Well I might as well hit all the tough topics on one day! This is something that I am particularly struggling with at the moment and I do feel that I am battling with two halves of my brain most of the time.

It started a few months ago with some dreams, which keep reoccurring (why do pregnancy dreams have to be SO vivid?!). The first type of dream was that I was living in a house with my partner and his four other wives and all of their children. The first wife was always cooking for me and was mean and jealous because she knew I was about to have the latest baby – in the dream I was paranoid about being poisoned by what she cooked for me. This dream keeps coming back and I wake up feeling really annoyed at my partner for having so many wives! He does have a daughter from a previous relationship so perhaps this reoccurring dream is a way of my brain shuffling through that before the baby arrives.

The second dream has also happened a few times and is the type that I usually wake up crying from. Thankfully I don’t remember the sequence of events but I know that in the dream my partner has died. He jokes about it now if I’m tearful – “Did you dream that I died again?!” – but it’s a fear that then spilled over into my consciousness too. When he was working away for a few days I thought about the dream and, when he took a long time to reply to messages, I panicked and my thoughts spun out of control. What if he had had an accident? What if the baby arrived early when he wasn’t here? What would I do if he died suddenly? Would I stay in Germany with the baby or go back to the UK? Would I see his daughter again without him around?

Some weeks/days are more emotional than others and in the bad times I feel that I need extra reassurance, love and hugs. It must be exhausting for my partner! But if I think that way, I then feel guilty and that leads to more emotional times, which don’t exactly encourage someone else to want to be around you. In the last couple of weeks I have struggled with feeling suspicious of him and over-analysing our relationship – at times I have felt completely crazy.

Thankfully, I have a great midwife who speaks English when I struggle with German. I’ve met a lot of inspirational women over the last few weeks through pregnancy groups and I’ve also made a few visits to a native speaking psychologist so that I can go over everything that is buzzing around in my head. As I’ve had a few weeks like this now it does make me nervous about post-natal depression and how I will cope when I feel emotionally drained AND have a newborn to look after.

The good news is that it seems it is quite common for women to feel vulnerable and worried about abandonment during pregnancy; your body is not how you’re used to it being and you’re all over the place emotionally. It’s natural to worry at some point that someone younger and in better shape, who doesn’t fall asleep as soon as they sit on the sofa, might catch your partner’s eye. The second piece of good news is that, in my case, these worries disappear with something as simple as a hug.