My Mother's Guilt around wanting another child

As any mother will attest, Mother's Guilt (MG) is something that arrives as soon as the baby exits the womb. It's simply part of the package. Over the last almost-three years I have been plagued with MG around all sorts of issues; big and small, real and imagined.

However my strong desire to have another child is probably the worst case of MG I've dealt with yet. My emotional ups and downs of the last year have to affect my daughter - there is no doubt about it. I try so hard to push on through it all but some days things do get the better of me and I am essentially emotionally unavailable to her. We've all heard how sensitive children are to their surroundings. As are our pets! Our off-spring and pets can sense when somethings amiss, no matter how much we try to hide it. It plagues me continuously that the irony is I'm not being the best Mum I could perhaps be to my daughter while grieving for another child.

I owe it to my daughter - and to my husband - to keep myself as well as possible during all this. It isn't like secondary infertility is there every single minute of the day, but it certainly pollutes our home life, even if just subtly.

First thing this morning we rushed our daughter up to A&E as she woke up inconsolable with a sore neck. "Hurt, hurt" she kept saying and given the recent outbreaks of meningitis in New Zealand, we weren't going to take any chances. She did fall out of her bed during the night so probably hurt her neck then. By the time we were seen to, she was a box of fluffies. When up at the hospital my attention was fully on my dear little girl. How vulnerable did she look sitting on a hospital bed in her PJ's at seven in the morning. Every trip we've made to A&E (Accident & Emergency) to Nelson hospital where our daughter was born, reminds me of her safe miraculous arrival into the world via emergency c-section.

I said to my husband tonight that after tomorrow's appointment with the gyno, I will consider going back to my Dr to address my mood-swings. The independent almost three year old I have described in other posts has regressed to her former-clingy self. She cannot get enough of me right now and I know that's partly because she can sense my detachment. I'm not going to blame myself completely for where she's at; but I know I do have to take some responsibility.