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  Apart from the times I’d been ill, we had been gloriously happy in France. That we missed seeing family regularly was balanced by living and working in a beautiful place, one that was only a short plane journey back to the UK and my family. However, in the midst of my illness returning, my cousin and his wife hosted their wedding on Lake Annecy, just down the road from where we were living at the time. It meant a week filled with festivities surrounded by close family members. It was the first time since moving to France that I had close family just a stone’s throw away and the effect of this stayed with me long after all the wedding guests and members of my family returned home.

  Their leaving left a void that made me feel so empty. Despite having everything – an amazing hubby, two beautiful and healthy little girls and living in a beautiful place – something huge was missing from my life. Without it I had no idea how I was ever going to find my way back. For weeks after the wedding I would find myself driving the girls and myself back to the wedding venue and the hotel where everyone had been staying. I would take the long route home, driving the opposite way around the lake, just so I could drive past these places where my family had been and which now held such dear memories of family. I felt such a longing that some days driving past these venues would be the only thing able to lift my spirits. To pierce the darkness.

  Now I realise I was driven by the thought of what it would feel like to feel at home again. To have help and to have the support we so desperately needed despite our desperate denial. It took a delayed baby passport application and my husband leaving the girls and myself to go back to the UK for a friend’s wedding to make me finally face up to what we needed to do to break the vicious cycle of the illness and drag myself back from the brink.

  ‘I think we need to move back to England’ were the unexpected words my husband returned home to from his trip to the UK.

  It was an inevitable but difficult and sad conversation – almost like we were giving up on us being able to get through it all on our own. Now, however, we both agree it was the best thing we ever did to get me well again, and as much as it pained my husband to leave the life he had known for eighteen years – a country he considers his home and friends he considers his family – we both agree that we would do it again in a heartbeat as it meant me being well again. So, six weeks later, we moved back and close to my family. I’d always thought my husband was a special human being, but after weathering this illness with him, watching him struggle watching me, and seeing him give up everything he wanted out of life for us as a family, I know that he is a truly exceptional man and one I would have not survived this battle without. Thank you, Jamie, a million, trillion times, thank you! Thank you for not giving up on me. Thank you for not giving up on us.

  So there you have it, we moved back. And I’m not claiming this was a quick fix. That the moment my feet touched UK soil, my mind was mended. That all was well. I am not going to mislead you about the aftermath of the move (which we are still living through as I write) or the fact that Jamie was, and still is, pining after our old life. Nor am I going to deny that after reality sunk in and the months clicked by, resentment started to seep in. The ugliness of what we had been through, what we had both lost and given up started to take hold, and so began a new battle for survival. However, we had come so far together, we were not about to give up at the final hurdle.

  FINALLY BEING FREE

  Did the Dark Stranger come back to the UK with us? Well, he did drop by and pay a couple of terrifying visits during the first few months of me being back, but though he tried to make a permanent return, he has not been able to break through the border control my mind is now running.

  It’s funny (in a messed-up kind of way), he was a huge part of my illness and, therefore, my life. Since he visited me most days, I thought the moment he left me would be more monumental. That there would surely be a huge exit performance, one last devastating stab at his victim as he made his exit from this stage of my life. An exit worthy of his terrifying presence in my life for almost three years. But there was nothing. It was silent.

  Just as quietly as he snuck into my life, so he departed. He slipped out of the door when I wasn’t looking, and although he sometimes stops and stares in from beyond the garden gate, he does not venture down the path. For months after realising that he was no longer here, and as it started to sink in that he was not coming back, I would find myself looking for him, walking into the lounge and expecting to see him on the sofa. I’ve found myself doing this again lately, almost testing the boundaries of my mind, letting myself ask ‘What if?’. But nothing – thankfully (a word that doesn’t even come close to expressing how I feel).

  I also can’t pinpoint the moment when my PND left me. I remember one of my greatest wishes whilst I was ill was just to be able to wake up and think: ‘Oh, it’s Monday’ rather than ‘Oh God, what is today going to bring and how will I get through it?’. So much did I want to wake up and just be ‘Oh, it’s morning’, I imagined that when I did so it would be a ‘moment’. There would be a fanfare, we would throw a party. Truth be told, it must have come and gone without me even realising, thanks to being run ragged answering the noises and needs of my tiny humans, from being caught up in the whirlwind of life as a mum. And isn’t that a bloody beautiful thing? That I was too busy, running around like a loon, feeling exhausted, torn in two, like I needed more hours and more hands, too busy feeling anything but depressed, that the moment it left went by without me noticing the exact time it left me.

  It dawned on me, probably after a month or so of having these gloriously hectic and normal exhausted mornings, that I felt OK, that it had passed. I remember running to my hubby, all giddy and shouting, ‘I’m OK!’. He looked at me like I was delusional (again) and then the words and their meaning struck home. ‘I’m OK! Like, I feel REALLY OK, and I’ve actually felt like this for more than a while without realising it. I think it’s all over’.

  I promptly burst into smiles and tears. We hugged and held onto each other and just stared at one another. There was no need for words. We knew exactly what we were both feeling. In that moment of our life history with the illness, all the dark places where we had travelled together, all the ugliness and hurt flashed before us and brought us back to this moment. The start of the rest, that was yet to come. We were free.

  The Illness – and what I went through personally and what we went through as a couple and as a family – will stay with us forever. Like witnesses to a tragic event, both my husband and I are changed forever because of it. We cannot unsee the things we have seen at the hands of this illness. We are no longer the people we were before. At times we have both thought that the final victim of the illness would be our marriage. We have bared our souls and our teeth at each other. We have been at our strongest and weakest. We have been at our ugliest and ultimately most beautiful.

  I do sometimes wonder where we would be and how our life would look if it had not been visited by this illness. Would we now be a family of three, even four children? Would we be living in France still? What would I be doing? Would I even be writing, since my illness is something that made me start writing in the first place? Would we be happier? More content? Better off? Better even, less jaded and wounded?

  It’s hard to even let myself begin to imagine these ‘what if?’ scenarios. And even harder to question if I would go through it all again, knowing what I do now? Honestly? I feel the illness robbed me of irreplaceable moments with my little girls. I would give anything to be able to return to those moments and fill them to the brim with the emotions and joy that should have been there in abundance without effort or thought. I would do anything to regain the innocent and naïve optimism by which my husband and I lived before the illness put out its light.

  However, it has also taught me some invaluable lessons that I would not now be without and which I feel weirdly and uncomfortably grateful for. It put me, my mind and our marriage on a crash course in survival. A course of fighting, t
eeth bared, knuckles stripped back, getting up and going time after time after time, fighting for the survival of my mind, my marriage, my family. I’ve been to the darkest places my mind could take me. I’ve realised and witnessed the power and complexity of my mind and what it can conjure up and make me believe. It has pulled back the mask we show to the world and revealed the grit and determination I can find when my back is truly against the wall.

  It has shown me my weaknesses, my ugliest depths and my greatest fears. It has shown me the pure and potent ferociousness of the love I feel for my babies and the sacrifices I will make to protect them. It has shown me that in the face of our marriage vows – ‘for better or for worse’ – we have endured the ‘worse’ more fiercely and beautifully than even our ‘better’ times. It has shown we have chosen well. I am a survivor. We are survivors. We may be a little family, but we are mighty and we can get through anything together.

  For this I am truly grateful.

  Thanks to all that I have experienced, I am proud to be me. I am proud to be Jamie’s wife and to be the mummy of our two amazing little girls. I’m proud of our story so far and, more importantly, proud that our story is not at its end.

  IT’S NOT YOUR FAULT – A NOTE TO MY DAUGHTERS ON MY BATTLE WITH MY MENTAL HEALTH

  One of my most heart-crushing and soul-destroying fears that quite literally sucks the breath from my lungs is the thought that one day in the future, when my tiny humans learn about my experiences, they might think that me getting ill was somehow their fault.

  That I was ill because of them.

  I’m even hating myself for putting these words and thoughts down on paper. For breathing life into these words and making the potential hurt a reality.

  If you are reading this, somewhere in the future, darling girls, you listen to your mummy: No! NO! A BILLION times, NO!

  My mind broke down for a while after having you both and I lost my way. However, I never once lost sight of my love for you both. I loved you then as I do now with every ounce of who I am, every fibre of my being and with every pulse of the blood that flows through me. If I had been shown a glimpse before I was pregnant of what was going to happen to me after having children, I would still have gone ahead. Nothing would have deterred me. Nothing – not even my own downfall – would have got in my way of having you two in my life.

  My darling girls, you are my life force and quite simply my reason to be. You were my reason to be well. You were my reason to keep battling despite how much my demons were telling me to give up, that you would be better off without me. I survived not in spite of you but beacause of you.

  So just you know this, my girly swirlies, you hold your heads high and your hearts full, be proud of your mummy for battling and kicking the ass of this illness. Believe in the importance of fighting stigma, for breaking down social and emotional barriers so we are all more brave and more free to talk about the subjects we usually box up and hide away from the world. To speak up on subjects we feel passionate about and always believe in ourselves.

  Most importantly, please remember, above all else, the only thing you are responsible for when it comes to my illness is my surviving it.

  Love you in the whole wide world

  Mummy x

  CALLING TIME ON MY OVARIES – WHY I’M NOT GOING TO HAVE THE THIRD BABY I’VE ALWAYS WANTED

  I always thought we’d have three children and I’m slowly coming to terms with the fact that this is not a possibility. It’s a choice that has been taken out of my hands. It’s a choice that has been made, not because my body can no longer have children and not because we don’t want another tiny human in our lives. Quite the opposite, in fact.

  We have debated having a third baby over meals in restaurants, we’ve argued about it during road trips and we have cried about the loss of our dream of what our family would look like. We have ultimately weighed everything up and decided that our family will grow no more. It’s so hard, though, to get my heart to catch up to where my mind is. As, if I am being honest, I still feel as though someone is missing. When I’m walking with my two beautiful and healthy little girls, I sometimes find myself looking for my third tiny human and I am stopped in my tracks realising they are not here yet and that this ‘yet’ is by the day ever more likely not going to happen. When we are all together, I look for our missing person, the last piece of the puzzle that is our tiny family and which will make our little unit finally complete.

  Please, please don’t think me ungrateful for what I already have – two beautiful, happy and healthy children – and please don’t think I am being disrespectful to all the women out there who would do anything to be able to have one healthy child, let alone two or three. However, I had always believed in my very bones that I would be a mum of three tiny humans. It’s not a certain quota of girls versus boys, it isn’t a gender thing, a feeling that I have two girls, so the universe needs to grant me a boy. It is more than that. It is a deep-seated emotion and belief that our family has room for one more.

  Jamie and I have spoken about it at great length and our conversations always end with us both reluctantly agreeing that we would not survive a third war with my mental health. The fact that it is this old enemy of mine that has determined we won’t follow our original dream of having more children and has stolen this choice from us, is quite simply heartbreaking.

  You see, I feel like there is a voice deep in my soul telling me, ‘You’re not done yet. There is still someone waiting to arrive.’ These feelings, and this little voice inside me saying: ‘Don’t quit now’, I keep silencing and have played down to my husband as his mind is quite made up. Mine, though, is not. Oh, of course I say the words, trying to convince myself that we cannot have any more children, and that to put our little family and myself through all of that again would be downright insane and totally irresponsible. However, there is always this other little seed of a thought, that maybe, just maybe it wouldn’t come back again, or if it did, it wouldn’t come back as ferocious and strong as before. This time I would be better prepared. I would seek advice before getting pregnant, put all the right measures in place, and attend regular counselling – all just to prepare myself mentally. All to make sure I was mentally fit and strong enough for whatever lay ahead. This time I would do all I could and more to prepare myself and my husband. I would do everything I would have done, should have done the first time around. I would go into it fully prepared, fully armed and ready.

  But would this be enough?

  I am reading this back to myself and think I sound like the most selfish woman on the planet. That the thought I would even consider risking the future of our family is just plain irresponsible. And that I should just stop being so bloody greedy and be happy with my wonderful lot. And I am happy, ridiculously so when I think about us and our two tiny humans. But I am also ridiculously defiant, and angry at this illness (my old enemy) for taking this choice away from me and leaving me instead with the question that will remain with me for the rest of my days: ‘What if?’.

  HOW EVERY MUM CAN HELP TO END THE STIGMA OF MATERNAL MENTAL HEALTH

  Throughout my battles with my mental health, I have dealt with a variety of emotions, from the fiercest of anger and debilitating anxiety through to feeling nothing at all. As I’ve become stronger, so I have found my inner voice – and boy, is it demanding some answers. The person who has lain dormant, silenced by crippling anxiety and self-doubt, is now brushing herself down and bombarding me with a barrage of questions for which I hadn’t realised I needed the answers until now. Questions, I now realise, myself and every mum suffering from this awful illness need answering, if we are ever to recover fully. If we are ever to be fully prepared for everything that motherhood can entail.

  Questions ranging from the ones we hate to admit to for fear of sounding whiney and pathetic – Why me? What did I do to deserve this? – through to the ones that appear in your darkest of moments: How am I going to overcome this? Will it ever not be a part of my life? It
is only now my battles with my mental health are behind me, that I’m asking: How did this happen to me? Why was postnatal depression not even on my radar? Why had I never heard of postpartum psychosis? Why was my maternal mental health not even a consideration? This has inevitably led me to the questions: How could I have been so ignorant? And why did I not place any importance on being mentally prepared for motherhood?

  Herein lies the crux of the problem: the subject of maternal mental health is not on our radar. It is a subject we have only vaguely heard of in passing or touched upon briefly in mother-and-baby books. It is a subject we find too uncomfortable, too dark and too shameful to talk about. In our minds and in our culture, becoming a mother is a topic that should only be a positive one. A topic filled only with talk of baby names, growing bellies and hopes and dreams of the future. It is a subject we shouldn’t tarnish with talk of anxiety, depression, self-harm and trauma.

  As an expectant first-time mum, my mind and heart was filled with nothing but love and excitement for the tiny person growing inside me and a joy-filled anticipation for the amazing future we were going to have together. Was I wrong in thinking and feeling this? No. However, with the beauty of hindsight, I can see that I was not best armed for the reality of motherhood and all it had in store for me. Yes, I had a beautiful, healthy baby who I loved with every part of me, but I was also gifted postnatal depression and postpartum psychosis – for which I was underprepared due to my lack of awareness.

  The fear and misconception surrounding the area of maternal mental health illnesses is leaving thousands of mums like myself not only unarmed and underprepared, thanks to a lack of knowledge of mental health illnesses in motherhood, but also feeling alone and isolated. We are terrified about what is happening to us, we don’t understand why we are feeling the way we are and we are unaware of where to go for the right help and support. Unless this changes, how can we as women be fully prepared for motherhood? How can we as mums help ourselves, how can we help others without knowledge of these issues in the first place? One woman in five is diagnosed with a mental health issue following the birth of a child, but how can we recognise these issues in ourselves or in others if we don’t know how they manifest? Most importantly, how can we arm ourselves against maternal mental health issues and empower ourselves to ask for help if the stigma associated with them means that we can’t talk about them with our family, friends and health professionals?