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.
