In my home country, Mexico, people tend to judge or criticize if you have not had babies before the 30’s, they start asking you things like: “when are you having a baby?” “we want to be able to get to know our grand children…” “if you don’t hurry up, then your babies can be born with some kind of disease”. So you start feeling pressure by the people near you.

Being a mom is not easy, and is not piece of cake, I mean, you are bringing a new life to this world, you need to be ready for it. To be honest I was afraid to be a mom for many reasons, here are the 5 more relevant that I faced.

1. Gestational Diabetes

Some woman experience high blood sugar when they are pregnant and some of them will be cured when the pregnancy ends, but some other will stay with diabetes for the rest of their lives. The majority of the woman with gestacional diabetes ara able to control it following a healthy diet and some of them need insulin so their blood sugar levels stay controlled.

Since I have family history with diabetes I thought I could have gotten Gestational Diabetes, so about 2 years before than my planned date to become pregnant I started to take more care of my food intake, and I started to follow a vegetarian diet, which worked for me, not only to take care of me, but also my husband and my future baby.

2. Not being able to get rid of the weight gained during pregnancy

Well, I have been always been a bit overweight since I was a teenager so I have to take care of my diet and make sure I workout frequently, which has worked so far to try to fit on the same jeans size.

However, when you get pregnant your body changes, and your metabolism as well. If you are able to breastfeed you will get rid of those extra pounds quickly but also you got to be careful cause when you stop breastfeeding you can gain some of those lost pounds back.

If you were not able to breastfeed there is a little bit of more challenge, you have to work hard on getting the weight off, carbs don’t help. So my advice is to increase your intake of vegetables and go low on your carbs.

In my experience I gained about 17 kg during my pregnancy, I was able to breastfeed a tiny bit, and I have lost 13, so I still need to loose 4 more kg and my daughter is almost a year, so its been a bit of a challenge for me, I am working out and trying to lower down my carb intake.

3. Stretch marks

Well, there are a lot of pictures out there with a lot of impacting stretch marks, and you might say: “I don’t want to be like that”, well let me tell you that if you already have some stretch marks or tendency to get them you will get some in your pregnancy as well. Also take a look at your mom skin, if she had stretch marks the odds for you to get stretch marks are higher.

I was lucky because I don’t have a lot of stretch marks, even with my weight being up and down for some years, it has not been a huge amount, but I have very few and they are not very noticeable. Also my mom has great skin, and she is clean from pregnancy stretch marks, so I did not get them either. However I started to moisturize my belly since I was 3 months pregnant with a vegan moisturizer special for mommies, its name is “Tummy Butter for Stretch Marks” from The Spoiled Mamma and it worked great for me.

Now that I have experienced pregnancy I can tell you that Stretch marks are like wrinkles

4. Lose the baby during the pregnancy

This was one of my biggest fears during pregnancy, however if you do a little bit of research, you will find out that it is pretty common to have an abortion and more when is the first baby. The reason is because your body is getting ready to have a baby, so the baby might not form perfectly the first time, if you think about how a baby is formed, it is a very complex and unbelievable process that only God could have made for us.

What did I do to overcome this fear? The first thing that I did was to pray a lot for my baby, also took a lot of precautions during pregnancy and I did not make public that I was pregnant, I told my nearest family until I was 10 weeks pregnant and I did it so they can plan their vacation days if they were planning to come and meet the baby, but my original idea was to keep it secret until the week 12. I did not publish on any social network that I was pregnant, why? because I wanted to avoid people asking me what happened if the baby did not arrived at the end.

5. Baby diagnosed with a disease during pregnancy

There are a few sad stories in my family with some birth diseases so I was a little bit paranoid in regards to it. However besides taking care of yourself and avoid alcoholic beverages and smoking there is nothing you can do, if the baby is on its way you need to be ready for everything and you need to be prepared to receive him/her with open arms no matter what.

Pray a lot for your baby and pregnancy, take care of yourself, don’t eat for two! eat healthy and try to exercise, at least walking, drink a lot of water, and try to be calm the 40 weeks so you can have a smooth pregnancy.

I wish you all the best and enjoy this wonderful stage of life! Even if you have a lot of morning sickness, it will get better I promise!