I got to know the toilet bowl really well during the first trimester. I had pregnancy sickness and every day was a drag as I waited and waited for the horrible feelings to pass. I would carefully manage my energy and blood sugar levels, leaving each meal not knowing whether I’d be seeing it again.
Going into pregnancy, I was pretty fit. I ran a few times a week, and cross-trained with yoga. I loved reading about strong women exercising through their pregnancies, running long distances, their Lycra tight on their bumps. This would be me, I thought. At six weeks, I felt a little nauseous, but I still managed a beautiful run in the hills, the white blossom of the hedgerows like daytime stars against a beautiful blue sky.
This was my last run until ten weeks postpartum – ten long months later. The sickness took hold, and although it ‘only’ lasted until the beginning of the second trimester, I lost a lot of confidence, and didn’t feel I could run again. I ate too much because I was so frightened of being hungry, which was when I was most nauseous. The first time I tried a gentle workout, I felt great, but at the end I had to dash to the toilet. Again. Some days the urge to throw up came out of nowhere. How could I go for a run like this? I knew the hormone relaxin made my joints vulnerable, and the idea of suddenly having to dart behind one of those pretty hedges was not something I could face.
As I approached my third trimester, my new ‘pregnancy friend’ suggested we try out pregnancy yoga. What she didn’t know was that my mental health had plummeted. Between the sickness, the lack of exercise, the weight gain, the pandemic, drama at work, and the impending terror of motherhood, I was a mess.
Yoga made such a difference in those few months. It gave me a chance to come back to my body in a way that I didn’t feel sick or tense or anxious. It gave me exercise that was gently challenging and rebuilt my confidence in my body. It gave me alternative breathing techniques for labour and birth, which I was grateful for as the counting breath from my hypnobirthing course made me feel panicky. When I finally went into labour, I was excited and confident about what lay ahead.
I wish I could write that my birth was a cool eight hours, with these yoga techniques helping to make it a ritualistic, calm experience. It started in this way, and the breathwork definitely helped a lot, but it went on too long, with some poor decisions made and interventions needed. In the end though, baby was born healthy, I was only slightly anaemic and I was left with just a little post-traumatic stress to contend with. I slept 15 hours across five days at the beginning, and had a single onehour nap in the first two and a half days.
There’s a six to eight-week gap after birth when you must allow your body to recover before you can resume gentle exercise. At three weeks postpartum, I was terrified of the change in my life. My son had colic and wouldn’t sleep, and my partner was heading back to work. Then my father-in-law died suddenly of a heart attack. The family went into mourning for a month, and my postnatal depression took a back seat to the pain of grief. It was at this point that we all got Covid and hit a new low.
I began to get glimpses of the future – of myself as a strong, capable woman once more
As before, yoga allowed me to return to myself. It’s worth noting that yoga means ‘to unite’; it’s part of what makes it so powerful during the perinatal journey. Feeling my body again, feeling strong again and being able to exercise with my baby, I began to get glimpses of the future – of myself as a strong, capable woman once more.
Looking around the room of the community centre, I felt I had found my tribe. These other women cared for their bodies and their babies, and I realised that I wasn’t the only one whose baby would cry throughout the whole meditation (because God forbid he should relax and sleep). I wasn’t the only one with fitness goals, the only one learning how to exist in a post-birth world.
The first run at ten weeks postpartum was too early: I felt as if my organs were going to fall out! But when I tried again two weeks later, while it was hard and slow, I eased my way back into it. My body healed quickly, thanks to the yoga, and things were looking up.
Sadly, when we’re anxious or depressed, we don’t always do what’s right for us. My teacher said we had to book in six-week blocks and we had to stop coming once our babies were crawling (or at least, this is what I thought she’d said). At exactly 3 months, my son started flipping over and doing push-ups in his bedside crib every night, so I stopped going. I wish I’d stayed, but I’ve since learned that when I’m sleep-deprived, I’m not very good at decision-making.
I had so many tools to take with me though. A big part of yoga is meditation, and throughout that first year of finding myself again, figuring out our new lives in our bereavement, and trying to settle a sleep-allergic baby, meditation helped keep me (almost) sane. It was hard: so hard. Coming back to the body, to the breath, sending love to myself over and over as I was being screamed at by my son, well, I can’t imagine how I would have survived without these techniques.
The perinatal journey is hard and unique for everyone. You may have experienced some of what I describe, or perhaps you haven’t, but it seems all women need to go through some sort of journey of rediscovery: matrescence. For me, yoga was a huge part of this, a chance to find peace and begin to sow the seeds of my future. I now teach perinatal yoga. It formed such an important part of my own journey, I hope to pass this gift on to other new mothers and mothers-to-be.
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Eleanor Stowe is founder of POMPOM Perinatal, a yoga company specialising in pregnancy and postnatal yoga. She is on a mission to help parents thrive during the perinatal journey and become the people and parents they want to be. Eleanor lives in St Neots with her fiancé and their 3-year-old son. An avid reader, she also loves running and (unsurprisingly) yoga! pompomperinatal.co.uk and on Facebook and Instagram @pompomperinatal
Photography by Liuba Mogilenko of LM Photographing
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Published in issue 94. Accurate at the time this issue went to print.
