Tuesday, 29 October 2013

Identity Grief

Identity grief: definition –  the realisation that life after having a child will never be the same, accompanied by an almost constant grieving for the person you used to be before becoming a mother, the career you once had and the social circle that kept your calendar full.

Somewhere in the madness, I decided I wanted an income for myself. I wanted something for me; a business, independence, a way to show the world I had my shit together. I wracked my brains for days as I sat knitting yet another baby’s blanket. I did a lot of knitting over that period. It was a way of doing something that I could see a result for the effort I was putting in, something I could do in between taking care of baby, that didn’t require a lot of brain power. During my search for money making ideas, I decided I would open my own business and sell the blankets that had been accumulating.

This great idea lasted a day. By the time I sat down and worked out how many hours it took to knit one blanket, with continual interruptions, (everything takes three times as long with a baby to care for), compared with how much I would need to sell them for to make any kind of money, it just wasn’t worth it. Anyhow, who wanted to buy knitted baby blankets in Central Queensland.
I was looking for something. Even though I’d begun to feel better within myself, not as edgy, a bit more confident, I just couldn’t get a firm grasp on the whole motherhood thing. No matter what I did, I just felt awkward like trying to wear shoes that are a size too big. It wasn’t as natural as I’d been led to believe, at least not for me.

Although I had been going out more with baby and wanted so badly to fit in, I was ashamed of what I’d gone through. The conversation of how many wees and poos baby Joe had done today did little to soothe my feelings of inferiority. I often left mother’s group feeling even more alienated than when I had arrived. I couldn’t believe my life had changed so much.  Was this all I had to look forward to for the next 18 years? The whole “my child is better than yours because mine can do ABC”.

Somewhere in the throes of hormones, sleepless nights, vomit, failed attempts at soothing the seemingly endless demands of a 6-month old, I decided I wanted my identity back. I couldn’t relate to being a mother. This was not what I’d signed up for. I wanted my life back where I knew when I was doing the right thing, the wrong thing, when people were calling for me, to get my advice, when I was validated for the job I was doing. That’s what I was craving. Somewhere in the haze, I thought the smart move was to go back to work. And my psychologist had recommended dipping my feet back in that pond, to do something for myself.

Eventually, I made the decision to go back to work. I was strong, confident and knew what to expect when I returned. Those days of sitting on the couch for hours on end, watching the meaningless TV shows, and hearing about life insurance over and over again, watching dead-pan soapies, cleaning up the spew from between my breasts yet again, were coming to an end. I was going back to work for 2 days a week. I was getting some of me back! Woo hoo! Party time!

It’s not just the fact that I had been struggling with adjusting to life with a  baby, not able to communicate in mother’s groups how I was feeling, feeling alienated, it was the fact that for 12 years I had been earning my own income, supporting myself. Suddenly, my baby arrived and I was cut off from that. If you are lucky, you receive a measly payment from the government, but nothing like what I was used to earning. I began to feel guilty about money. I didn’t want to spend it because I didn’t have it coming in. The whole time I was on maternity leave, I didn’t ask my partner for money. He paid for a lot of the household things, but I was too proud to ask him for any for myself.

Something tells me I am not the first, nor the last woman on this earth to experience this. The big thing for me was that I didn’t really know who I was anymore. My identity was tied up in what I was doing, rather than the kind of person I was. I can see now that the qualities of me as a person far outweigh whatever title I choose to put after my name. After all, I could have been “Super Mum” ticking all the boxes with an inability to show love and affection for my child.


Somewhere along the way, society has gotten us all mixed up. I think feminism is a fantastic thing. I am grateful to be on an apparently even-keel with our male counter-parts. Although it was something I couldn’t get my head around for the longest time. Women are having their children later on in life now. We have usually established a decent career for ourselves by the time we’re ready to start our families. And having children is something we slot into our busy lives, as opposed to a few decades ago, a woman’s purpose was to get married and start having babies pretty much straight away.

We have experienced so much freedom and have held positions of leadership, made decisions, had choices by the time a baby comes along. We have a strong sense of self – who we are, what we stand for and what we believe in. Somehow, what we do has become so intertwined in who we are. When that was taken away from me whilst I had my baby, it was so isolating because I had never known anything different. Motherhood was foreign to me. The identity of being a mother didn’t fit.  It seemed to go against the grain of what I was used to and perhaps that’s what led me on my journey. Learning that my values and who I am as a human on this earth holds so much more meaning than any position I hold has been one of my most empowering insights yet.

 

Tuesday, 22 October 2013

The Help

Sitting on the couch with the psychologist across from me, re-telling my birthing story again with tears streaming down my face, I began to wonder if I would ever get over what had happened. Every time I went there I was asked to tell my story. I get it now that she was trying to de-sensitize the experience for me. It just wasn’t working and definitely wasn’t helping. I was caught in a spin cycle, just like that of a washing machine – going round and round, faster and faster. I had no exit strategy, no way of getting out or escaping the feelings that engulfed me whenever I was taken back to that life-changing experience.


Whenever I thought about it, it would dredge up feelings of failure, helplessness, hopelessness, being out of control, not being perfect, not being good enough. These feelings made my heart feel heavy, my chest tight and then the sadness would set in, like a tonne of bricks weighing on my shoulders.  I felt trapped. I loved my baby. I hated what had happened when she was brought into the world. I just couldn’t move on from that.

I realise now I had no control over what happened with the way she arrived into the world. I had a choice though as to how I responded and the meaning I gave the event. Back then I didn’t realise. I was naïve, ignorant and uneducated.

The psychologist t told me one day she didn’t believe I had post-natal depression. It never sat well with me any way. She had another label for me, post –traumatic stress disorder. On one hand  it was a relief, on the other I was still entrapped by a  “label” of what I was going through.

Once I accepted it was post-traumatic stress, I was able to move on a little. Our sessions then took on a different focus, and began delving into my relationship with my partner. He couldn’t understand why I could just snap out of it, why I couldn’t get over it, why I couldn’t just enjoy being a mother and being home all day with our beautiful girl. We started to argue. Constantly. Whenever we were together, we’d end up arguing. Me out of pure frustration of not being able to communicate what was happening and him out of pure frustration that he came home to a helpless mess.

Part of me was jealous of the fact that he got to go out into the big wide world every day and talk to real people who didn’t pee or poo on him, who didn’t vomit between his breasts just as he was about to head out the door. I was envious that he didn’t have to worry about when baby last ate, how much she ate, when she was going to sleep, how he was going to soothe her cry. I longed to be connected with the real world again.

As I discussed my relationship with the psychologist, the struggles we were having, the issues with communication, me feeling like my actions were controlled by him, she began to wonder if he had narcissistic personality disorder. Another label pulled from the endless pot of labels that seemed to come from the health professionals. She’d never even met him. I must have told a great story about him though for him be to sporting his very own label. I’ve never told him about that.  He probably would have forbid me from going back to her.

For the longest time I believed that how I felt was in direct proportion to how my partner was treating me or how I perceived him to be treating me. I thought my happiness was hinged on him being in a good mood or a bad mood. Flicking back through my memories and other previous relationships, it was a strategy that I had always run. I had no idea that I was in control of my feelings or that I actually chose how I wanted to feel.

Being happy for me was always tied to being in a relationship with a guy where I felt worthy and wanted. I had to be in a relationship to experience happiness. When I realised this much later on and realised how much control and choice I actually had when it came to mastering my emotions and being in charge of my own life, it was like discovering Pandora’s Box had been hidden under my bed for the past 30 years.

I couldn’t believe it! Who’d have known that I had the innate ability to make myself happy or sad or good or bad or elated or dreaded or ecstatic or depressed? That I could choose the meanings that I assigned to events in my life. Who knew that I had the power and the ability to move beyond circumstances and that my happiness in life was directly in proportion to how I felt about myself. Its been the discovery of this power that has led me on a journey of learning more about human behaviour, what makes us tick, how we choose our beliefs, how we communicate with the rest of the world and has ignited a passion from within to help others discover their Pandora’s Box and open up a world of endless possibilities for themselves.


Wednesday, 16 October 2013

Silent Screaming



As the weeks wore on, my feelings about myself and motherhood weren’t getting any better. I loved my baby, yet I didn't love me and how I felt. Constant anxiousness, racing heart, tight chest and shallow breathing were my new friends. I felt like I was drowning. I felt so out of control that I had to control everything I could.

When I was feeding our baby girl, her feeds were timed. Ten minutes on each breast, I recall being the magic number and the rule I had. I hated feeding. It was so uncomfortable. I hated not being able to move and hated even more those moments when I needed to go to the toilet but was in the middle of a feed and not able to take her off the breast knowing all hell would break loose if I did. So I carried on, hating it.

I wondered what was wrong with me. I didn’t get the warm and fuzzy feeling that I’d heard many mums talk about when they were feeding their babies. I felt so relied upon all the time and that scared the living daylights out of me.

There were days when I couldn’t shift the anxiety. I couldn’t bear to hear our girl cry. If I did, I would start too. There was so much sadness in my heart. My favourite hangout when she was sleeping was in the bottom of our walk-in robe with the door firmly closed. Enveloped in darkness, I felt safe. My external environment matched how I felt on the inside. I remember silently screaming. So many fears and emotions running rampant, I just couldn’t get them out. I didn’t know how to. I didn’t know what the consequences would be. And so they stayed inside me and the internal screaming continued to get louder and louder.


But the feeling in my chest just wouldn’t let up. I can clearly recall the day that I realised my world was falling apart. It was 7am in the morning and I’d already done 3 loads of washing, hung them on the line,  baked a chocolate cake, some monte carlos and had an apple pie on the way. It was as if I had a momentary out of body experience. From afar I saw myself doing what I was doing and said to myself, “This is freaking crazy! You are not okay and you need to talk to someone about this. It can’t be normal!”

It seemed like forever until it was 8.30am and I could ring the doctor’s surgery to make an appointment with my GP. Finally I got through.  The receptionist must have picked up that things were not good with me; she managed to get me in straight away. As I got off the phone, I felt relief. The tears were streaming down my face and the feeling of hopelessness and imperfection came bubbling up again. In my heart I knew I was doing the right thing for myself and for our baby girl.

Sitting in the room with the doctor, I managed to tell her what I had been going through. I felt safe with her and trusted her. Through the tears I managed to tell her my story, how I hated breastfeeding, how I felt like a failure and how I wasn’t cut out for motherhood. She turned to me and said, “If the mother is happy, then the baby is happy. If you being happy means stopping breastfeeding and moving to formula, then so be it”. It was really that clear cut and simple.

I was with her for a long time. I talked. I cried. I shared my pain. She just sat and listened and offered me tissue after tissue. She then looked at me and said, “I think you may have postnatal depression, with what you’ve experienced with the birth and everything else that you’ve gone through”. In a sense, there was relief. What I was going through was abnormal and yet again, I wasn’t alone. Now I had a label to add to the collection, and it definitely wasn’t Chanel.



Together we came up with a plan. Start weaning baby off the breast and get her onto formula. Then we could start to take care of me. She gave me options. Once baby was weaned I could go onto medication and see a psychologist. I was to see her every other week as well, so she could keep track of my progress. I left with a fistful of pamphlets about post-natal depression, it’s causes and it’s treatments to take home to share with my partner, phone numbers for Lifeline in case I needed someone else to talk to, phone numbers for playgroups because I needed to start mingling more with other mums and her own personal mobile.

As we left, that familiar sense of failure came back. I had felt so completely safe and trusting in the doctor’s office. Yet as soon as I was back in reality, I felt totally out of control. I had no idea how I was going to explain to my partner what was going on with me and what was happening in my head.

That night I had a discussion with my partner about my visit to the doctor. I had always struggled with knowing the “right” thing to say. When I was younger, I would spend hours having conversations in my head, just to ask my parents a simple question like “Could I go to the disco on Friday night”. Communicating my feelings to my partner was a huge risk and I was terrified of how it he would accept it.

I was able to tell him about our trip to the doctor and her recommendations. He told me there was nothing wrong with me; it was all in my head. Darn tooting right it was in my head!!! He wasn’t in favour of me going on medication, but said if that helped, then so be it. He agreed that the breastfeeding was upsetting me and wanted to become more involved in that side of things. I couldn’t help but feel that I had let him down too, that on some level I had failed his expectations of motherhood.

And I guess this is where it all fell down for me. I had the picture in my head of how it should be and what the right thing was and the wrong thing was. There was no room for someone to throw a spanner in the works and change the course of my pre-planned events. Over time I’ve learnt to loosen my grip on control and have learnt to go with the flow more. To just relax, take a deep breath and trust that things will work out the way they are meant to.

 

Wednesday, 9 October 2013

What's your story morning glory?



 The first few weeks of motherhood are just a blur when I look back. A constant cycle of feeding, nappy changes, bathing, changing, trying to get some sleep where I could. I can’t access any specific memories during that time. I remember feeling out of control, out of my depth and just taking things day by day. After all, I was still healing too. The time came for my partner to return to work and I guess it’s from there that the memories flow from. He worked long hours and I was often at home alone at night with our girl.

I remember it being quite lonely. Not being able to drive for those first 6 weeks was a real isolator. I was alone in a brand new home with a brand new baby to boot and no instruction manual to get me through. Thank goodness for the mid-wives popping in every couple of days for their checks and for my mum coming to take me to the shops when I needed it.  It was comforting to have people around me, but I didn’t know how to reach out and ask for help. I thought if I did, I would be seen as a failure, as the chick that couldn’t get this motherhood thing right. Because you either get it right or you don’t. There was no room for trial and error in my mind. So I pushed my feelings down and carried on.

There were so many rules that I’d made for myself and for our girl even before we’d even met her. I would breastfeed her. She would wear cloth nappies. She would sleep in her own bed. Our child would never have a dummy. I never had one and I managed to survive okay. When I think about these rules now, they weren’t really my rules at all. I had learned them from when my mum was a mum and she from her mum and so on, back through the generations it goes. The rules were rigid, structured and judgemental. Lacking flexibility and from generations where the woman became a stay-at-home-mum once she’d given birth. She was expected to raise the family and manage the domestic chores.


One day, I had our angel midwife from the hospital visiting me and my mum was there too. On this particular day and for a few days before, I’d been struggling to settle our baby. Every time I lay her down for a sleep, she would wake within a few minutes. It was driving me bonkers. The constant crying and no peace was sending my world into chaos. I didn’t know what to do. Nothing I did seem to work. I was exhausted from a lack of sleep. My hormones were out of control. Tears came without warning.

With the help of our angelic midwife, we discovered that our girl liked to sleep with her head slightly raised. Who knew what kind of discomfort she had with her brace on? That’s the other distressing thing with a newborn too. There’s no instruction manual and no real indication of when you’re doing the right thing for them and when you’re not. There’s also no praise nor validation for when you do get it right. Something I was very much used to in my line of work. I don’t know that I ever got used to that. I just felt like a failure.

It dawned on me one day that I was never going to be the “perfect mum”. You know the ones you see on the cover of magazines in a bikini just weeks after giving birth. Trim, taut and terrific. I was never going to look like that because I’d had my stomach cut open to even have my baby. I couldn’t bring myself to look at my Caesar scar for the longest time. It was a constant reminder of how I’d failed as a mother right from the get go. Man, I couldn’t even have a natural birth, so what hope did I have of being the “perfect mum”.


These were the demons I was constantly battling with. You’re probably reading this and may even be thinking, that story you were telling yourself is complete and utter bullshit. And sitting here now writing it, years later, I can say without doubt that it was a bullshit story. We create our reality each and every day, in every single moment. With everything that happens in our world, we have a choice, whether we are aware of it or not. We choose how we feel. We choose how we respond. We choose what we believe in. We don’t always make good choices and at times may not even be aware that choice exists.


Looking back now, I know I took the safe choice, the familiar choice, the I-am-so-used-to-beating-myself-up-about-what-it-is-that-I-can’t-do choice that I don’t have it within me to see any positives in the situation. I wasn’t even aware at the time that if I’d not had the emergency c-section, I wouldn’t be here to share my story and most definitely wouldn’t be blessed with sharing my days with my beautiful, intelligent, inspiring and often challenging 4 year-old daughter. This is something I am now grateful and appreciative for every single day when I wake up and greet the world. I am truly thankful.

Thursday, 3 October 2013

High Flyer

Boarding a flight with a week-old baby was not something I had ever thought I would be doing. I also had never imagined that I would be travelling to the Royal Children’s Hospital to seek out treatment. But I was and we did. And we survived.

Getting on that plane, suitcases being loaded underneath, having no idea of how long we’d be away for, what would happen or what we were in for, was one of the scariest things I’ve done. My need for certainty was incredibly high and my anxiety levels were off the radar. It took a lot of deep breathing to remember that everything was going to be okay, that we would get through whatever was about to come our way.

The flight to Brisbane went by without a hitch. I was able to feed our girl during take-off and landing. No crying baby here. Only a mum who suddenly realised that everything she did was now on show, judged and that her most private anatomy was no longer her own. Breasts that had a mind of their own and were producing milk like there was no tomorrow to keep up with the demand of a newborn. The human body really is amazing. It always knows what to do and when to do it. We get into trouble when we overthink and overanalyse things. Sometimes you just need to let things be.


We checked in at the hospital for our appointment and were sent upstairs for an ultrasound of our girl’s hip. As we navigated our way through the corridors, I soon realised how lucky we were. It was heartbreaking to see other children who were much worse off than our little girl. We started to think that things were going to be okay. We were going to make it.

In the ultrasound room, we got chatting with the sonographer and told them about the experience we’d had in the other hospital. They kindly advised us that the bones of babies can’t be seen by xray until they are about 6 months old. WTF! I started to wonder why we had gone through what we had back there and was incredibly relieved to know that we were somewhere that knew what they were doing.

After meeting the orthopaedic doctor, he checked her out and consulted the ultrasound images. He confirmed that her right hip was dislocated. He told us that it is quite common in breech babies, female babies and first-borns. Yep, we had the hatrick! Treatment is usually a brace fitted on the body to hold the baby’s legs abducted while the ball joint grows into the hip socket for a period of 3 – 6 months. My partner and I looked at each other, bewildered at the simplicity of the treatment, yet overwhelmed with the brace the doctor had just produced from nowhere.

The brace was fitted there and then and suddenly our baby was a boxed package. Picking her up for the first time it was like picking up a robot and trying to cuddle it. It was awkward. Where was our baby! Newborn nappies no longer fit. We had to be careful about the outfits we chose for her to wear. She couldn’t wear skirts or pants or dresses. Thank goodness for wondersuits! That was it, we could go home. “Come back in a month” the doctor told us, “we’ll change the brace because she will grow”. 


Off we went back to the airport. I was exhausted, mentally, physically and emotionally. I was going through the security scanner carrying our girl and we kept setting the alarm off. Finally it dawned on me that her brace had metal in it and that’s what was setting the alarms off.

Back home that night, the wheels started to fall off. My breasts were so sore and tender from the constant feeding, my nipples had started to bleed and the ends of them were hanging on for dear life. I hadn’t heard about nipple cream and definitely hadn’t read about any of this in the pregnancy books! I sat on the edge of our bed tears streaming down my face, in so much pain, feeling helpless, that I had a crying baby depending on me for food and the one way I had of getting that to her was failing. I hadn’t brought formula, because my rules said that I was going to breast feed. I hadn’t brought a breast pump, because honestly I had no idea about them. Somehow I managed to get through the night.


The next morning, my partner had me on the doorstep of the shops as soon as they opened. We left laden with formula, nipple cream, baby bottles and a breast pump. Looking back now, I wonder why I wasn’t more prepared. Obviously I had no idea of what I could have been in for and no one ever mentioned to have these things on hand ….. just in case.

I’ve come to realise that in life it’s healthy to have more than one way to reach an outcome, more than one way to fulfil a need.  Someone wise once said to me “If you only have one way to reach an outcome, you’re screwed”. You’ve got to have options, more than one way to get to where you are going. Because sometimes you don’t know what you need until you need it.