On episode 89, Alice Grist is an author of books, creator of cards, oracles and tarot decks. She lives in the UK with her husband and three children. Her eldest daughter is almost 12, second daughter is eight years old, and her youngest son is eight months old. As a younger woman, she didn’t actually think she wanted children. She says she wasn’t one of those little girls who fantasized about babies. In her late 20’s, she did a past life regression just out of curiosity to see what came up. She found it to be very lovely that took her back to a past life. It was all about a job in a past life. She’d been a nun and worked in an orphanage. It had felt really exhausting. It had felt like constantly looking after other people’s babies. It felt really powerful. It felt really real and validated something within her. As a younger woman, she thought she didn’t want children because she thought babies were hard work. That experience cleared that for her. It wasn’t long afterwards that she started to become quite compelled to be broody and want a child.
Her journey to pregnancy started at 33. She gave way to a more mature version of herself that wanted to have a family. She started trying for her first child which she felt her daughter’s energy was around her for a long time before she was pregnant. She was there making herself known and she wanted to come through. She was doing a course in shamanic and magical things. She felt the energy of her pregnancy within her and she was. That first pregnancy was epic. She thought for a long time she would just have the one. She again felt that little niggling that somebody else wants to come through. She stopped taking precautions and waited. Not much later, she fell pregnant with her second daughter which was a very different experience. It was a very tough pregnancy. At the very first scan, the doctor told her there was potentially things wrong with the baby. She had a series of tests afterwards that turned out she had a duplex kidney that only minorly effects her now. Alice had a really wonderful birth with her second daughter.
Well, I just assumed I was perimenopausal, I was 44 years old.
At 44, with her two daughters, she was moving on with her life. She wasn’t even thinking of having babies. She assumed she was perimenopausal. Her cycles had shifted and changed quite a bit to being much shorter. She wasn’t taking any precautions with her husband to prevent pregnancy. Her dad’s wife, over the years had always done a pendulum on her to ask how many children Alice was going to have. It always said she would have two girls and a boy if she wanted him. Alice was happy with her two girls. She had been very ill over Christmas holiday. She thought the illness had sent her cycle off a bit off. She was in bed sick for two weeks. She didn’t think she was pregnant until one day, she said to her husband that she might be pregnant. She sent him out to get a pregnancy test thinking it’s probably just a waste of money. She thought she might as well just check. She could see the two positive lines. Her husband couldn’t see the second line, so he went back out and got another test that showed a very definite positive result. Alice was shocked.
Alice said her pregnancy was really hard. She felt sick the whole time. It felt a lot more intense than the others. She had to get really ridiculously hungry and eat and eat and then she felt so sick. She couldn’t even eat chocolate. Towards the end, she could barely walk anywhere. She felt exhausted and tired. Alice says her exercise went out the window. She kept thinking throughout the pregnancy that once this sickness is gone, she was going to do a bit of exercise. Once the sickness had gone, she just felt shattered and so tired. Alice didn’t have any food cravings, but she craved reading fiction books.
She wanted to take pleasure in the pregnancy, but it was hard at the end. Her baby was breeched for a long time, so that was uncomfortable. When he wasn’t breech, he’d lay in a weird sideways position, which really tugged on her ribs.
Alice was hoping to have a spontaneously labor at home in a birth pool. In the end, she had a c-section by choice, and one she never thought she’d make. Pregnancy was already becoming incredibly stressful at the end. She was in and out of hospital for the last couple of weeks, almost daily for different appointments and checkups. Labor just wasn’t happening. The last thing she wanted was everyone in her family to be exhausted with her. It wasn’t just about prioritizing herself in the way that she had the privilege to do when she was younger. She was already over 40 weeks by five days. The induction process was traumatic for her last time, so that wasn’t an option she wanted to explore. There was something in her that just suddenly said no and asked for a c-section.
The c-section was scheduled on a Sunday, so she had to be up at 5:00 am. They had her in scrubs and special compression tights. She sat there all day with her husband because there were higher priority cases than her. She finally went in at 5:00 pm that night.
It was insanely intense as Alice describes it. Her husband had to stay outside of the room to begin with. The room looked like what you’d see on TV shows, the old fashioned kind of surgical rooms with bare bricks on the wall. It was a strange old room considering the hospital was quite new. There were loads of people in there. There was a real sense handing over trust to either nature or in this instance, people with needles. She remembers one of the guys holding her hand before it started. They told her what was going on as things happened. She was terrified because she didn’t know who these people that were putting needles into her body almost immediately. It was of scary. She did a lot of hypnobirthing in her previous births, so she leaned on that in the room to help calm her. She sat with the weird symptoms she got with the medications. There was a lot of tugging. It felt like someone was pulling her ribs out, but it wasn’t painful. A few minutes later was when she heard the cry. They lifted her baby up as she tried to reach for him. She and her husband both burst into tears. It was the most beautiful experience.
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Resources:
Over 40 Fabulous and Pregnant on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/over40fabulousandpregnant/
Alice on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/alicegrist/
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