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IThis is the worst of times and the worst of times. Brighton, May 2017. I'm tired, pushing a stroller into the crowd. The sun is hot. People sit in lounge chairs and enjoy the first breath of early summer. But it is not an ordinary Sunday on the seafront. On either side of me, two rows of polished cars parked – all mini-cars – stretch out into the distance. There are Minis in every possible color and style. Some are themed cartoon characters or sports heroes. Some have eyelashes. Some have stickers on the hood and fur seats on the inside. Hundreds of people walk – no, slowly – in between, admiring the cars. The crowd flows in one direction. I am trapped. I walk painfully, trying not to crush my feet, children or dogs, trying not to look at the smiling faces, the bright and happy people who bask in the Mini Love.
I had left my apartment without knowing where I was going, I just needed to walk, get out, put one foot in front of the other, to do something that seemed vaguely self-contained . These walks are the only choice I have left. I slammed the door, cursed the elevator that never happened (No 1 Scourge of my life), I crossed the road, crossed the perilous bike path, cursed a cyclist ( Bane No 2) and turned left on the front. I walked along the boardwalk, the i360 observation tower, the seafood cabins and the smokehouse, the ice stalls, the jetty, illuminated and roaring, the crazy golf and the lighthouse. aquarium. Brighton is a place where people come for holidays, for chicken and high jinks. It's a place of joy and celebration. I am a black cloud on it. My partner, the designer, told me this morning. "It's like living with a black cloud." He also said nice things. He says mostly nice things. He is a man at the end of the roll.
I know that I have not been easy to live in lately. My mind has been darkening steadily since December, about a month after the baby was born. I have accumulated layer after layer of bad feeling; negativity, rage and misery. I am bloated with, waiting to explode. "I think you have postnatal depression," the cartoonist says regularly. "I think you should go talk to someone. A therapist Your general practitioner. "
He is a general practitioner two days a week, when he is not a draftsman. Even though I asked him to check all my moles the first time we were in bed (apparently, this often happens to doctors), I refuse to accept his diagnosis about it. I do not feel depressed. I feel bading furious. To make matters worse, in my troubled state, I inadvertently fell in the middle of the mini-race from London to Brighton. This is an annual appointment for Mini owners. The smell of gasoline is in the air. People have dressed for the occasion. They smoke rollies and drink tinnitus. There is a distinct festival atmosphere.
I have not slept more than four hours in a row for seven months. I am nervous and nervous, like a person in a state of alertness. I want to scream and scream, go to bed, roll myself into a ball and leave someone – no matter who – take the baby for a few hours and give me time to pull myself together. I have the impression of being on the brink of a psychic crisis; an uncontrollable explosion.
The cartoonist told me that he feared that I would be "almost psychotic" more than once. But I do not have options. My family is far away and I feel like I just have to go on with it. Everyone can not possibly find that that difficult or they would not want to do it, is not it? So I'm almost psychotic, surrounded by pretty mods and Minis – my least favorite car.
The designer and I have a mini. It's an old pigeon-colored thing with a door that works. Electricity is down and windows do not open. The trim and the dashboard keep falling inside. The caricaturist and I argue each time we try to understand him. The pbadenger door has been broken for two years, but repairing it costs more than the price of the car. Getting in and out of a baby is a gymnastic feat. I often find myself literally in the street, panties raised, bags scattered. Traveling 300 miles to see family members in Manchester and Wales is a logistical nightmare. The caricaturist refuses to get rid of the Mini (he has owned it for 10 years) and I feel that he digs his heels, as a kind of eternal license in the denial of his new responsibilities.
The Mini convention gives the impression that something of my subconscious is sent to make fun of me, and I can not go out. It's like a bad dream. People have to wonder why I'm going ahead with such a thunderous air. My phone vibrates in my pocket; I have it in silent mode so as not to wake the baby in the precious moments when he sleeps. I miss calls, but people call less. All my life has been spent extinguishing, extinguishing, withdrawing into darkness. This is a text of the designer: where are you?
I'm texting back. It is difficult to type while walking and heading. He is worried, but I also want to let off steam. I am the master of angry texts, especially angry night texts when he is absent (how come he can leave?).
"I'm stuck in the middle of a mini convention …"
I wait a moment, then I launch my irresistible punchline.
"And I hate Minis bading."
It's not going, not today. I wait for him halfway. He would love it here. He would mingle well. Not like me, with my three-day clothes, my tousled hair and my disgusting behavior. He sends a text message. I look, waiting for a long and pbadionate defense of his beloved Minis, but no. He says: I'll get on my bike and meet you at the marina.
I do not answer I do not look for it on the bike path. I'm trampling. Everyone and everything is on my way. Sunday is on my way. Life is on my way. By the time I arrive at the marina, I am a ball of rage, a kind of dying terrestrial sun, a red giant on the way. We buy burgers. As we sit, where it is calmer, the baby wakes up and looks at me. My heart is pounding, as in the night, as every time he needs me. I take out his bottle. The baby accepts the bottle and sucks it. The knot in my chest – the constant knot – relaxes a little.
I stomp the burger without joy, without tasting it, peddling and pressing it in my dry throat. My love for food – like my love for most things – has mostly disappeared. I eat whole packages of cookies, without thinking, to stay awake in the afternoon. I shovel in jumbo chocolate bars, barely chew. Sugar is my solution – but also, I feel a self-destruction in these acts. A self-hatred that I have never known. Darkness that deepens and widens, in the center of me.
The designer looks at me eating. I shake my head and frown. I do not want to be watched. Do not want to be examined. Leave me alone in my … My brain says it before I allow it consciously. Misery. There you go.
Boom.
I am miserable.
And I know it.
I start crying. The designer agrees and hugs me.
"I think I could be depressed," I say.
"Yes, do you want to go see someone?"
"I will go see someone else for a potential diagnosis," I say.
His face is wrinkled, but that's all I can give him at the moment. I'm so ashamed. The valves have opened and I can not stop crying. How did it happen? I'm hard. I'm intelligent. I've built a career. I lived alone. I have spent decades carving myself a satisfying life. Now, I crack, in the middle.
"I remember the day I started to love my life again. It was as if the sun was out in my head "
Rewind six months until November 2016. The birth of my son was chaotic. I've torn badly. I wanted to protect it immediately, but it was not what I called being a link. The only thing I was connecting to was a bad kind of maternity cushion. Ouch. Breastfeeding was just as difficult. I had mastitis, then a thrush, and then my son had his teeth – at 16 weeks old. I had sore hips every night – sometimes so much that I cried, that I took painkillers to the maximum, unable to put myself at ease. It was said that it was "normal" to have pain about "one year" after childbirth. During this time, I suffered from hemorrhoids every other day.
But it was not the worst. The worst was sleep deprivation. My son was sleeping badly from the beginning. There are not even words to describe this level of fatigue. "Tired of bones" is what I can get closer, but my bones seemed to be dissolved – as well as my frontal lobe. I could not finish sentences. There is a reason why sleep deprivation is used as torture. At bedtime, bursts of bright white hide behind my eyes – adrenaline flushes, I learn – at the split second when the baby starts crying. I miss supermarkets – abandoned basket in the aisle – whenever he's crying, rushing home panicked and crying myself.
***
But it becomes more than just fatigue, more than "baby blues" – it's calcified into something deeper, more deadly. As the months pbad and the winter turns in the spring, I sink more and more in the interior. I have to start working again – I want to start working again. I am an independent writer and it has not been easy. But new mothers are not supported financially or globally by the state or the system. In fact, I feel actively discouraged. The designer is great, but I became a person he does not know; a person who screams and screams and finds herself on her knees sobbing in the kitchen while the baby's nap. In the absence of extended family nearby, I just have to keep working, do not sleep and feel like I'm doing a shitty job of the lot. When I allow myself to compare myself to others, my pride blurs things. I feel like a loser for not coping. I'm lying to my health visitor. I lie to my friends. I lie to myself. I'm starting to overcompensate. I'm cooking (I'm not a baker). I post happy pictures online. I do my best "I'm fine" dancing in the whole city. I want to look like a capable person. A modern woman A successful feminist, who has everything for her. But, slowly and surely, I break.
I do not talk to my GP first. I'm talking to a therapist My friend Lauren told me, during a walk in a bluebell wood, that she had had a postnatal depression after the birth of her second child. It sounds like a secret confession of one of the strongest and coolest women I know. I feel her shame and I hate her. Lauren recommends a locally living therapist who specializes in family issues. After the mini-convention, I contact Kim, the therapist. I tell her that I'm not quite sure if I'm depressed, but could I come to talk to her?
Kim lives on the waterfront. I enjoy walking there alone, listening to music or just letting the sun hit my face. I'm having fun during this first session. I cry without effort while I speak. "I do not know if it's even appropriate to ask for a diagnosis," I say. "But my partner thinks that might be helpful." Kim simply agrees. She tells me that, in her opinion, what we call "postnatal depression" is a generic term for a variety of mental illnesses that she believes constitute "a reasonable response to the demands of motherhood in the Western world".
Imagine that. All I have felt – anger, panic, indignation – is reasonable. It's a revelation. This is the beginning of my recovery. Over the next few months, Kim helps me understand how I feel. Why am I so angry. Why I hate everyone and everything. Why my previous positivity has been reduced to a black hole of despair and fury. Why I feel, for the first time in my life, like it was sometimes easier to just be dead. (At least I could sleep.)
As I start to get stronger, Kim begins to challenge me, which I like. Why do I take so much more mental stress than my partner? How did we allow this to happen? My partner and I are both feminists. We both thought I could do everything. I realize that the idea of "having everything" is a golden myth of modern Western motherhood. There is a huge gap between what women are supposed to be and what is possible for us to be in the current system.
According to the NHS, more than one in 10 women suffer from PND and it is thought that many other cases are not reported. I guess it's because women are ashamed of failing and that's how it feels (or it was done for me) – and because it seems like a betrayal of your child, in a way. I hesitated to write this article because I thought if my son saw it online in 10 years and got upset or thought I did not like it at first? But I want to reach out to other new mothers who might have difficulties and feel unable to say – or even see what they are. So the big question is, how do you know?
I am sure that many of the symptoms I have described will echo the experiences of all new mothers. Nothing prepares you for badault and exhaustion, mainly because we do not yet speak honestly enough about motherhood. We do not talk enough about the "normal" break. I guess a comparison could be a mourning, where it's probably "normal" to feel shattered for a while after losing a loved one. But if this break is prolonged, month after month, to such an extent that one feels unable to take control of one's life, then one has to tackle this problem.
There is no physical test for PND, but if you have difficulty, talk to your doctor. They will talk to you through a test and offer help. You do not drop your baby. You do not let anyone down. You will feel strong and informed, and you will begin to come out of the hole, I promise. And the more we all talk about it, the more we all learn; to be ashamed is less a thing for which one can ask for help.
We are often told that depression is a clinical, chemical disease, distinct from external factors, but I feel that my NDP is somewhere in between: it is caused by lack of sleep and the feeling of having to work. Perhaps she would be better treated and more easily recognized if she was perceived as a different type of depression, with a spectrum of her own. The deliveries and the first six months are often so traumatic that I almost think women should be controlled as soldiers returned from the war.
While my son is 1, I turn a corner. I am always low, but not hopelessly low. I start to sleep a little more. But I'm not quite there. I'm still angry and crying more than I feel good, so I'll see my GP. I am reluctant to take medication. I'm afraid it will reduce my ups and downs, leaving me stuck in a dull, flat emotion. But I feel that I may need a chemical start, and my GP agrees. The tablets, citalopram, work almost instantly and I begin to feel more positive and more capable.
My son is now two and a half years old. I am still on antidepressants and may be forever. So what? When I left, I hid the pills – stuff them in my glbades case. Now I leave the package in sight. I need them as glbades, to fix a little of me that does not work as well otherwise. There is no shame in that. Rabies always returns on a smaller scale every few months, usually after a bad night's sleep. I handle it with exercise, naps, taking care of my machine. I feel strong and imperfect, old and new. I now understand that there is a loss in every great change of life, even the those for which you are grateful. There is a grief that accompanies this loss, but it is a sorrow that can coexist with the joy in your heart.
I remember the day I started to love my life again. I had been taking antidepressants for about a month. Otherwise, I was sitting with my son on a bench near the beach, while he was eating ice cream and it was, honestly, as if the sun had come out in my head. I sighed and looked up, because it seemed like a kind of deliverance, although I'm not religious. Suddenly, everything seemed possible rather than impossible, optimistic rather than condemned. I wanted to smile at people who were pbading rather than hit them. I knew that I could handle what was still difficult, but not beyond my abilities. I kissed my son's head and whispered, "My God, I love you. I'm glad we did it. "
Some names have been changed
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