Balancing Motherhood and Mental Health - The Year Everything Changed: Love, Loss and Learning to Live Intuitively
“Reconnect. Realign. Rise — live with intuition, not expectation.”
Balancing Motherhood and Mental Health - The Year Everything Changed: Love, Loss and Learning to Live Intuitively
By Jen – OT_Intuition | Founder, The Intuitive Living Collective and Podcast
2023 was the year everything changed. The year I held new life in my arms while saying goodbye to one of my brothers. The year I learned that love and loss can coexist, and that living intuitively sometimes means surrendering to both.
When we first decided to start our family, I could never have imagined the path it would take. From choosing a donor, to my wife conceiving and carrying our first child through IVF donor conception, to me later carrying our second using the same donor. Well it felt like we were writing our own unique love story.
After the struggles of COVID and the isolation that surrounded our first conception in 2021, the idea of trying again in 2022 brought both hope and excitement. Early that summer, we received the news every parent longs for: a positive heartbeat scan. It followed an earlier missed miscarriage, so seeing that tiny heart rhythm felt incredibly special — especially as I’d experienced light bleeding the day before. But what was meant to be a joyful year turned bittersweet.
When Joy and Grief Collide
Pregnancy wasn’t easy. I was hit with hyperemesis gravidarum (severe nausea and vomiting) and later intrahepatic cholestasis of pregnancy (ICP), a liver condition that can increase risks for both mother and baby. My body was tired and unbearably itchy, and my mind fragile.
Then, in January 2023, everything changed again. One of my five brothers was diagnosed with terminal oesophageal cancer. Just two months later, in March 2023, our second son arrived — healthy but fragile, beautiful and entirely ours. Two weeks later, on Good Friday in April 2023, my brother passed away. I was living two realities: one filled with new life, the other consumed by loss. My newborn’s first breaths were shadowed by my brother’s last. The grief was indescribable.
The Spiral: Birth, Breakdown and Finding My Way Back
Our son was born with a tongue tie and developmental dysplasia of the hip (DDH). At just five days old, I noticed he felt unusually hot. Our eldest had a fever that same day, so we rang 111 for advice. We were told to head to A&E — “just routine checks,” they said. But a few hours turned into a few days. He was admitted, undergoing invasive tests, including nine failed lumbar punctures. He was brought back to me crying, bruised and shaken up. My newborn was tiny, intermittently hooked to an IV or obs machine, and I sat beside him feeling helpless. I recorded his feeds as requested and noted whether the feed was breast or bottle. I was feeding using nipple shields as the pain was unbearable, and the latch following tongue tie was difficult.
My brother was deteriorating at home at this point in my home town two hours away from where I now live. All the while I was trapped in a hospital room, feeling stiff, bleeding heavily, exhausted, terrified. I remember asking for a maternity pad and being handed a small sanitary towel they’d requested from the adult hospital next door....the kind that barely fits half a day’s period, let alone postpartum bleeding. I felt unseen, unsafe, invisible.
One night, the nurses offered to watch my baby so I could rest. When they returned him in the early hours, his nappy was soaked through with urine and faeces. He was distressed. The bottle he’d been fed wasn’t ours. It was something small, but it broke me. I searched the ward and kitchen until I found our bottle. Fixated on finding it to gain back some sense of control... I couldn’t control what was happening around me, so I started trying to control everything else. Writing obsessive to-do lists, ruminating about not being able to cope, terrified my boys would be taken away. Intrusive thoughts raced through my mind... What if they take my children away? What if I can’t keep them safe?
That’s how perinatal OCD crept in. It wasn’t about tidiness or order. It was fear and love twisted together — my trauma’s way of trying to keep us all safe.
Coming Home: Finding My Way Back to Myself
We were eventually discharged, but my anxiety stayed. Between hip harness appointments, feeding challenges, and the weight of grief, my mind never stopped spinning. It felt like I was carrying my brother’s death, my own recovery, and motherhood all at once. There were days I couldn’t find words...only tears and exhaustion. But there were also moments of grace: my baby’s smile, my wife’s calm presence and humour, her logical thinking and strength. The quiet sense that even in chaos, love and stability were still here.
I began therapy again once my medication started to help rather than hinder, and my nervous system slowly settled into a more receptive state. Only then was I able to lean into deeper therapeutic work: creating a trauma timeline, exploring cognitive theories with my therapist, and using Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) alongside Exposure Response Prevention (ERP). These approaches helped me unhook from intrusive thoughts ..to name them for what they were: thoughts, not truths. And through it all, I began learning to live intuitively again. listening to my body, my grief, my intuition, not just my fear.
Learning to Live Intuitively
That’s what The Year Everything Changed really became about. Not just surviving, but reconnecting. Learning to trust myself again, even when the world felt unsafe. To honour my brother’s memory through presence... accepting what is, even if it brings along pain and sadness... slowly allowing reality to just be. Intuitive living isn’t about having it all together. It’s about tuning back into what truly matters. our values, our love, our humanity... even when life unravels.
For me, that meant giving myself permission to grieve, to rest, to ask for help, and to slowly rebuild my sense of self as mother and wife, daughter and sister...... as someone simply healing. And this joinery continues. I am a survivor in recovery. I don't know if there is an end sight. But accepting what is gets easier, allows you to process the emotion that accompanies lives unravelling.
Why I’m Sharing This
I share this story because I know how easy it is to feel alone in the chaos of early parenthood, especially when it collides with trauma, grief, and complex mental health. If you’re reading this while juggling feeds, tears, appointments, or your own racing thoughts, I see you. You’re not failing. You’re surviving something incredibly hard. And you are not alone.
Finding Support - If any of this resonates, please reach out. There is help, and there is hope:
Maternal OCD – UK charity supporting parents with perinatal OCD: maternalocd.org
Mind – Information and guidance on perinatal mental health: mind.org.uk
Bliss – Support for parents with babies in neonatal care: bliss.org.uk
Tommy’s – Pregnancy loss, complications and baby support: tommys.org
ICP Support – For those affected by Intrahepatic Cholestasis of Pregnancy: icpsupport.org
OCD Action Helpline: 0300 636 5478
Shout (text): 85258 – Free, confidential 24/7 text support in the UK
Samaritans: 116 123 – If you are in crisis or think you might harm yourself
Grief, trauma and parenthood can coexist. So can fear and love. Healing doesn’t mean forgetting; it means learning to carry it differently.
On my podcast, Intuitive Living by OT_Intuition, I talk about what it means to live authentically while navigating these complexities, the mess and the meaning, the pain and the beauty.
If this story resonates with you, I’d love for you to connect with me on Instagram and Facebook @ot_intuition. Let’s keep creating spaces where we can talk about the real, unfiltered side of parenting and living authentically. The side that holds both heartbreak and healing. Sharing our stories might just be the first step towards our own recovery journey.
About the Author:
Jen Anderson-Frost is a proudly queer ADHDer, wife, Occupational Therapist and mother of two donor-conceived children. Jen is the creator of The Intuitive Living Collective by OT_Intuition — a podcast and membership exploring authentic living, embracing queerness and neurodivergence, managing parent burnout among identity challenges, trauma and perinatal mental health.
Jen uses her lived experience of perinatal OCD, trauma, and loss to support others in navigating the early years of parenthood with compassion, honesty, and intuition. Find her on Instagram @ot_intuition and Facebook at OT Intuition, or listen to her podcast Intuitive Living wherever you get your podcasts — Series 1: Perinatal OCD, Episode 4: Jen.
