Life went on, as life tends to do. Especially now that I was a mother of a toddler and a baby our days were pretty busy and time seemed to fly by. In the evenings I worked through the theory stuff of my course. And I worked hard on pelvic floor exercises, core stability and did a fair bit of walking. But I wasn’t running at all. And I didn’t dare to lift anything heavy. The prolapse was too uncomfortable and I didn’t even feel supported enough with the cube anymore.

I guess I had come to a point postpartum where I expected to be able to look ahead and see a more clear picture of what my future might hold, but I felt let down by my body. My baby had grown into a little person by now and around this time I also started to struggle a bit with the parenting side of things. I would feel inadequate as a mum of two and the intense lifestyle this often involved, and also about not quite being able to pursue what I wanted outside of being a mum. After all, fitness and training was important to me on a personal level but I also wanted to one day be able to work as a fitness professional. There were many tears and low moments over the next few months as I just felt like a failure in all areas of life.

This was over a year postpartum. My fitness was nowhere near where I wished it to be. After my first child things had improved a lot more by now, and it was very clear how much worsened my prolapse was since having baby number two. Was my aspiration of becoming a personal trainer really the right path for me in the end? How could I expect to be able to do that with a broken body like this. So limited in what I could do, or felt comfortable doing. Not only my body felt broken, my confidence was too. And the first practical examination I attended I didn’t pass, for that exact reason. Lack of confidence. The reality was that I felt like I didn’t belong there, I genuinely felt like a fraud. Like someone who wasn’t supposed to be there but had managed to sneak in anyway because of what looked good on paper. Because my profile probably looked decent, considering my background within the health and fitness industry. But physically I wasn’t a good candidate for a personal trainer. Nobody could actually see it (and I probably also looked reasonably fit by now), my issues were not visible. All that was visible was an insecure mother of two who had had this crazy idea about becoming a fitness professional, because maybe in the past this would seem an appropriate road to go down. But not anymore.