Diana Spalding - The Motherly Guide to Becoming Mama: Redefining the Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Postpartum Journey

Table of Contents

To the generations of mothers whose strength, sacrifice, tenacity, and tenderness gave birth to a better world for women and children. We carry your lifes work within us.

Contents

Dear Mama

Pregnancy is about more than simply growing a baby. Its about becoming a mama.

These 9 months are also the season of your own metamorphosis because when a child is born, a mother is born, too. And that has been the most powerful revelation of our lives as women.

Motherhood changes you long before your baby is born. The changes begin with the decision to focus on your health, to start saving up for your first home, to accept a work promotion, or to connect more deeply with your partnerall with the goal of someday, somehow welcoming a little one into your life.

In each small moment on that journeymeeting with your medical provider, starting your prenatal vitamins, taking your first pregnancy testyou begin to transform into this new being: a mother.

Perhaps motherhood for you started with an unplanned pregnancy. Or perhaps motherhood has been a long-fought journey, full of incredible waiting, pain, or loss. Maybe your pregnancy experience is just like you anticipated. Or maybe its nothing like youd ever envisioned.

In many ways, pregnancy epitomizes the highs and lows of motherhood: the dreams and the despair, the magic and the ambiguity, the strength and the sacrifice, even the absurdity and the beauty. The discomfort of pregnancy, which can make it hard to sleep, is a bellwether of sleepless nights to come. The joy of a positive pregnancy test becomes a peek into the ecstasy of seeing your babys face for the first time. The marks that pregnancy leaves on your body are a reminder of the permanent shift in your identity.

Motherhood will also mold you in unexpected, amazing ways, but becoming a mama doesnt mean leaving the woman you are behind. It means you have an opportunity to nurture, not lose, your true sense of self. Youll discover superpowers you never knew you had. Youll endure greater challenges than youve ever known. And youll experience an indescribable love that will change your life.

We created The Motherly Guide to Becoming Mama to coach and inspire you through this season of transformation. It is the pregnancy book we wish wed had when we first became mothers. It is the one pregnancy book focused on youthe pregnancy book women deserve.

This book wont bog you down with demands or give you more to be worried about or tell you what to do. (We promise!) Because the truth is, we dont know quite how your story will unfold. Its impossible to know exactly what to expect during your pregnancy; after all, you are your own amazing woman with unique dreams, experiences, and needs. Instead, we asked Diana Spalding, a certified nurse-midwife, pediatric nurse, Motherlys Digital Education Editor, and mother of three (we know, were impressed, too!) to write this book, drawing on her deep experience walking alongside women like you to help you feel confident during this time of massive change, to remind you of your strength, to give you the courage to face difficult choices, and to help you defineand redefine along the waywhat becoming a mama means to you.

At Motherly, we want to be with you along this journey. Were so proud of the supportive, nonjudgmental community of women weve built together and are thrilled to bring their wisdom to your pregnancy. Every woman, every baby, every pregnancy is different, but mama, we know this is true: You were made for this moment.

You are powerful. You are capable. You are becoming a mama.

Youve got this.

xo,

Founders of Motherly

Welcome, and How to Use This Book

My heart is bursting for you.

Maybe you are already pregnant. Maybe this is your first baby, or maybe its your fourth. Or perhaps you are not pregnant yet but have decided that it is time to start preparing for what comes next.

Whatever the reasons that inspired you to pick up this guide, you are on the verge of something tremendous. This is the start.

You are on your journey to becoming mama. And becoming mama is everything.

It is thrilling, blissful, scary, exhausting, empowering, confusing, and awe-inspiringall in a single moment.

And it is a whole-self journey. This is not just something that happens in your uterus.

Becoming mama involves your whole body and mind, emotions, lifestyle, career, relationships, home, bank account, schedule, spirituality, worldview, and your heart. Oh, your heart. You will always be you, but you will never be the same.

And I am so deeply honored to begin this adventure with you.

My path to midwifery started when I was a little girl. I am the daughter of a midwife and have been surrounded by birth my entire life. I didnt play normal games as a child. Instead of tea parties with my dolls, I pretended to deliver their babies. The very first word I learned in Spanish was empujapush. I read baby name books and made notes in the margins.

Ive been obsessed with pregnancy and birth for a very long time.

In college, I studied anthropology. My fascination for the ways culture, health, and medicine influence each other led me to Central America, where I conducted public health research focusing on parasitic diseases.

Inspired to become a nurse, I moved to New York City for nursing school, and as it turned out, to fall in love with the guy who would become my husband and father of my kids. I spent 5 years working as a registered nurse on a pediatric hematology-oncology unit in the Bronx, learning just how strong children and their parents can truly be.

I then started midwifery school, which for me was a masters degree in nursing (more on the different paths to midwifery on ). I was trained and guided by wonderful midwives and was then hired to work with them.

Midwifery is not my job; it is my life. Being with women as they grow and give birth to their children is more of an honor than I can describe. I get invested in womens stories. I still cry at every birth. Bearing witness as a woman crosses the threshold into motherhood fills me with joy, reverence, and hope that everything really will be okay.

Through it all, my most profound teachers have always been the women I have had the honor of working with. I learned very quickly that it was never going to be my job to tell women what they needed. My role is to provide information, evidence, and compassion and then to hold space for a woman as she finds her way to motherhood.

My way to motherhood started on a warm spring dayafter 32 hours of laborwhen we welcomed our daughter into our lives. Three years later, our middle guy joined us, and then in an unexpected plot twist, our youngest, another boy, came into the world a short 15 months later. And since we are all about birth stories here, I will share that they were all born vaginally in hospitals with midwives and with epidurals.

I am the founder of a motherhood wellness center called Gathered Birth in the suburbs of Philadelphia.

And now, in what still seems like a surreal dream, I get to work with Motherly and give birth to this book.

The Motherly Guide to Becoming Mama was inspired by what we saw as an overwhelming need to provide evidence-based, nonjudgmental nurturing to women when they need it most.