Category Archives: Postnatal Depression

Return to Oz

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“I think I’d like to make today’s session my last.”

Recovering from PND

Quiet words. Too small for how huge I feel inside. I have a moment of panic, where I imagine my therapist falls off his chair laughing and tells me I’ve still got a long way to go. But the truth is, I haven’t.

“Agreed,” he says instead. “I think that’s great.”

And that’s it. I’m free. Out in the big, wide world and all on my own again. Except that I know I’m not on my own, this time. PND has taught me more things than I could possibly list here, but probably the most important is that I am not – and have never been – alone.

I’ve recovered. Recovered. I used to have PND. I had PND once. I am better.

I turn the words over in my mind, trying them out. I’ve done that before, when they still felt hollow and hung like a weight about my shoulders. Now, they seem full of promise. I realise I don’t even need to say them out loud; not to myself, nor anyone else.

Being better is terrifying. Funny as it sounds, postnatal depression was, at times, a comfort blanket. It was my disorder. My please-may-Charlee-be-excused-from-class-today note. If I lost my temper or cried or worse, it was the PND. If I disappeared into a hole for weeks on end, there was nobody to blame but my illness. Now I have to take responsibility again. Realising that a Bad Day is just a bad day – a regular, common-or-garden bad day, like everyone else has from time to time – is both liberating and frightening. There are no more excuses; no more second tries; no more capital letters. If I get angry, I’m just another sleep-deprived mama having a meltdown in Sainsbury’s.

I am full of hopes and fears right now, after eighteen months of numbness. You know that bit in The Wizard of Oz when Dorothy first steps out of the crashed wooden house and into the glorious Technicolour land of Oz? Yeah: that.

Turns Out I Do Like Parenting

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Coming out of the bad parenting closet

Turns out I do like parenting!For a long time, I have been harbouring the dark thought that maybe I Just Don’t Like Parenting.

There, I said it.

Obviously, I’m only leaping out of the closet now that I realise it isn’t true.

I’ve been trying, for weeks, to figure out what was causing me to feel so much resentment about being at home with my toddler. It certainly couldn’t be her: she’s adorable (and a future Nobel Prize winner, natch). It turned out to be – ta da! – me. Again. I am my own worst enemy: this much we know, by now.

Specifically, here’s what I do to sabotage my own time with my child. Witness, if you will, a snapshot of a random five minutes inside my head:

    • “I’m useless at leaving the house on time. Perhaps her development will be stunted because she’s indoors too much. I need to get out earlier.”
    • “I shouldn’t be letting her watch Zingzillas. TV makes kids stupid. I should be reading to her instead.”
    • “I only read to her for fifteen minutes today, and we read the same book three times. I’m not giving her enough stimulation.”
    • “I shouted at my husband this morning. She’s bound to be emotionally scarred. She’ll grow up thinking that’s the only way to communicate with people and all her relationships in life will be messed up.”
    • “I must have frightened her when I told her off about touching the plug sockets. I bet she’ll grow distant from me because she thinks our relationship is aggressive and confrontational.”
    • “She doesn’t respond to “No!” – I must be doing something wrong. Why can’t I get the right tone of voice to make her stop kicking me? If I was a better mother, she would just stop.”
    • …and so on.

Spotting that I do this, all day every day, was the hard part. After that, it got easier. Whenever I spotted a Bad Mummy moment, I simply told myself to SHUT UP, out loud. I got some funny looks on the bus, I can tell you. It was worth it, however, because I have just had three Good Mummy Days in a row. And that’s a record.

Diary of PND ~ 05 Jan

Aside

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I’ve been avoiding my blog.

I thought I’d just been short of time, and what with Christmas in the way, and then there was the house to sort out and all that stuff to list on eBay and that cake to make and, hell, I haven’t had much time for me lately so I ought to paint my nails…and so on.

I think I’ve been scared to write.

Writing has been my tool throughout my depression; my outlet for all the stuff that normally swills around inside my head, threatening to drown me if I don’t doggy-paddle like hell. By not writing, I was somehow saying to the universe, “I AM BETTER. I have nothing to say. Nothing to moan about. Nada.” (I have plenty to moan about, of course. Why, only this morning, I catapulted my iPhone out of the car and into a puddle, my relief that the important bits had somehow stayed dry tempered by the discovery that I had snapped the fucking thing in half. Honestly, who makes a phone out of GLASS? But I digress.)

Am I better? Not if you ask my husband, whose thoughtful gesture of making me a bowl of porridge and a cup of tea this morning ended, somewhat inexplicably, in a forty minute bust up in which I shouted, “Why are you always trying to force me to eat GODDAMNIT?” repeatedly. (He doesn’t ever force me to eat. I’m just shit at mornings. He keeps telling me I have to get a handle on it now we’ve got kids because, well, they’ll probably try and talk to me at least once in the morning. After 31 years, however, it seems unlikely that I’ll get the hang of them now. Kids or mornings.)

I thought I was having a good old fashioned relapse. I spent most of all of Christmas wanting to punch people’s stupid faces in. My husband helpfully played Mariah Carey and festive jazz on repeat, to drown out the sound of my grinding teeth. On Boxing Day, I thought I’d add an extra layer of guilt and misery into the mix, so I Googled a bit, decided I’d got secondary infertility and did some crying. Just to make sure, I weed on a pregnancy test, waited three minutes, bellowed “SEE?!” at the blank window and threw it in the bin.

When I dug it back out of the bin twenty minutes later (we’ve all done that, right?), there was a line in the window.¹ Oh my. Then I took several thousand extra tests, just to be sure.

I thought, “Oh, well that’s alright then. That explains all the shouting.”

It occurred to me afterwards that I probably should have thought the same thing when I was diagnosed with PND, instead of trying to jump out of moving cars. While pregnancy carries a get-out-of-guilt-free card for acting like a bitch, it just isn’t the same for postnatal depression. The beautiful and talented Mammy Woo wrote a very touching post this week about why you should stop treating PND like a lifestyle choice. Please read it and share around; it’s enlightening stuff. (Do yourself a favour and peruse the rest of her blog while you’re there. She’s an outstanding writer, and the person to introduce me to the phrase “shaking like a shitting dog,” for which I will be forever in her gratitude.²)

¹ By the way, it’s early days and therefore not common knowledge yet. If you happen to know me personally, please be discreet about it until after my twelve week scan. Thanks!

² I knew I’d manage to get it into my blog one day. YESSSS!

Awakening

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I had a blog entry going round and round my head last night in bed, and no laptop to hand, so I scrawled it in my journal instead.¹ Please excuse the lack of style, but I tend (as I think I’ve mentioned before) to exercise a laborious and time-consuming edit-as-I-write process on the computer, so I find the permanence of the biro a bit daunting. It does have advantages – economy of words being the main one; but I digress. Here it is, in all its handwritten glory. Sorry if my dreadful handwriting takes a little deciphering…

This post is dedicated to my good friend, M, who embodies the idea of living in the everyday world whilst living, at the same time, somewhere altogether nicer, better than anyone else I know.

¹ One of my dearest friends bought this journal for me. Her eclectic – and somewhat French – tastes are a constant source of joy to me, as is the journal itself. I am a stationary fetishist, of course.

Diary of PND ~ 15 Nov

Aside

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How many good days do you have to have before you’re “cured”? One? Three? Seven? Sixty-four? Six hundred? I’m going to decide, and pick a date, and on that day I shall wear a t-shirt that says, “I survived childbirth, the first year of mummying and Postnatal Depression!” (It may also say, “Yay me!” on the back.)

Because if you think for one second that I’m going to spend the rest of my life being a “recovering” PND-er, you’re sorely mistaken. And if I catch myself thinking that, there’ll be some Very Stern Words.

Today’s outlook:

Not enough sleep followed by a little light yoga. Regularly spaced meals and a nice work/life balance. I am doing this. I am doing it!

Today’s mood:

Cautiously optimistic.

Diary of PND ~ 01 Nov

Aside

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I close the front door quietly behind me and walk away (I daren’t look in the front window as I pass or I’m sure I won’t leave at all). My legs are numb and shaking but I push them one in front of the other; it’s like wading through syrup. I can feel the cold air rushing in and out of my lungs and I wish it would stop. I don’t want to breathe. I don’t want to feel. I don’t want to think. I don’t want to be me, here, with this _thing_ again today.

I feel like someone died. I think it might be me.

I put my giant shades on in spite of the drizzle and I feel a little better. I got out of bed and left the house, didn’t I? That’s the hardest bit done. I allow myself to feel a small sense of achievement, but going easy on myself makes me start crying again, although I can’t for the life of me work out why.

My husband rings me, then. He thinks I should come home but I know I can’t. I know that if I’m surrounded by people I hardly know, I have to hold it together. I tell him I’ll see how it goes and hang up, then I listen to Music For A Found Harmonium on repeat until I get to the office. I’m doing this, I think. I’m getting through this. I WILL NOT LET THIS BEAT ME. I am big and I am strong and I am determined. But then it passes and I’m just little me again. Floating. Lost.

I miss my grandma. She always knew what to say. I often think there’s something she would say if she was here that would make everything better. I know I have to stop thinking this way. I know I have to stop thinking that someone, somewhere has the answer I need. My grandma, my therapist, my husband, Buddha. The answer lies inside me, if only I can tease it out. Maybe one day I’ll read back all the things I’ve written and the answer will be there on the pages, plain as day.

Postnatal Depression – One Day at a Time

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My experience of Postnatal Depression

I’ve been promising you – and therefore myself – that I’ll write something on the blog about my Postnatal Depression. I kept saying it, but the more I wrote, the further away from my own experiences I got. The last time I tried, in a genius bit of avoidance, I came up with this well received but ultimately impersonal article about Postnatal Depression charities.

Then, on Saturday night, a simple dinner with my husband opened some doors that I have kept shut since the birth of my beautiful daughter. I let somebody else in. And the next day, I wrote about my experience of Postnatal Depression. I cried while I wrote it. It sounds dramatic to say that it changed my life, but it feels like a new beginning. I woke up on Monday feeling maybe not any better, but different, and after nearly a year of Bad, Different is as welcome as Good.

For a long time, I didn’t want to acknowledge Postnatal Depression as a part of my life. I didn’t want it to define me, become all I could talk and think about. I wanted to shut it out of my life and ignore the hammering on the door until it got bored and went away. Now I realise it doesn’t – can’t – work like that. A friend told me, “You have to embrace it as a part of who you are and stop fighting against it.” At the time, I didn’t want to hear that, but now I am grateful for his wise words and I think I am beginning, slowly, to understand what that means.

I realise, at last (although I think I really knew all along), that my NaNoWriMo novel is going to be about Postnatal Depression. It’s what I know. It’s my reality. If I accept it, I can recover from it.

So, please head over to The Baby Show and read the article I wrote for them about my experience of Postnatal Depression. It is my eureka moment, even if it doesn’t sound much like one:

Postnatal Depression – One Day at a Time at The Baby Show (part of their season on Ante- and Postnatal Depression)