as much as mine, have talked. And we’re both pretty clear about what we want to do.

We’re going to go for it.

Wish us luck.

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How did you know you were ready for a baby, or a second, or a third? Is there ever a ‘right’ time, do you think? Or do you just have to take a chance and go for it?