Tracey Quinn talks about why she regrets bringing her son to her pregnancy scan.
Isn’t hindsight a glorious thing altogether? The amount of times I look back and see a situation so very differently retrospectively.
I often relate to it in a very different way after the fact. That’s the thing about parenting – there really are so many should have/could have/would have moments and it’s very difficult to get it right all of the time.
Scrap that, it’s tough getting it right even some of the time.
I’m a real over-thinker, me. I over-analyse pretty much every decision I make in life and I’m always wondering if I made a good call or not.
It’s just me - I’ve always been a bit of a worrier. Becoming a mother has mellowed me in many ways because it is so full of the unknown and unpredictable, but it is something that I do struggle with quite a lot.
When it comes to making big decisions for my child, I think deeply and usually end up going around in circles in my head before finally making peace with some kind of decision on the matter.
And then, sometimes, I completely neglect to give enough thought to other decisions. Take a baby scan for instance.
I saw it as no big deal to take my four-year-old along to a pregnancy scan during my pregnancy. I didn’t give it a second thought and any thought I did give filled me with happiness as I imagined it to be a really lovely experience that we could share together.
Oh, how wrong I was!
This mama made a bad call in this particular situation and it taught me a very valuable lesson. Stop over-thinking the small stuff because sometimes it overshadows the big stuff.
Now let me first start by saying that not everyone has the luxury for this to even be a decision. Your child’s age and childcare situation may mean that they simply must attend all of your appointments and scans with you.
I’m not assuming that everyone has a choice. It just so happens that for this pregnancy and in this particular scenario, I did have one.
I’ll paint you a little picture of what I imagined to be the way things unfolded on the day, shall I? My son would skip into the scanning room with me, feeling excited about seeing his future brother or sister on the screen.
He’d be smiling, asking tonnes of questions and it would raise the levels of excitement in a really special way.
That is not what happened.
The first five minutes or so were pure and utter silence. I thought to myself that he must be so enthralled and amazed by seeing the tiny little fingers and toes dancing across the screen in front of him.
I had butterflies just knowing he was seeing it right by my side. Then the fun started.
He started to kick the chair and say really strange things about how the scan was “boring” and “horrible” and I cannot emphasise how out of character this was for him.
As the scan went on his “behaviour” only escalated. The sonographer spoke to him a few times and mentioned some of the things the baby was doing, and he just shook his head, frowned and actually became quite annoyed with her.
Again, this was so unlike him. I felt awkward as I lay there trying to stay still as she scanned while trying to communicate with my son to try to get him to calm down and stop being so rude.
When we left the scan he was totally out of sorts and began to cry. He told me that the scan was freaky, referred to the baby as an “alien” and was just inconsolable.
You see, in his little world, a baby is...a baby. It’s not a blue moving object on a screen with shapes and shadows that do not resemble an actual human from his perspective. I never in a million years even considered this.
Unfortunately, the whole thing disturbed him entirely and we had to spend considerable time reassuring him that the baby would, in fact, come out looking like a human baby.
This is not about scaremongering or beating myself up, but I will admit that in this particular instance I’d like to think that it just might help another family out.
Needless to say, that was the end of him accompanying me to anything hospital or scan related and we’ve thankfully turned a corner just in time for the baby’s arrival - which will be any day now!
