What My Body Knew Before I Did

Both of my pregnancies were wonderful. I felt radiant. Growing these little people, watching my belly, feeling every kick, having "actual" breasts for the first time in my life … I loved every bit of it. I knew I was lucky, and I was grateful.

There was one moment during the first pregnancy that caught me off guard. A thought I had and then quickly pushed away, because I couldn't believe I was thinking it.

Never alone again.

And for a minute, it frightened me. I don't know if anyone can relate to that feeling.

I had always been someone who needed to disappear. Sometimes physically, really going somewhere alone. More often just going quiet for days, sometimes weeks. Not answering messages, not reaching out, not participating much in the world for a while. I needed that. It recharged something in me. And the thought of a being who would depend on me completely, every day, no stepping back from that in the way I was used to — that unsettled me. But… I let it pass. I moved on. I never thought about it again.

And then I had my first baby.

The first months were great. I felt capable. Competent. Easy, even… I was surprised.

That feeling lasted maybe four months. And then something started shifting.

The best way I can describe it in English is a kind of flatness. In Spanish, I'd say falta de ánimo: no drive to do anything beyond what absolutely had to get done. Everything felt heavier than it should have. Even the basic things. Showering, taking care of myself, getting through a morning. I did the important things. I wasn't neglecting my baby. I was back at work after three months. But outside of what was essential, nothing else was happening. No room for it.

I got very moody. I've always lived at extremes, no real middle ground. But during this period the lows got harder to come back from, and the highs came less and less often. I started fights with my partner that didn't make sense. Looking back, I see frustration. Dissatisfaction with my whole situation. I was letting it out on the person closest to me. I wasn't well. At the time it just felt like everything was wrong and I couldn't explain why.

I was functioning. Just functioning.

I assumed it was the situation. The birth. The breastfeeding that hadn't lasted as long as I wanted — I went back to work after three months, started pumping, and the milk ran out not long after. I felt a little inadequate about that. A little sad. The fact that I was in a different country with a different language and my partner was working far away. Circumstances, I told myself. Once things settle, I'll settle.

And the circumstances did ease. Things did settle somewhat. But the flatness, the overwhelm, the sense that my system was running on less than I needed. It stayed.

By then I had done a lot of work on myself. Books, courses, programs. I had looked at my past, traced where things came from, made sense of a lot of it. I felt very smart about it. We all do, don't we? We can explain our past so beautifully. We know exactly why we respond the way we do. We can map the whole thing.

And I did feel better. That part was real. I was calmer. Less reactive. Not that angry person I used to be. I genuinely thought: I'm well. I've done the work. I'm good.

And then my kiddos arrived. And everything came back. But harder. I wasn't prepared for that.

Things I hadn't even noticed before suddenly had me reacting in ways I couldn't explain. Too much noise. It was as if all my senses had been turned up with nowhere for the volume to go. Even the dogs coming over for affection was sometimes just too much. The radio on (yes, we still listened to the radio) while I was trying to have a conversation.

I was irritated by everything. Especially my partner. The way they cleaned the dishes. The way they did anything. I have a wonderful partner, someone who was doing everything to make life easier, fixing things, carrying more, and it still got to me. The way they moved through a room. Small things, irrational things.

I didn't like myself during that time. And I can understand why my partner wasn't having an easy time with me either. I am infinitely grateful they put up with me.

All that self-reflection. All that beautiful understanding of where things came from.

Apparently, for me, understanding something gave my mind relief. My body seemed to need something else. And the two are not the same.

Here's the part that still gets me when I think about it.

My first child was one of the calmest babies I have ever seen. She barely cried. I could take her to work, and she'd sleep through the whole thing. We didn't even change our life much that first year. We went to restaurants, we saw friends, we went to parties, and she'd just sleep in her little carrier, completely unbothered.

And I was still overwhelmed. By her.

She wasn't doing anything wrong. She was just a baby. Not even particularly demanding. Just her being there, her presence in the room, her energy. That was overwhelming enough. It frightened me a little, if I'm honest. This small, easy baby. And I was drowning.

I wanted to disappear into a small, quiet, dark room. Just somewhere where nothing was asking anything of me.

When my second arrived two and a half years later, the first three months were something else. Constant crying, every day. That was its own kind of hard. And then it shifted. They settled, became quieter. Still more energy than my first, but calm compared to most kids. And it got harder anyway. Now there were two of them. More life, more sound, more need.

I looked at other moms and I couldn't understand what I was seeing.

Their kids were louder than mine. More demanding, less settled, more of everything. And those moms seemed fine. Patient. Present in ways I could not access.

I started to wonder what was wrong with me. My partner. I won't pretend to know what they thought. But I imagined it. An eye roll. A look. Maybe none of it was even there, but I saw it. And it made everything worse. Like I was exaggerating. Like I was making everything harder.

I tried to stop. I'd catch myself mid-reaction, asking myself why am I saying this, why am I reacting this way, and tell myself to just stop. It didn't work. Not by deciding. It was something that had been running quietly underneath for a long time, and the kids arriving had simply turned up the volume on something I hadn't known was already playing.

What changed things came much later.

When my second was still small, I started studying again. A master's, then more courses, this time more body-based. Mindfulness practices, breathwork, things that asked me to feel rather than just understand. And then, eventually, hypnosis.

That was the real shift.

It started with self-hypnosis. And then I decided I wanted to learn it properly. I studied with two different schools, and when you're learning, you receive a lot of hypnosis yourself. That helped me enormously.

And I'm genuinely calmer now. By the time my younger one started expressing who they are, I had tools I didn't have before. Not a cure — more like a language. I still feel things. It still catches me. But I know the signs now, and I know how to let things move through instead of getting stuck.

Part of it was also finally honoring what I had always known about myself. That thought from early in the pregnancy, the one I'd pushed away? I stopped being ashamed of it. I started building around it instead. My partner would take the kids for a weekend, and I'd have the house to myself. As they got older, my kids understood this about me. Sometimes they would even say, I think you need a retreat again. And they were right.

If your body needs quiet, it needs quiet. That's not a flaw to work around… it's just information.

I also see this in my work.

I sit with people in sessions and they go back to something. A time, a feeling in the body that surfaces before any memory does. And sometimes they say: I remember this, but I didn't know it was still in there. I didn't know that was still a thing for me.

It looked resolved. To everyone, including them. And yet there it was.

Okay. That was a long way in. Here's what I want to say.

For a lot of parents of trans and nonbinary kids, the moment their child comes out is the moment everything gets hard to manage. The overwhelm, the fear, the running on empty. And I understand why they locate it there. That moment was real. It did change things.

But I sometimes find myself wondering whether that was the beginning or the reveal.

Whether what is so loud now was already there, running quietly underneath. Something much earlier, something long since filed away as handled — and their child's story simply turned up the volume.

I know this because I had my own version of it. I thought the birth was what broke me open. It took me years to understand that it was just the moment when something older finally had nowhere left to hide.

I'm not sharing this to give you something new to worry about. You have enough. What I hope my story gives you — if it resonates at all — is this: you don't have to go back. You don't have to name everything or excavate old stories. The work can happen right here, right now, in the body. And it ripples further than you'd think.

If you want to start somewhere quiet, just a few minutes, no pressure, the Peaceful Warrior Calm audio is a gentle place to begin. Seven minutes. It asks nothing of you except to let something settle.

Get the Peaceful Warrior Calm Audio →

Visual Transparency: All images in this article were generated via DALL-E to illustrate the concepts discussed.