Maternity Awareness Week 2024

PPN-SE Team Members Reflection

Thinking about my own experience of parenthood, I feel a strong pull towards the 2024 theme of 'Rediscovering You'.

Pregnancy and parenthood can be a really positive time in a persons life, but, for a lot of people, pregnancy and parenthood brings challenges.

In my experience, the day to day changes of the pregnancy journey, the highs and the lows, the whirlwind of caring for this new life felt consuming. I felt overwhelmed and privileged all at once, while wondering how I was still going to continue my career and do all the things that made me feel like myself, alongside being a parent. This eventually drove down my resources and I felt myself experiencing anxiety and low mood. The hardest part of this time was the lack of awareness of these states in pregnancy and the thought that I was in some way alone. Being told the feelings were based on hormones without any awareness of the impact on my loss of identity as a person. I began to feel like a baby vessel instead of a new parent.

Empowering your identity as a parent, and finding yourself within this journey is something that brings a lot of benefits in terms of supporting Maternal Mental Health.

The Maternal Mental Health Alliance have have been organising the Maternal Mental Health Awareness Week since 2017 and this year their daily topics include Demystifying perinatal mental illness, finding you in this journey: identify transformation in the perinatal period, sharing empowering resources for all families in the UK and beyond and more.

Visit Maternal Mental Health Awareness Week | Maternal Mental Health Alliance to support keeping the conversation of maternal mental health alive.