Testimonies: The struggles of motherhood

Testimonies: The struggles of motherhood

Today my oldest daughter is living overseas doing her overseas experience. She calls me and reminds me to do my Kegel exercises, and to go for walks to keep fit. She’s five foot nine and is a beautiful girl. My second is a law student, busy at ubiversity and working part time so she can travel. She is an equally tall and beautiful girl. My fourth and last is a pre teenager.

Life isn’t always like that. Motherhood was both frustrating and exhilarating. One would think I dramatize my struggles of motherhood. My husband was a graduate student and I worked for five years after graduation. We planned to have our first baby when he graduated and I would be a stay home mum. We were ecstatic when we conceived as planned. The baby came but my husband hadn’t graduated, so our plans were thrown out of the window. We lived on a shoe string budget.

It was a hard labor when I delivered her. It was a long twenty six hours of excruciating pain. It was fashionable then to be all natural and I wasn’t offered an epidural. It was also fashionable to breastfeed. She was a difficult baby and used to vomit a lot and wake up every two hours. Soon I had sleep deprivation. We were living away from my parents and my in laws, and our inexperience took its tow. When baby was eight months old, I had a bad breast infection where I was rushed to the hospital to be operated on. As she was fully on my breast milk, she was admitted to the hospital as well. We stayed for four days, the other patients in the surgical ward thought she was the patient.

Baby number two had severe food allergies. On the fifth day, she came out with big red patches all over her body. It took five months before the doctor suspected that she could be allergic to my breast milk and prescribed her soy milk. They did an allergy test on her and found her to be intolerant to eggs and dairy products. Even on a strict diet, she still got rashes. It was so pitiful observing her watching other kids eat ice cream, biscuits or cakes. Later she developed asthma. We had to rush to A & E a couple of times.

Baby number three was born with a syndrome of a worst case scenario. We were told he was going to die that night. He didn’t die that night, but slowly degenerated and died when he was fifty five days old. It was a most traumatic time burying your child and to explain to your five year old that baby had gone to Jesus and would not be coming back.

Our last baby was a blessing. He was an unplanned baby but we all love him. There was no drama like the other three, except in the beginning when I worried he would have the same syndrome as number three. I cried in the gyneacologist’s office.

Motherhood is also a blessing, you rejoice at each milestone your children achieve. My second and fourth children are gifted children. People admire me, but they do no know the hardships, the trials and tribulations of motherhood I had to bear.