Bonkers Page 16

  The answer is: We can’t.

  What a truly terrifying acknowledgement this is. With thousands of women giving birth in the UK every year, it is shocking to realise that many of these women will be entering into motherhood with no knowledge of maternal mental health issues, and will then, unfortunately, become one of the one in ten diagnosed with one. Without the armour of knowledge, how are these women expected first to recognise they may have a problem and then to know where to turn to for help and support?

  So who is responsible for putting maternal mental health on our agenda? I am a huge believer that more money needs to be spent and more resources need to be allocated to provide all mums with the support and care they need when they enter into motherhood, whether for the first or a repeat time. However, I am also a huge believer of the philosophy ‘If you want a job doing properly, then do it yourself.’ So I am going to be bold and stick my head above the parapet and say that the people who should be responsible for making all mums and mums to be aware of their maternal mental well being is, in fact, US.

  Every mum who has suffered and overcome a maternal mental health illness. Every mum who is currently suffering. Every mum who has a friend or family member who has been a victim. Every mum who up until now was unaware of maternal mental health or the high probability of developing a problem in motherhood.

  Every mum needs to start talking openly on the subject of mental health. Every mum needs to be brave enough to talk openly and honestly about their own experiences. Every mum needs to embrace the subject of mental health rather than sweep it under the proverbial carpet. Each and every one of us needs to arm ourselves and others with the knowledge of maternal mental health illnesses, how to recognise them and how to overcome them.

  With every conversation we have, every article we write, every piece of information we read, every friend we support and every question we ask, we are one step closer to abolishing the stigma attached to it and ensuring there are no chinks in the armour we all need to survive the battle that is motherhood. By treating our maternal mental health as importantly as our physical health, we are doing all we can to ensure every mum is mentally fit for motherhood.

  We need to change our mindset and reprogram our view of motherhood. Yes, becoming a mother is a true gift and our tiny humans are amazing. However, our view of motherhood, our expectations and portrayals of it, need to be better balanced and give a truer reflection of its realities without judgement. We as women need to feel empowered to talk about our experiences of motherhood, and the magical and the challenging, the ups and the downs should be given equal space and column inches.

  As a mother of two daughters who will hopefully one day be lucky enough to go on to be mothers themselves, I feel it is my duty to bang the awareness drum of maternal mental health as loud and as clear as possible. My promise to myself, my daughters and every mum is to keep banging this drum until it penetrates the consciousness of society and every mum worldwide.

  Who else fancies joining me in making some noise?

  *If you would like to show your support for The Every Mum Movement I’ve set up and if you share the belief that Every Mum Deserves the Right to Enjoy Motherhood, you can find out more on how to join the movement on page 7.

  CHAPTER 12

  FEEDING YOUR TINY HUMAN

  Why is it that every time we enter a conversation about how we choose to feed our tiny humans we feel as though we are entering shark-infested waters?

  Why can’t we all just agree to feed our tiny humans and get on with it? No discussion, no debate, no mud- slinging. All just safe and secure in our own choices, the most important thing being that we are actually feeding our tiny humans?

  I have had a mixed bag of feeding experiences when it came to my two tiny humans, both overeager to get here and arriving six weeks early. Unfortunately, they hadn’t given my boobs the heads-up, so to get them working and ready to feed was an uphill battle each time.

  The first time was much harder than the second. At one point, I was crying with relief when I managed to express 2.5 ml of milk (a combined effort from both boobs); another time, I was left crying with despair after fruitlessly pumping for almost an hour, only to be told by the midwife that it wasn’t working because in my exhausted state I’d put the machine on the wrong setting and she’d only just realised. If I hadn’t felt so utterly forlorn, I swear I would have strangled both her and myself with the bloody tubes!

  Apart from that one time, though, I did receive amazing support from the midwives when trying to breast-feed. There was no pressure only to breast-feed, and no pressure to stop and give my baby a bottle. I don’t know whether this level of support was because both girls were born premature and so more time was spent trying to help and encourage me to breast-feed, or because we needed to make sure my tiny humans were feeding in whatever form that feeding took, meaning there was no pressure and no judgement since my milk hadn’t come in properly.

  The experiences with my two children were extremely different. After the birth of my eldest, I spent the first week of her life in shock. The birth had left me traumatised and I was in agony, not being able to walk more than a few paces at a time. If I’m being totally honest, I felt incredibly alone and lost – despite being in hospital surrounded by my hubby and a ward full of neonatal doctors and nurses. Somehow, I just couldn’t find my bearings or manage to find my footing.

  Everything felt alien and out of my control, and it seemed as though I was failing at everything. My baby had arrived earlier than she should have, after a birth I had not planned, and now that she was here I was not able to function as I wanted and as I had expected since I was in excruciating pain every time I picked her up. My milk hadn’t come in yet, so I was not able even to fulfill the one job that I was supposed to be able to do – feed her!

  Until I had my first tiny human, I had imagined breast-feeding would come naturally to me. (God knows why I had this notion!) I felt that, yes, it was going to be hard work but with a bit of perseverance it would all work out fine. It started off incredibly well, luring me into a false sense of mummyhood. My daughter, despite being premature, was a good size (5¼ pounds), had passed all the tests and needed no persuasion from me or the midwife when it came to breast-feeding : she latched on the moment she was placed on me, and stayed there for the next hour. However, following this first glorious moment where I thought that was it, we’d cracked it without even trying, things didn’t carry on to plan. (My mum-of-two self is now saying: ‘No shit, Sherlock!’.)

  Despite first impressions, my milk just wasn’t there yet properly and so followed hours of my boobs, and in particular my now incredibly sore nipples, being manhandled by any midwife going. This was accompanied by the relentless feeding and pumping schedule, trying to feed her from each boob for twelve minutes each (a random number, I know), which just exhausted my tiny human who should still have been cocooned inside me. This was then followed by bottle-feeding her the miniscule amount of milk I’d managed to produce at the last pump session and then topping her up with preemie formula (either by tube or bottle). Then I would place her back into her cot on wheels and as she slept I would begin the pumping sessions again, pumping for twenty minutes on each side. By the time I had squeezed out 5 ml from each boob and handed it to the midwife, I would then pace my way back slowly to our bed and lie there for around ten minutes before the whole two-hourly schedule started again. These feeding shifts were exhausting and made me feel like a failure: not only had my body let her down by not being able to keep her safe and where she belonged for the full nine months, but now after ejecting her from the only home she knew, it could not feed her the milk she needed to ensure she was strong and healthy enough for us to leave the hospital.

  The nights sitting on our own in the brightly lit feeding room in the neonatal unit, trying to get her to latch on through the pain, to manoeuvre her into a position comfortable for both of us, to keep her awake so she had a full feed, were exhausting. I would sit there
watching her feed from me but with no idea if she was even getting any milk or how much, and then feeling like a failure when I had to resort to a bottle and could produce only 3 ml of milk despite pumping for an hour. Exhausted, in pain and feeling lonely, watching this little person sleep (a little person who now miraculously belonged to me and who was my sole responsibility), I was overwhelmed and at times off kilter.

  I desperately wanted breast-feeding to work. I felt like a fake mum when it didn’t. And even worse when I returned home, and after trying to keep up the two-hour change–feed–bottle–pump schedule that was keeping me confined to the house, decided that I had to stop breast-feeding and move her over to formula.

  Friends around me were breast-feeding exclusively, and the fact that I couldn’t and had reached the point where I didn’t want to try anymore made me feel less of a mum. To this day, I feel uncomfortable talking about how long I breastfed her for, feeling as though I let her down for managing to keep going for only six weeks.

  However, one thing I do hold onto is the last time I breastfed her. I made sure it was a really lovely moment. Just her and me in the house, together on the big comfy armchair in her nursery. No noise. No distraction. Just the two of us, looking out of the window onto a crisp snowy day. This moment was magical. This moment I hold onto and will never forget. It’s the memory I use as my armour against the negative memories of feeling I wasn’t doing a good enough job during those first few weeks of her life.

  Without knowing it, I was in a really precarious place after having Éva. My mental health was in need of support, and my inability to breast-feed easily helped to compound my fears that I was not a good enough mum. By the time my second tiny human came along, I was determined to do better at breast-feeding. I’d also read that mums who breastfed were less likely to get postnatal depression. This knowledge proved to be a double-edged sword for me. On one side I was intrigued to learn that it could help and desperate to try anything that would keep the Dark Stranger from my door. Once I began breast-feeding, I was then scared to stop, fearful that my illness would come back full throttle and it would be my own fault as I should have breastfed for longer.

  Thankfully, the second time around, breast-feeding came easier to me. The birth had been easier. I could actually walk (bonus) and wasn’t in excruciating pain every time I moved (double bonus). And despite her also coming six weeks early my milk came easier. I was more confident in my abilities and more relaxed about everything. It was in its simplest of terms, just easier.

  Because she was early, she was initially fed through a tube that went up her tiny nose and into her tiny tummy. This gave her the breast milk I was able to express and was topped up with preemie formula if I’d not produced enough. This time around, though, when I could manage to get only 5 ml (despite pumping forever) I felt a huge sense of achievement and pride rather than the failure I’d felt like the first time around. I felt that I was doing all I could to get her strong and healthy, and knowing that she was getting even a few millilitres of my milk made me feel that I was being the best mum I could be. Now that I knew how hard breast-feeding can be and that having a preemie baby means producing milk is more difficult, this knowledge helped me to be less hard on myself and helped keep me mentally strong. As she was born early she needed help breathing for the first twenty-four hours and was kept in an incubator in a neonatal unit for the next forty-eight, which meant that for the first day and a half of her life I was unable to hold her or have her with me. The act of expressing every two hours became my way of being there for her until I could hold her in my arms and have her with me at all times. It was my way of being a mummy to her. So anything I could produce for her made me feel amazing.

  We eventually got to the point where my boobs started to work, and by the time we left hospital she was breast-feeding every four hours. Of course, all of this went tits up as soon as we left hospital, with the lovely four-hourly routine going down to every hour or every time she cried. I felt determined that I would not be giving up – even after three full days of her feeding on the hour every hour, when my husband woke to find both her and me asleep on the sofa where we’d been since 2 a.m. and said: ‘You need to stop breast-feeding, It’s killing you.’

  With a demonic roar, I growled back, ‘I am NOT stopping and do not EVER ask me to do that again.’

  He was only saying it out of concern, as he was so worried about me getting ill again. However, I was fiercely protective about my right to carry on. I loved the fact that I was doing something for her that no one else could. That I was the one keeping her alive, well and fed. After feeling like such a failure the first time around I was making up for that, paying my dues and proving that I was maternal and I was a good mum. I was no longer a let-down.

  However, here is where the problems started.

  Breast-feeding brought with it a plethora of emotions and feelings for me, ranging from feeling like Mother Nature, the life-giving queen of the universe one minute to a slummy mummy the next simply for fancying a glass of wine.

  I also felt pangs of resentment and thoughts of: Oh my God, what more can I give? I want to put myself and what I want first again for once. I’ve spent the last several months giving up things I love, and now you’re here I’m still the one giving things up. I just want to have a glass of wine and not feel like a terrible mum.

  These thoughts were all juxtaposed with feeling like a selfish, abhorrent demon who didn’t deserve to be a mother, let alone enjoy a glass of wine or a night out.

  It’s such a crazy ride of emotions, feeling almost superhuman as the life giver and provider of the only food your baby needs, all from your own body, to the guilty thoughts of wanting your body back, wanting a glass of wine, wanting to wear underwired bras and not wanting to smell of stale milk. Did these thoughts make me a bad mum? And why is it that we feel we can’t talk about them?

  I can remember sharing the physical challenges of breast-feeding, sore nipples, expressing and feed schedules openly with friends and family. However, when it came to the other emotions it stirred up in me – well, those I kept all to myself because they made me feel like I was a bad mum. I thought that if anyone else heard them they would think I was a bad mum too.

  Looking back now that I am five years down the line of motherhood, I ask why. Why should we feel as though we can’t air all our thoughts on the matter? That we can’t talk about all the emotions that are being stirred up inside us without fear of being judged? Surely, if we did, we would be more prepared, feel less isolated and be kinder to ourselves. We would realise we are not bad mums, just normal ones going through normal emotions and thoughts. We would all be more mentally fit for motherhood.

  With the benefit of the kind of mummy hindsight you get from being two years further on, I want to go back, give myself a huge hug, pour myself a large G & T and tell myself that I had already done enough. I’d already fulfilled my awesome mum quota by growing and then pushing a tiny human out into this world. I had already done enough by loving this new little stranger with such a ferocity that her needs now instinctively came before my own. I’d already done enough and proved I was a good enough mum simply by worrying that I was not.

  That, in a nipple-shaped nutshell, really sums up the fierce emotions breast-feeding conjured up in me, which had me veering from wanting to give my all and breast-feed for as long as I could to wanting to run to a darkened room, take a nap and not have to worry about someone wanting yet another piece of me because surely I had already given enough.

  God, it’s a real head-fuck, isn’t it?! I often wonder: Do other mums feel like this? Do mums who go on to breast-feed for a year or more ever have these feelings and what do they to get over them? Sometimes it makes me think that maybe I was just too selfish. And isn’t that awful to think about yourself? As you can see, this is still something that plays on my mind to this day.

  Isn’t it crazy? That after you’ve spent the best part of a year dedicated to the wellbeing of someone else,
after putting your body through childbirth, after worrying about every little thing and making sure your unborn tiny human’s needs are all met over and above your own, that you still feel like you are a selfish and unfit mother if you dare to let your mind wander down the path of thinking what would be easier for you?

  The legacy of breast-feeding for me is that I still have to fight the feeling of being judged on the length of time I fed both the girls. When asked how long I fed my eldest, I find myself answering one and a half months rather than six weeks because I think that sounds longer, and I’m always quick to add that she was premature and my milk hadn’t come in, and that I had PND and my hormones were everywhere – all as a form of defence. But defence against what, I hear myself now ask? I guess defence in case the person asking the question will judge me for not being mum enough to do it for longer, will assume I didn’t care enough to try for longer, to persevere. But thinking openly and honestly now, I think it’s mainly defence against myself and the pressure I put on myself. I’d see all the posts on social media celebrating mummies getting their silver, golden or ruby boobies and think, ‘God, did me and my six weeks even make it to tin?’.