A very mellow maternity leave

Molly Whitehead-Jones - 16 Jul 15

As every mum will know, choosing when to start your maternity leave is tricky given that you have to make a decision about it way before you have any idea of how well you’ll actually cope with the final few weeks of your pregnancy.

I plumped to stop working when I was 36 and a bit weeks. As it turned out, by this time I was counting down the days: my workload itself was still manageable, but trekking back and forth to the office via public transport had become incredibly draining and my daily tram rage had reached new heights of irrationality.

When I got home from that very final-feeling day at work, I burst into tears with a mixture of relief and shock: thank god that was over – but what the hell was I supposed to do now!?

Everyone tells you that you should enjoy your maternity leave while you can; relax, rest, do all the things you won’t be able to once the baby arrives. But given how impatient I am, I just didn’t see how I’d be able to manage that for more than a few days before I started getting frustrated/going out of my mind with worry about what lay ahead.

Despite my reservations, the first three and a half weeks of my mat leave were just lovely in the end: leisurely lunches with the ladies from my NCT class, pottering to the shops, reading up on lots of baby-related info, stocking my freezer with home cooked meals and slowly working my way through the many little preparatory tasks needed for the baby, all punctuated by an occasional, blissful afternoon nap. It frankly delighted me that I found it so easy to happily fill my time for so long. OK, there were brief fits of stress and boredom, but far less than I would have predicted.

I’ll be honest, the final phase is proving a bit harder going. A new feeling of unease kicked in about two days before my due date: my ‘to do’ list is all done, I’ve reached the stage where my body’s stretched to its limits, and I find I don’t like to stray too far from home (and quite frankly, can’t due to my absolute massiveness).

I’ve obediently tried to get things going with a sweep, several long walks, a 600g bag of fresh pineapple and two slightly-hotter-than-I’d-usually-be-comfortable with curries. I had one isolated day of total fed-upness earlier this week. But I’m still getting an OK amount of sleep, and at eight days over my due date, I bizarrely still don’t feel particularly desperate for the baby to get out of me.

Even now – with a nursery full of baby bits and parenting books piled high on the coffee table – I find it almost too easy to switch off from the fact that I’m waiting around to GIVE BIRTH. While there’s an overwhelming feeling that I’m waiting for something big (and I’ve dedicated endless hours getting ready for it), the reality of what’s about to happen still feels weirdly abstract.

Although flashes of concern naturally enter my mind every now and again, I refreshingly don’t find myself worrying about the pain of pushing the baby out of me, whether I’ve bought enough babygrows or obsessively reading the car seat instructions. I feel simultaneously ready and in no way ready for what’s next and it seems like the two opposing feelings are somehow balancing themselves out in my brain. In short, I am surprising myself – and everyone who knows me – by proving to be an uncharacteristically mellow mummy-to-be.

But with my induction date looming, I now finally have something tangible to work towards, and a few of the many ‘maybes’ concerning our baby’s arrival are finally becoming ‘definitelys’. With this in mind, I’m starting to wonder if I’ll be able to carry this sense of contentment with my total powerlessness into my labour experience, and to early motherhood too… I certainly hope so, but I’m totally OK with the fact that I’ll just have to wait and see; proof that I really have got the best grasp of my ‘chill’ that I’ve EVER had.

And to all the other usually highly-strung ladies out there who are approaching their mat leave with trepidation: you can bet that the next 18 years of your life are going to be full of the unexpected, so be prepared to surprise yourself with how capably you ultimately end up coping with what must surely be one of the hardest waiting games there is.

Molly Whitehead-Jones

Molly Whitehead-Jones is a first-time mum living in Manchester and founder of Mamas Collective, a mums group that offers meetups, workshops & events for savvy, super-cool mamas who love their kids but won’t let motherhood hold them back.

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