Mothers

Being a mother offers you something that no other life experience can achieve: to feel something very intensely, and the opposite a millisecond later. There is no trip, job, gift or relationship that gives you these sensations in such a visceral way, and that also includes the perception you have of yourself.

It is a fact that the age of being a mother has been delayed more and more in recent years. In Spain, the arrival of the first child is delayed beyond 31 years, and it is common to see women who are mothers in their 40s, and even more and more frequently, women who are mothers close to 50 years old, and beyond .

The fear begins to appear when the doctor releases you from the hospital. I remember it like it was yesterday: I only managed to answer with a "already?", because after three days in the hospital, surrounded by doctors, nurses and where I felt safe, the moment of truth was approaching: seeing me with my husband, with no family to support us, scarred from a C-section, and a premature baby at home. Were we prepared? No! Nobody ever is!

The baby distinguishes sounds around the sixteenth week of pregnancy and reacts to these sounds by accelerating its heart rate, feels sounds that come from outside the uterus. But it is around the sixth month of gestation that the future baby recognizes the voice of its mother and the difference between other voices.

Every end of the year the famous "list of resolutions for the new year" returns to our minds. However, after these months of uncertainty, stress, juggling to get to everything (and despite this seeing that the list of "to-dos" continues to grow vertiginously), we have come across a truly inspiring video. If you identify with this situation, you definitely have to see it.

When we start thinking about looking for a baby, it seems that the universe agrees that we see pregnant women everywhere. You may also have noticed that when a woman is pregnant, other women around her also break the news soon after.

Smell is the most developed sense in the baby at the time of birth, much superior to that we have as adults, to such an extent that it allows it to feed itself by looking for the mother's breast. If the baby is placed on the mother's abdomen in skin-to-skin contact, the baby will instinctively crawl up to her breast. The newborn will crawl, guided by the smell, until it reaches the nipple and begins to suck.

Spain has one of the lowest fertility rates in the world, standing at 1.3 children per woman (in 2019), despite the fact that women say they want an average of two children. Thus, there is a gap between desired and achieved fertility.