Why I’m glad I didn’t wait until I was ‘ready’ to have a baby

Certain life decisions can be rational and planned out, like the ‘effortlessly’ chic outfits of my adored Scandi momfluencers. Others cannot.

When I became pregnant, I used to talk about it feeling as though I’d jumped out of a plane with no idea when or where I was going to land. I would go for long walks, sensing the life growing in my womb, which first showed up as a weird sloshing sensation in my belly while my boyfriend and I were finishing a pho on a street in Copenhagen. “I actually felt it,” I told him. 

I would spend hours trying to imagine how my life might change and would be soothed by the photos on my feed of Scandi mums like Christine Sofie with their babies tucked into their beige-and-white-chequered Artipoppe carriers. Their life seemingly unchanged, only now accompanied by beautiful new accessories, both the baby and their carrier.

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I loved leaning on the fairytale of Hanna Steffanson’s pregnancy outfits and babies that just came along for the ride at the local coffee shop. I needed the simplicity of this narrative to soothe what otherwise felt like chaos in my brain, trying to understand what was about to happen.

When I became pregnant, my boyfriend and I would tell people we had been casually “letting it happen” and we were surprised I fell pregnant as quickly as I did. My first dip into trying to build the appearance of the casual, ‘cool mum’.

 

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In reality, we’d spent a whole year trying to decide when might be the right time to start ‘trying’ (my Google history will show 1am searches for the perfect baby temperament by star sign). We were both brought up with sex education classes scaring us into thinking that getting pregnant happens at the first whiff of unprotected sex. We both were under the illusion that deciding when to have a baby was fully up to us. 

My own mum always told the story about how delightfully unexpected and unplanned her pregnancies were and perhaps I was trying to live up to the same lightness and spontaneity.

It feels taboo to really want something and admitting to wanting something so big and life changing, and cliche as wanting a baby, felt vulnerable. Even though I would have benefitted from talking about my deep fears of how my life might change with those around me, my boyfriend and I kept this secret between us, as we tried to grow our preparedness for becoming parents. 

But even through all the assessing, I never felt ready to have a baby. As much as I tried to reach the point of readiness, it never hit. And after months of pushing it out, I realised I was never going to feel ready and I was never meant to.

A friend recently told me she’s doing field research to understand whether having kids is worth it, before she embarks on the journey herself. I remember that feeling of trying to decode the parents I would come across.

I’d catch myself staring at the mum at the table next to me, trying to get her coffee down, fighting to get two seconds to send a text while her two toddlers were writhing around her, knocking over their fluffies. It was the BTS to the Instagram posts I had saved. I’d be trying to see beneath the layers of tiredness and frustration; ‘Is this what she had envisioned for herself?’ I thought. Is this what I want?

At work, I’d hear the echo around me of how hard it is to be a working mum and the stories of women who struggle to find their place after maternity leave. I can understand why fertility rates are dropping and why the average age of women having children is rising.

I can relate to women feeling like they have to choose between having kids or having their careers, or the feeling of wanting to tick every other pursuit off the list before giving themselves to motherhood. 

 

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As ready as my boyfriend was, it always felt like I had more at stake. My goalpost for readiness would keep moving as I went through the list of loose ends I thought I needed to have tied up before becoming a mum: ‘If I just get that promotion first, then I’ll also work on getting my anxiety sorted a bit and what about that trip to India?’

I wish I could tell my past self to trust that while some parts of my life will be compromised, it makes space for bigger and better things I never imagined possible. Things like an assertiveness that would make me rejig my life for the better, a resilience that runs deeper, an inspiration beyond what I ever had before, and continual bursts of the broadest gratitude I’ve ever experienced. The problem is you don’t know what these things are until you’re in there, doing it.

Certain life decisions can be rational and planned out, like the ‘effortlessly’ chic outfits of my adored Scandi momfluencers. One of the things that can’t be decoded and assessed to a point of readiness is embarking on potentially one of the biggest transformations of your life. While I could never live up to the spontaneity I tried to portray about our conception journey, I’m still proud of taking the leap even when I wasn’t fully ready.

It took a mix of putting on my blinders, taking a complete chance on it and a deeper sense of knowing it will somehow be okay. And it is okay, in fact it’s so much more than okay. Because even though, as parents, our eyes are sunken and tired, they sparkle. And if I waited until I was ready, it never would have happened.

For more on navigating motherhood, follow Sonja’s newsletter ‘Unfamiliar Phases‘ on Substack, here.