Magical Thinking in the Mommysphere

I’m saying the affirmations. Why aren’t I Buddha yet?

As I write this, I’m one day away from 28 weeks and officially in the 3rd trimester—and at the moment I’m anxious. Baby is being quiet, she’s probably just sleeping, but after a couple of days of boisterous kicking and punching—her sudden silence is always unsettling.

This isn’t unusual. Throughout the entire pregnancy, I’ve wrestled with pregxiety that has shape-shifted with every trimester; morphed with every milestone; a goalpost constantly moving. After my first appointment with my OB-GYN at around 5 weeks I boldly proclaimed, “I’ll feel better once I know it’s viable.”

He looked at me and laughed. “You don’t think you’re going to be worried after that? It’s normal. Don’t beat yourself up for being nervous.” If only I’d listened.

In the very early days, when I was five weeks, I’d panic every time I had to go to the bathroom.

Am I going to be terrified of peeing for nine months? I worried.

But there were signs of life—morning sickness, exhaustion I’d never known before, persistent nausea, food aversions, breast sensitivity, extreme moodiness—that gave me some sense of her presence. Eventually, I stopped worrying that I might poop the baby out and got comfortable with the nausea as a sign that everything was progressing.

Week 13 hit and it all abruptly stopped. Other than feeling a little chubby, my energy came back, the nausea went away, I could work out again and there were days when I would forget I was even pregnant. Gone were the unpleasant but welcome reminders that there was a baby cooking. My pants didn’t fit and I just had to trust that everything was coming along fine. In fact, the only reminders were the constant tests. Being a geriatric mommy means endless tests in the first 20 weeks. Genetic tests. Non-invasive prenatal tests. Full 3D anatomical scans. Every test induced fear. And after every “negative” reading and normal scan—a sense of relief.

My relief was always short lived. These weeks were hard on me mentally—intellectually I understood the risk of miscarriage drastically went down after the first trimester, but emotionally I refused to let myself get excited or attached. In trying to guard my heart, I knew that I wasn’t allowing myself to connect to this growing being inside me and I’d feel guilty, like I was already failing as a mother. The fear would keep me up at night. While my husband and dog snored peacefully, I’d stare into the darkness, crying.

It was in that solitary darkness, trying to escape my own catastrophic thinking, when I turned to guided meditations for pregnancy on YouTube and podcasts like Meditation Mama and scrolling Instagram for inspiration.

There is a strong current of Woo in many of the things in the mommysphere. There are meditations and mantras and affirmations. Just a quick scroll on Instagram of the hashtag #pregnancyaffirmations will bring up all sorts of tricks to “train your mind to think differently and subconsciously remove those negative emotions.” I’m particularly susceptible to this kind of messaging.

I was a stoner hippie most of my life. I became a yoga instructor in my twenties where I was fully indoctrinated with quantum quackery. The mandatory film viewing during our teacher training was What the Bleep do We Know? Wikipedia describes it as “a 2004 American pseudo-scientific film that posits a spiritual connection between quantum physics and consciousness.” I loved that fucking movie. The “Woo” was a big part of my spiritual framework, if not the entirety of it throughout most of my 20s and early 30s.

When I worked on weed farms it was all about Mother Gaia and diva cups and positive thinking and crystals and law of attraction and placenta art. Home births were the only way to go—Gaia forbid you gave birth in a hospital and contributed to Big Birth. I learned of doulas and water births and the 2008 documentary, The Business of Being Born.

It was my hope that the Woo would kick in like some automatic response to being the bearer of new life. That I would be like so many of the examples I saw of this on Instagram. The mommy influencers doing yoga with their little bellies in lotus position on top of some mountain they just hiked that day.

One night, as I was repeating some fucking affirmations about how my body was a temple made to grow a baby and “I was chosen to be the mother of this child and I’m enough for her,” I just started sobbing. Nothing I was saying resonated with me. I didn’t believe it—or I couldn’t accept it. And again I beat myself up for failing to banish the bad thoughts.

I’m saying the affirmations. Why aren’t I Buddha yet?

The Woo failed me in pregnancy because New Age language puts so much pressure and responsibility on the mother-to-be for things she really has no control over. Thinking positively won’t stop a miscarriage in those early months. And it’s not because you didn’t say enough positive affirmations that you have a stillborn or your birth doesn’t go as planned.

The superstitions. The positive affirmations. It’s two sides of the same coin—which is very much me trying to exert control over a situation I have absolutely no control over. It’s all out of my hands, even if it’s in my body. And herein is the mind fuck that is pregnancy. (One of the many.)

Realistically, me worrying or not worrying isn’t going to affect the outcome very much. There are about five things I can do: take my vitamins, drink lots of water, sleep, eat well, and exercise. There are a couple of things I shouldn’t do. Drugs. Smoke. Overexert myself.

Everything else…is in Gaia’s hands.