Embracing the Family Gram

Lucy McMillan - 31 May 18

I joined Instagram back in 2011. It was just a platform to post a few pictures of my then new son Harry and make them look a little bit arty-farty. That was it. I was a keen Facebook user, updating my statuses every minute of every day (I was on mat leave from my nursing course) and generally letting the world know every time I’d farted….

As my role as a new mum developed, so too did my statuses, which were honest accounts of what I was experiencing on a day to day basis; recovering from an awful birth experience which involved an emergency C-section; struggling to breast feed with mastitis, trying to survive on no sleep (he didn’t sleep though the night until he was 4.5. No reason, he just didn’t need much sleep.), his milestones, weaning, sleeping, eating and basically all of the crap that you really have no clue about.

I stupidly put them out there in the hope that I would receive some support and kind words of advice or ways to try and get through it. Then came the judgements. The unhelpful comments and put downs from so-called ‘friends’. Comments about the fact that I should only be exclusively breast feeding (one ‘friend’ made such awful comments that made me feel like I was throwing poison down my baby’s neck by feeding him formula). By the age of a year he wasn’t crawling and by the age of 18 months wasn’t walking. Of course, he was fine and started crawling eventually and by 20 months took his first steps which immediately broke into a sprint. He was a sturdy little man. He was just lazy and didn’t really give a shit about walking.

The offensive comments came in (along the lines of what’s wrong with him?). These judgements made me feel like complete shit. I was a failure. I’d failed my son by not being able to breast -feed, and not being able to settle him into a routine at night so that he would sleep through it. I felt useless and the most unnatural mother figure in the world. I had basically carried him for 9 months but didn’t give birth to him in the conventional sense and couldn’t sustain him with my (lack of) milk. Still, I continued to use Facebook, culling as I went along.

Facebook went quiet for a while once I was back at University and on full time placements as student nurse. Studies and exams took over and things started to settle down a bit social -media wise. Harry was nearly 2 and I was working all sorts of day and night shifts, passing my husband who was working opposite shifts to me and trying to juggle my studies / placement hours / small child and cope on no sleep. Things weren’t great but I felt that my maternity leave ‘bubble’ had popped and things were slowly moving forward. I was entering a new stage of motherhood and once I’d qualified as a nurse, I was a proper working mum. I’d started to develop a bit of confidence in my abilities as a parent and things were getting a little easier…even if they were still on no sleep! It was at this point that we wanted to start trying for number 2. We’d conceived Harry so quickly that we were quietly confident that id be knocked up with baba no.2 within a few months, so let’s just enjoy the ride…

A year passed. No baby. Another 6 months…. still no baby. Things started to get tough. We went to the GP and hubby was asked to give a sample. We got the results. Not good. I had various tests to check I was ovulating and that my bits were all ok. I wasn’t ovulating much. Not good. This combined gave us a very small chance of naturally conceiving another baby. We kept on trying, with each month passing becoming more and more painful.

Facebook was a splattering of scan pictures as, by this time most of the mum’s I knew with kids the same age as Harry had since had second and even a third child. This is the influence of social media. It has the power to lift you into the heavens and make you laugh, and then drop you down into a deep black hole of overwhelming sadness making you feel like a complete failure. We’d been trying for a baby for nearly 4 years and nothing was happening. We bit the bullet and signed up for ICSI treatment (for those of you who don’t know, it’s a more expensive (approx. £6,500) IVF treatment where the sperm is taken and all the crap sperm taken out – which was what we needed as my hubby’s wasn’t good enough). It was at this point I deactivated my Facebook account. What we were going to be going through was not going to be at all easy and with my anxiety being sky-high, Facebook was the last thing I needed.

It was April 2016 and we were booked in to have our ICSI treatment in August. We’d already paid out over £1000 in consultation fees, and blood tests. We found the money from somewhere (with the help of our amazing parents) and with a little extra headed off to New York for my hubby’s 40^th for a much needed mini-break. I felt a bit ropey after a long day of walking, and it got worse as the evening went on. I found a 7/11and bought a pregnancy test for $27 (almost laughing) on the off-chance (I’d totally disregarded my cycles and with all the stress my periods were all over the place anyway). I was well and truly knocked-up. Bun was in oven. I nearly fainted. James was born 9 months later. Bloody miracles really do happen!

So, I turned to the Gram. Things then changed. I made a massive discovery: A support network. A sister-hood. A brother-hood. A group of like-minded people. Mums and dads, mums and mums, dads and dads, step parents, single parents, parents of one child, multiple children, parents who have experienced loss…the list goes on.

Since I joined the gram, things have changed massively for me. My mindset is completely different and so to my expectations of myself as a mother, co-parent and wife! I’ve found a group of people who make me feel supported, respected, relaxed and quite loved if I’m totally honest. I’ve become much more relaxed in my approach to parenting, my fashion tastes are changing, I’m gaining confidence in my individuality and who I am as a person and not just a mother. I’m also very passionate about supporting small businesses (hence purchasing some amazing merch from the lovely @fmlystore from the very talented and lovely Molly @selfishmother and her fantastic team!!!), flexible working (the wonderful Anna Whitehouse @mother_pukka working her butt off with her #flexappeal campaign), and generally supportive and part of this amazing mama community.

So, rambling over. As you can tell, I’m not a writer in any way shape or form, but what I want to say is this; there is light in times of darkness, miracles actually do happen, and social media can be a friend, not foe. You just need to find the right people and they will light the way.

x

Lucy McMillan

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