Building Your New Community as a Pregnant Immigrant
You’re alone in this country. It’s just you and your husband creating a small family away from the shores of those you love and trust.
Being a pregnant women in a strange land can make your very bones ache for home. As humans, we were not meant to be far from our family. It is mothers and sisters that hold our limbs as we cry out in pain during childbirth. It is aunts and uncles that tend to older children as they wait in eager anticipation for a new baby to arrive. Ideas of dressing it up and tending to it already taking root in their minds.
To have a child away from home is a difficult and hard task. I don’t know why a woman would choose to experience motherhood away from those she loves. But sometimes that is the case. At times, your spouse in carried away due to work or perhaps your life has taken a different path. Perhaps there are pains that prevent you from returning home. Whatever the case may be I am here to reassure you that despite your distance. Despite your loneliness in a new place and culture, you have the ability to cultivate a new community. They will not share your blood but they can most certainly share in your joy as a mother. Especially with a first child, when all things are new, hormones are strong and emotions run high. When the mettle of a marriage is tested as well as your own basic human needs.
Begin with those that will care for you professionally. It is a circle of people that you’ll rotate from time to time with your prenatal visits. Ask with each visit, inquire who is the best at what and why. Cultivate your network of doulas, midwives, doctors, therapists etc.
Mothers share. It is a beautiful thing to be in the midst of other mothers at times, their best kept secrets pour out willing over a warm cup of coffee or tea. But if your sources don’t come from close friends then search the internet for their words. Mothers share online as well. They are conduits of information and they enjoy letting you know The who’s who of what. Not in a malicious way but in the joy of discovering support.
Oh, how you need support! In every aspect. There will be many lonely moments where you crave the comfort of your own women to lift you up. The hugs of new friends will not replace them but will offer a sense of comfort that will soothe you.
You don’t have to be strong in everything. It is normal to be scared but use the wisdom of the network. As a spider carefully creates her web that seemingly appears fragile to the human eye, but in reality can support the entire body. So, is the importance of a web of people. Those you can see, feel, touch and smell (yes, scent matters).
When you are an immigrant and this land is unfamiliar to you, one of the wisest uses of your time to work towards building that beautiful web of those that will sustain you during your pregnancy and the months and perhaps years afterwards.
