Aurélie is a sun. She is 30 years old, also responds under the nickname Love Eat Smile on Instagram , and she is the mother of Joy, born in the summer of 2020. She discusses with us her experience of motherhood, which gave rise to a desire in her deep in helping women.
3 AND A HALF MONTHS
I got pregnant in the fall of 2019 and in real life, I had been trying since the summer of that year. Trying was still a source of stress. I started crying while on vacation in California because I had just had my period, for example. I started to question myself, I thought about fertility problems, about my body not wanting it, while Dimitri (my boyfriend) was optimistic on the subject. I realized I was pregnant on the day of a shoot… for menstrual panties!
9 MONTHS AND TWO DAYS
Joy decided to arrive 2 days after due date. She was scheduled for July 5, 2020, she arrived on the 7th. I had a confinement and company pregnancy so it was quite a special experience. So of course, it's a moment of immense joy, but it's an entry into another life, that of a mother, quite brutal for me. I put incredible pressure on myself and one thing is certain, I was poorly supported, if at all.
15 MONTHS
To be super honest, I'm just starting to recover from my birth.
I start to think about myself as a woman. I know that my pregnancy is over on a physical level because visually, I don't look like the one who was pregnant. But it's much more complex than that. I'm still carrying my child, I'm still breastfeeding her, she's in my head all the time, I don't think about myself. It's a real effort and work to start thinking about yourself again. And that’s actually essential.
Plus, I'm hypersensitive so everything is intense and heightened. The worries, the questions, the ups and downs. To refocus on my post-pregnancy, on this postpartum, it's simple: I thought I would never regain my strength. Even just a little bit of strength. And yet, I hadn't considered it: I'm a yoga teacher, I thought I had better control over my body. I wasn't prepared...
On a psychological level, I felt a huge lack of self-confidence. It would be necessary to set up real monitoring, to set up visits to see how this new mother is doing. I find it crazy that a hospital cannot participate in the future of the woman who gives birth. To have services, you have to pay, be connected, go private. And even. Besides, I think that we should take care of all mothers, and not just those who have had a difficult birth, or premature babies. Without any malice, I think that we should pay as much attention to a mother of a premature baby as to a mother in general. In all cases, it is psychologically and physically violent.
After 15 months, I took steps to help me unblock physical ailments because since my birth, I have had pain in my body. I understood thanks to an osteologist specialized in somatic psychoanalysis that it was necessary to close doors, open others, to accept and get better. This is one of my new priorities.
After a year and a half.
