Bonkers Page 11

  The thought that we are doing all we can to give our little ones the best start in life and that once we have completed our mission of growing and bringing a healthy tiny human into this world we can then ease off the pressure, give ourselves a huge pat on the back and enjoy our baby and all the things that make us feel normal and part of society at large.

  Pah! Who were we kidding?!

  Why does no one warn us that pregnancy is just the tip of the mummy guilt-laden iceberg and that once you actually reach motherhood status you will be living as a nervous wreck, feeling guilty about everything you think, feel, say, do, don’t do, think about doing, never get round to doing, wish you could be doing, what you feel you should be thinking, feeling, saying, doing … ? It is bloody exhausting.

  Ladies, I give you motherhood. The one thing capable of sending you from feeling like a million dollars to a piece of dog turd in one fatal swipe of a muslin cloth. It is a constant battle between our pre-baby self and our new mum self, a woman we don’t quite recognise and with whom we are not familiar. However, here she is, as bold as brass, shoehorning herself into our consciousness and leaving us feeling guilty and anxious over the most ridiculous of things that would never even have registered with our former selves.

  We’ve all been there, and most of us are there daily.

  Let’s say you are having one of the best days since labour day. You wake up after three hours of unbroken sleep (which now constitutes a full night’s sleep), your little one is actually feeding to schedule and you’ve managed to have a shower – yes, an actual shower – and all before midday. You are feeling bloody amazing. You have this motherhood game down. Then wham bam! The arse that is mummy guilt comes sweeping in and slaps you round the face, throwing you off kilter and making you feel like a terrible mum.

  Let the battle commence.

  In one corner is your pre-mum self, telling you to get a grip, it’s only a dummy/bottle/dirty nappy/glass of wine/night out/formula (the list goes on). You have nothing to feel guilty about. You are doing a great job. In the other corner sits the gut-twisting mum guilt, screaming at you that you can do better, undoing all your previous good work and leaving you a guilt-ridden, crumpled mess as you try to soothe a screaming baby whilst feeling like the worst mum in the world and questioning why the hell you thought you could pull it off in the first place?

  And all this before you even dare contemplate your other worries of not spending enough time with any other children you may have. Of not having had sex or even a non-baby related conversation with your partner for what seems like a lifetime. Of knowing that all body parts north of your navel are more Planet of the Apes than yummy mummy.

  We all stand guilty as charged.

  On a daily basis us mums have two battles on our hands. One battle to get to bedtime all alive and in one piece and the other, never-ending battle with ourselves and the guilt that at times can be so debilitating we just want to throw in the towel and say to hell with it. Guilt trip, you win. I will now berate myself. I will now be a slave to the master that is mummy guilt. I surrender.

  Ladies, do not be beaten; you do have this motherhood thing sorted. How do I know this? I am there with you. I, like the rest of you am juggling babies, my sanity and incessant guilt trips daily. And you know what made me take a step back and give myself a break? My tiny humans. Following the birth of our second daughter, I found myself mid-meltdown to my husband about not feeling like a good enough mum, when something caught my eye that stopped me and my guilt-laden tears in their tracks. Something so powerful that any guilt I felt was replaced by a hysterically relieved laugh.

  Amidst me declaring to my hubby that I was a crap mum (brought on by the fact I couldn’t express enough milk so that I could get some sleep while my hubby could feed the baby with a bottle) and him declaring reassuring words to the contrary for the thousandth time that morning, I caught a glimpse of something that made everything OK. My tiny little human, sleeping with a big milky grin on her face.

  Did she think I was a crap mum? Did she think she had been given the dud and wanted out? Yes, she may have been wishing I would keep my wailing to a minimum, but the rest she didn’t care less about.

  You see, despite the days that feel like hell to us and despite the feelings of guilt we have, these tiny humans of ours really couldn’t give a rat’s ass. To them we rock and they could not be happier with their tired and stressed human, who answers at their beck and call, no matter the time of day or night or the smell coming from their nappy. We can do no wrong in their eyes, so we need to start looking at ourselves through them. We are bloody legends who singlehandedly grew all their body parts and are now keeping them alive on a daily basis. Without us, there would be no them – meaning us mums are pretty bloody spectacular, no matter what the guilt trip that is currently trying to make us feel crap says.

  So, let’s all scream out together: ‘Oi, mummy guilt, be on your way before me and my knackered mum self, kick your manipulative and evil arse into that pile of fermenting dirty nappies I still have not had time to dispose of or feel guilty about!’.

  Amen to that, sisters!

  CHAPTER 8

  AFTER THE AFTER (BIRTH) PARTY

  – CELEBRATING OUR POST-BABY

  VAGINAS

  So let’s get it out on the table, shall we, your post-baby vagina. Not literally, obviously (it’s not that type of book). But let’s get the subject of post-baby vaginas out there and be brave enough to admit that, damn, our vaginas are bloody hardcore when it comes to the matter of surviving and recovering from pushing a tiny human into this world.

  I’ll get mine out first, shall I? Here goes …

  So, following the birth of my first tiny human, I can remember thinking, ‘I want to be a sloth.’

  Yes, you heard me correctly.

  A sloth. Those weird furry things that live in the Amazon (I think) with the funny face and the crazy ass eyes.

  Yes, I had made my mind up. And no, I didn’t care that they are as ugly and as hairy as hell. I wanted to be a sloth because those bad boys moved slower than a dying slug being given his last rites.

  And that type of speed is the exact speed I needed to be moving at right after pushing a tiny human out of my vagina. Move even a minuscule faster, and I felt as though my poor, post-baby vagina was going to burst into a screaming ball of flames, never to be the same again.

  Yeah, you get the picture and will probably know exactly what I am talking about if you’ve pushed a tiny human out of your vagina and it now aches like hell on earth.

  If your vagina was anything like mine was after having my first, I wanted either to divorce the lower part of my body or to learn to walk around on my hands. Any slight movement of anything south of my navel rendered me short of breath and short of speech – and losing my tiny mind with pain, screaming from the inside out.

  Every jerk, every step, every time I sat down, every time I stood up, every feed, every reach, every goddam muscle was screaming surrender unless I took everything at the pace of yes, our friend the sloth! And I’m not talking a young, nubile, I can cross a one-metre branch in less than six hours specimen. I am talking an old granny of a sloth, who moves no faster than a tranquilised snail.

  Oh YES! Sign me up for some of that slower than the speed of a snail action.

  God, I have NEVER known pain like it. And the worst part of it all was that I wasn’t prepared to even consider that I would be feeling such pain post-birth.

  What was I thinking? And why the hell did I not even think about the pain factor post-baby and after stretching my vagina to ten times its usual size?

  I blame all the limelight childbirth gets. Seriously, we need to start sharing the column inches dedicated to childbirth with our poor unsuspecting vaginas so we are all prepared for the prospect that some of us will discover that the body-shattering pain does not come to a glorious end once childbirth is done and dusted.

  ‘Ooh, but if we did that, that would be scaremongering. Th
at would be terrifying poor mums-to-be. They don’t need to hear about the bad shit that can happen. They just need to remain positive. They don’t need to know the truth!’

  I am here to say: BULLSHIT

  I was one of those new mums-to-be feeling positive about pregnancy, childbirth and becoming a mother. I had prepared for everything up to birth and listened to and believed wholeheartedly the popular line that every pregnant woman has heard at least a gazillion times before childbirth: ‘Well, of course, it can be painful, but once you have that baby in your arms all of that will be forgotten.’

  BULLSHIT! BULLSHIT!! UTTER BULLSHIT!!!

  I am going to be straight with you, ladies. If you go through a birth experience that leaves you rocked and traumatised to your very core, if childbirth causes such damage down below that the recovery is a long and painful one, then the best thing you can be is to be prepared for it.

  Finding out you can feel such pain post-birth, and realising that it can take more than popping a couple of Ibuprofen, soaking in a salt bath and doing some pelvic floor exercises to right the vagina wrongs of childbirth, is bloody horrendous and no mum should enter into it unprepared.

  Now I know, as with a lot of things with motherhood, you never can truly ‘get it’ until you’re actually living it. How-bloody-ever, a heads up would have been handy. In fact, it would have been life-saving.

  To have known beforehand that I might have the overwhelming desire to chop off the lower part of my body/live on ice-packed sanitary pads/check myself into vagina rehab due to the level of pain, would have made life as a new mum a whole lot easier.

  I would have been fully up to speed with how to make my life and my vagina as comfortable as possible. I would have known how to construct a sanitary pad ice pack. I would also have known you can actually buy them online, so I would have had a box of these on ice – just in case. Instead I was sent home, told to place ice cubes inside a flannel and pop a couple of painkillers!

  I recall not even waddling but shuffling around, wincing in pain and sweating with pure exhaustion at the effort of moving as I tried to ‘carry on as normal’ after the birth of my eldest. I thought that the pain I was experiencing was normal. That every other mum was going through the same thing, and that I was the only one who couldn’t handle it. The only one who, excuse the pun, was being a pussy about it. I’d convinced myself that the pain I was feeling was simply a byproduct of birth. I wanted to (and often did) cry at any sudden movement or jolt, so obviously I was just not as tough as other mums.

  BULLSHIT!

  What I didn’t realise, because no one had told me – and the birth books, magazines and parenting blogs had neglected it as a topic – was that just as every mum’s birth experience is different, so too is their recovery from it. Some women have the most amazing birth experience and recovery, feeling physically well pretty much straight after birth (I can vouch for this, because I had this experience with the birth of my second daughter). Some women have an horrendous experience and an agonising recovery that can leave them traumatised and never wanting to go through it again (I can also vouch for this because it was the case with the birth of my eldest).

  If I had known all of this – if someone had told me about all the possible outcomes, the good, the bad and the downright traumatic – I would have been better prepared for my recovery.

  Instead of trying to crack on as normal, whilst I tried desperately to get my premature baby to feed and latch on correctly; instead of forcing myself through the pain barrier as I reached over to do the night feeds; instead of forcing myself back into my maternity jeans and out for a walk with my new baby (because that’s what all new mums should be doing with their little ones, right?) I would have taken proper care of myself. I would have asked for more help. I would have taken things easier and made sure people did not expect or ask too much of me. I would not have made myself feel like I just had to suck it up and get on with it as every other mum seemed to be doing. I would have expressed to my husband the level of pain I was in, though he would probably have had an inkling since I had shared all the other things I had learnt from the books. I would have been kinder to myself. I would have shown my amazing body and my rock star of a vagina, which was now trying to recover, more respect.

  I would have been prepared. I would therefore have had a better recovery. I’ve found so far that, when it comes to motherhood, preparing for the worst and hoping for the best works a treat.

  It’s so important to tell the truth about our experiences, no matter how scary. If we don’t, the reality can turn out to be another scale of terrifying – and who needs that after becoming a mum?

  It is particularly important to share the truth about the aftermath and effects of childbirth. Thousands of women every year are left traumatised by birth. They are at home, taking care of a newborn tiny human, feeling isolated and silent in suffering with their post-birth recovery.

  What a difference it would make to our recovery and quality of life as new mums if we all had a post-birth plan (just like a birth plan) to consult. A plan detailing the possible outcomes and how best to take care of our minds and our bodies to help our physical and mental recovery following childbirth. Wouldn’t the whole process be a whole lot easier, a whole lot kinder if this was considered normal? Instead, millions of women worldwide ask the same question: ‘Why didn’t anyone tell me?’.

  For the sake of ourselves, our post-baby vaginas and our physical and mental wellbeing, we need to prepare ourselves for the good, the bad and the ugly of motherhood – and aftercare should be at the top of our agenda.

  Trout Pout – no, not the lips on your face

  (An ode to sore and swollen vaginas everywhere)

  Out of respect for post-baby vaginas and their owners worldwide, I give you my little rhyme to help you laugh in the face of the fear we all face at the thought of laying eyes on our post baby vaginas for the first time. (By the way, my ‘first time’ face to face with my post-baby vagina was in a mirror handed to me by my French midwife in front of my husband forty-eight hours after pushing a tiny human out of it.)

  Mirror, mirror between my thighs,

  You’ve sure given this mum one nasty surprise.

  I expected things were not going to look ‘cosy’,

  That my lady garden may no longer be rosy,

  But for fuck’s sake, no one prepared me for this!

  How will I have sex again, let alone take a piss?!

  You cannot deny the scary, eye-watering sight,

  When forced to look at your vagina in stark daylight.

  It will ‘make you feel better’ the midwife said,

  But instead it just filled me with horror and dread.

  Although never known as that pretty before,

  It’s now less supermodel, more stitches and gore.

  You see, post-baby bits are never spoken about,

  So I was shocked that my vag had a trout pout,

  Please, Mother Nature, give me a damn break,

  And restore me to normal if I must procreate.

  In the meantime, I’ll sit on ice packs galore,

  And pray my bits don’t drop out on the floor!

  GETTING INTO THE GROOVE OF MOTHERHOOD

  Writing that subtitle has just made me laugh out loud as it is only now, five years into being a mum of two, that I actually feel I am kind of in my groove and getting more confident than I ever have been about motherhood. However, during the early days of motherhood I wanted desperately to feel that I was in my groove straightaway. I wanted to feel 100 per cent confident in what I was doing immediately. I wish someone had told me that I wasn’t supposed to know what I was doing and that the only groove I needed to be in was one where wearing PJs all week and eating chocolate brownies for breakfast was fine as long as me and my baby were happy and healthy.

  If I’m honest, things began to settle only after I came through the newborn stage (where everything seems to change hourly, probably because it does). We were n
ow in a routine and I had more of an idea on what we were doing (kinda).

  During this time, a big factor was my mental health. Trying to get a handle on new motherhood while also trying to get control of my maternal mental health was a struggle. I began to feel I could juggle the two only after I had started to take anti-depressants.

  The tablets made me feel free of the fog through which I had been stumbling and lifted the depression that crushed me. They gave me the clarity that we mums are all getting a bit of a raw deal in terms of the image of motherhood we are sold whilst pregnant. It was the first time that I stopped and questioned all the books, the blogs and the magazines and asked where were the real accounts of being a mum? The ones that talked about how amazing it was but also how exhausting and overwhelming it can be too. Why had none of these media outlets included any information on maternal mental health and how to keep mentally strong?

  These questions spurred me into action. Whilst Éva slept I started to write about my experiences of motherhood and my maternal mental health. I first shared my articles with my husband, who then convinced me to share them with some friends of mine who were also mums. They really enjoyed them and soon enough I had a reading group that had grown to forty mums – friends and mums I’d met via other friends – all reading my articles and sending me their feedback and sharing their own experiences. This reading group then turned into a blog and a secret Facebook group called ‘The Baby Bible’. The blog and the Facebook group embodied the ethos of supporting all mums – no judgement. They provided a safe place offering support for mums wanting to talk about all areas of motherhood. Word got around, and it quickly went from forty mums offering feedback on my writing to more than four thousand mums sharing advice and nonjudgemental support. I was blown away to realise how many mums wanted an honest account of being a mum, and it made me understand that I was not the only one in need.