Before pregnancy I wish someone told me that all of my friendships would shift. Yes. All of them. 

There's a complete identity overhaul that takes place with matrescence. As my friend Asia has put it, relationships are how simply we relate to each other. So it would follow that when you are completely transformed by pregnancy (each time it happens) the way you relate to the people in your life will be transformed too. I didn’t know this. 

When I had my first pregnancy I was 17 and in high school. I got pregnant when Teen Mom was a hit show and it felt like it wasn’t something that would change my teen life too dramatically. I still did a lot of the typically teen things - I just also had a baby. I still went to school, was a cheerleader, went on dates, and hung out with my friends. Even into young adulthood it was pretty normal to have my kid along with me for lunch with girlfriends or hanging at someone’s house. 

14 years later though, pregnancy destroyed everything I thought I knew. Not in a bad way, but the way a storm reveals infrastructure and resource issues. It illuminated a need for change in my relationships that I couldn’t ignore. 

I've always been little miss popular. Surrounded by people, never an open weekend, and part of a group. However, this wasn't all it appeared to be. My friendships have mostly been built around what I could offer rather than what I could receive. They have also been rooted in my performance. We talk about the "cool girl" persona in dating and that appears in friendships too. I've spent a lot of time typing out "no worries if not!!!" When there was, in fact, many a worry.

I appear as though I always have it together, I almost never ask for help and I'm always available to help with advice, time, energy, and other resources. I was perpetually understanding and trying to keep the peace. I made myself useful in exchange for affection. I became a resource instead of a person.

This strategy helped me to survive my youth when belonging by any means created a sense of security and social currency. At 31 though, transactional relationships only bred resentment and depletion. I was exhausted from over-giving and tired of pretending like I was okay without reciprocity. 

Pregnancy demands all of you - mind, body, spirit. You give everything to your baby and there isn’t much left over. This means you need to be poured into, not extracted from. 

Overtaken by mood swings, nausea, fatigue, physical pain, and overwhelm I couldn’t keep up my performance during pregnancy. I needed to lean on someone. Anyone. I quickly realized I had not really built out a network to do so. I quickly noticed who checked on me and who seemed to forget I existed. Who showed up when it mattered and who showed up when it was convenient. Pregnancy can feel isolating but maybe part of that is because people we expected to stay disappear.

Maybe it’s because you disappear too, becoming a stranger in your own life.

You find out who your real friends are when you stop being erasing yourself and start taking up space - literally in the case of pregnancy.

Let me clarify - I have people in my life who I love dearly and who love me. Who care for me. Who support me. However, there were people who were getting a ton of my energy while giving little to nothing in return. My performance of being the cool, solid one who never needs anything meant I did not have the muscle to know how to ask for support. I had built a network who had become accustomed to assuming I didn’t need any. Once I was pregnant I FELT THAT SHIT. 

Some friendships blew up or fizzled out before I even realized I was pregnant but started becoming a person with feelings instead of just a good time or an unpaid therapist. It was almost like my baby’s spirit was cleaning house of all the energy that he did not want to be around. Your entire being shifts into being about preserving yourself and your baby. Fuck shit is a threat that is too high to accept. All of the insincerity and inconsistency felt unbearable suddenly. It was like overnight the entire landscape of my social life was mostly wiped out. 

Then there are the people who stayed. Some of them were also experiencing the impacts of motherhood. Even if we’d know each other for many years the way we related to each other changed. It felt like I was experiencing everyone for the first time. Noticing things I hadn’t before. Or maybe I did but chose to ignore. I saw a deeper layer of others and offered a deeper layer of myself because I did not have a surface veneer anymore. Pregnancy stripped all of my outer layers away revealing me to the world. 

And I felt afraid. Awkward. Vulnerable. I didn’t have anything else to bring to the table except me and my big ass belly. Would they still accept me? Would there be room for me in the relationship? Would I still want to connect with them with my new perspective on life?

Into postpartum I still felt myself stumbling through social interactions. Brain fog making me feel like I was incoherent in conversations. Sleep deprivation making it almost impossible to have the energy to socialize with anything other than my bed. My whole brain and body were oriented to my baby creating (or maybe just exacerbating) ADHD symptoms that made it incredibly hard to pay attention when someone was talking to me. “Am I talking about my baby too much? Am I talking too little? Did I say that out loud or in my head?”

It all felt like too much so I exited stage left. Once a social butterfly, I found myself opting instead for the dark and solitary inside of a cocoon (my house) again. "It’s safer where I’m alone, where I don’t have to worry about how I’m coming off." At least that’s what I thought before postpartum depression peaked. 

The sweeping waves of anxiety, grief, confusion, paranoia, and stagnation amplified my loneliness. I longed for a safe space to be the huge fucking mess that I am. To not have a performance, a perk, a curated experience to offer. I just had me, my thoughts, and my feelings. And I needed to share them with someone other than my husband, my therapist, and my cat. 

This was where the positives really came in. For the first time in I don’t know how long I was showing up truly authentically with others. I've become more honest about not being okay. That I need help. That I need a friend. I've been pleasantly surprised by the level of vulnerability and support that I've gotten in return from older relationships and new people in my life.

My social life is not the picturesque, sitcom style friend group I’ve had in the past, but I guess that’s kind of the point. It’s not a movie poster, it’s a real life system of support. Flawed, awkward at times, but we’re all trying our best. Stumbling at times but still pushing forward. 

Since becoming pregnant I have a lot less people in my network now, but the quality of who’s there has more than made up for that. I am also now in place where I am trying new things, meeting new people, and being my new (true) self.

I’m still walking this journey just putting one foot in front of the other. If you’re walking this journey too and don’t want to walk it alone join us in Multi-dimensional Mama. A mom group centered around authenticity, love, and liberation. Learn more and apply here.