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  The panic attacks continued sporadically once we left hospital, but the panic was constant, leaving me just teetering on the edge of control. There was no off switch. I remember once describing to my husband how I felt as though all the atoms in my body were shaking violently and consistently underneath the surface of my skin. That I could almost hear them clattering and crashing up against each other, sending violent ripples along the surface. Sometimes I would expect to look down at my arms and see my skin rippling like ferocious waves crashing against the shoreline of my wrist. It made me feel weirdly exhilarated, moving around at warp speed, and utterly exhausted – all at the same time. It gave me the running-on-empty energy to blitz the house, sterilise all the surfaces and bottles, do all the washing, rearrange her clothes drawers and do a workout all whilst she napped. However, this supercharged efficiency never allowed me the time to eat or rest – the two most important things I should have been doing as a new mum whilst my tiny human slept.

  In fact, come to think of it now, I never sat down. Ever. I did everything standing up, completing different jobs that had to be ticked off my never-ending To Do list. I rushed around manically to complete all my chores whilst she slept, fuelled by my belief that if I didn’t complete everything I would have failed at being a good mum. I never sat down. I never rested. I never questioned my behaviour. This was my life.

  This was every mum’s life, wasn’t it?

  • Not wanting visitors

  One of the strangest things – one of the biggest signs that something was wrong – was that following the birth of Éva and even whilst we were still in hospital I didn’t want any visitors. I call this ‘strange’ because everyone else I know who’s had a baby could not wait to show them off to the world and have their family and friends meet them as soon as possible. But after having Éva I just did not want anyone to visit us. This wasn’t something I ever admitted or voiced out loud. I just engineered it so that it didn’t happen.

  My family were all back in the UK and already had flights booked for a couple of weeks before her actual due date. As Éva arrived six weeks early, this meant that it worked out that we had around two weeks after she was born until they were due to see us. They asked if they could come out straightaway, but I managed to somehow fob them off by saying that we were still in hospital and that it would be more helpful if they waited and were there with us when we were out of hospital. That worked.

  Friends who lived locally tried their hardest to visit, but having a premature baby made it easy to discourage them – due to feed times, tests, me being tired, etc.

  A good friend of mine (who’d also had her little girl six weeks premature, just a few weeks before me) was desperate to come and visit us. She wanted to meet Éva and make sure I was OK. However, all she got from me was total radio silence or excuses from me via my hubby. Several months later she admitted to me that she found my reluctance to have visitors a bit odd and then became increasingly worried about it, thinking that something wasn’t quite right. I then admitted to her that she had been right and that it was a sign of how ill I was that I didn’t want to see anyone.

  At the time, I didn’t know why I didn’t want to see people. All I knew was that the anxiety residing in the pit of my stomach was so strong that I had to do whatever I could to get out of having visitors – and that I was so ashamed to be feeling this way, I never voiced these fears to anyone.

  Whilst we were in hospital, I had a grand total of three visitors over the two weeks we were there. This all now feels desperately sad, and all I want to do is go back to that hospital and give myself a huge hug, to call my mum and my forceful friend and beg them to come and see me, beg them not to listen to my excuses but just to barge their way into my hospital room and give me the reassurance and support I didn’t know I needed but for which I was so desperate.

  During these early days, I was in such a mess – in retrospect, the most shocking realisation is that it happened so suddenly and so completely that I had no time to prepare for it. There was no slow burn, no gradual build-up. I had my baby, I spent two hours with her in the labour room following her birth, I left the room and was wheeled back to my bed (whilst my hubby took Éva for a few more routine tests) and then I was given some food and told to sleep. I ate. I closed my eyes. I went to sleep. I woke up and the illness was there and I was powerless to recognise it – and therefore, unable to do anything about it, before it was too late.

  Writing about these early days has made me feel quite sick to my stomach. Remembering that desperate and anxiety-riddled state makes me feel – even now, four years on – as though I could physically throw up, just to eject the memories. As I am writing this at home, alone, I am crying. Crying with sorrow for the absolute wretchedness this new mum went through, all on her own, trapped inside her own mind, a mind that had turned against her. It has the well and recovered me asking: Hadn’t she got enough on her plate? Why could she have not been left alone to enjoy motherhood the way she had envisioned? Why had no one warned her? Why was she left to enter motherhood without the knowledge that becoming a mum can affect your mental health? Why did she not know that there was such a thing as maternal mental health?

  My heart aches with sorrow when I remember that new mum, sitting in hospital with her new premature baby, in crippling pain, trying to keep a grip on her own sanity and wondering why she was not feeling as ecstatically happy and content as she always felt she would feel after becoming a mum. Waiting hour after hour for something to click into place, for the cogs of her emotions to start to turn so she could stop feeling so empty, so desolate and so alone and isolated. Stop feeling so numb, and start feeling something. Anything.

  The mind is a silent and cruel, cruel bully. Unless we are armed with the correct knowledge, we will not be properly equipped to stand up to it. So when I look back on that mum and her guarded smiles, I see someone caught in a trap, having chunks of herself being unceremoniously torn away. No one can see what is taking place. No one is privy to her suffering – not even her closest of family, despite being right next to her whilst the attacks are taking place. She herself cannot scream for help; she is bound and gagged by perceptions – her own and society’s – of how she should be coping. She sits there, smiling whilst watching pieces of herself, pieces that she treasures the most and which make her who she is, being stripped away and set alight. And she has no idea if she will ever have them or anything close to them again.

  All this. All this during the happiest time of her life. How bloody cruel and unjust is this illness?

  IF THIS IS YOU

  If you are currently this mum, please know that you are not alone and that you have done nothing wrong. You do not deserve to be going through what you are going through. You do deserve to be well again. You do deserve to be experiencing the motherhood you had dreamt about. You do deserve the right to enjoy motherhood and there is support out there to help you reclaim this right – see page 236–page 238.

  GOING HOME WITH A BABY AND PND

  The first two weeks at home after being discharged from hospital are now (as they are for pretty much any new mum) a bit of a blur – a mix of sleepless nights, feed schedules, trying to breast-feed and crippling pain as I tried to recover from the birth.

  It’s fair to say that those first moments at home didn’t quite live up to my expectations. Pre-baby I thought that being back at home would be filled with visiting friends, showing her off to the world and taking lots of walks with her in the brand new and swanky buggy. However, due to the amount of pain (thanks to the stitches), I could literally only walk to the toilet and back before I was wincing in agony. So I spent the first part of being at home literally cocooned with just Éva and me. Home was where I felt safest, just the two of us, fathoming out our routine and each other. Just being us. This is when the illness really started to take hold, and what should have been the warning signs of the illness became the norm. Instead of standing out like a sore thumb against the backdrop of my new
mum life, they were part of everyday life.

  • Feeling overprotective

  My parents came to visit two weeks in – and as only parents can they picked up on a couple of things. These, if they had been probed further or viewed more continuously, would have highlighted that things were a little off. Now, I don’t know if my parents can even remember either of these two moments; to the outside world they were so small and insignificant, but to me it felt as though someone was scraping their finger over an open, raw wound.

  The first moment involved my mum. It was the first time she had met Éva and, like any new grandparent meeting her new grandchild, she wanted to give her a cuddle and hold her. It was the first time I’d realised how difficult it was for me to hand her over to someone else (even my own mum). Watching someone else hold her, be responsible for her, sent my anxiety levels into overdrive and made me feel sick to my stomach. I remember the moment so well, me sitting on the sofa, Éva (safely) in my arms and my mum (the woman I trust most in the world) sitting opposite me, looking at me expectantly, with the unspoken request in the air of ‘Please can I hold her?’. I felt frozen, could feel the warm and reassuring weight of Éva in my arms and was unable to move. The rational side of my brain which was still functioning (if only on a part-time basis) was trying to get the message to my arms to pass her over, but I just couldn’t summon them to move. It was probably only a moment that lasted no more than a minute, but it seemed to go on for an eternity as I battled with myself internally.

  It took my mum to say the words ‘Do you not want me to hold her?’ to snap me (and my disabled arms) into action and hand her over whilst the desperate person inside me screamed:

  ‘NO! No, I don’t want you or anyone else to hold her and I don’t know why. But just hand her back to me right now before something awful happens to her.’

  I went through this, to varying degrees of hell, during every visit we had and every social gathering I attended. Everyone (naturally) wanted to give her a cuddle while I was desperately going out of my mind and dreading every request, until I could stand no more and would do anything I could to escape the situation. Often I found myself so heartbroken about having to hand her over that I would have to leave the room just to be able to endure it.

  • Scared to let the world in

  My dad was the one who touched upon another elephant in the room when he turned up one day to the house and asked me why the lounge curtains were still drawn? It was nearing lunchtime and a beautiful crisp and sunny winter’s day. This simple question sent me reeling in panic. I felt as though I was on the verge of being found out – though for what I couldn’t quite figure out. I remember feeling that with this simple question my dad was unlocking the door to an ugly part of me and revealing it for all to see.

  At the time, these feelings confused me, but they were so unnerving that I felt I had to cover myself and fix the mask that had slipped. I remember replying as nonchalantly as possible that I didn’t even realise they were still shut – silly and tired mummy that I was – and went and opened them whilst rolling my eyes at myself.

  Little did my mum and dad know that those two simple and unassuming questions hit at the heart of the illness that was growing stronger every day, and trying to stake a claim over me.

  I was scared of anyone else holding her and I was becoming increasingly scared to leave the house and let the outside world in. Keeping the curtains closed and shut was keeping the world out, keeping the dangers out and my new family safe. Trying to open those curtains that day and handing Éva over to others to hold went against everything that my body was telling me to do.

  I know they would never want me to feel I had to apologise to them for any of this. However, I am sorry, Mum and Dad, for not having the words to tell you what I was going through. I’m sorry that I didn’t share my illness and my depths of despair with you. I’m sorry for shutting you out and for putting on a show for you that everything was OK, when it wasn’t. But please take solace in the fact that you two were the ones who instinctively picked up on two of my biggest fears back in those first weeks. I know deep down that if I hadn’t been living in a different country to you, that if you had been seeing me more regularly, you would have eventually figured out and voiced that something was not right with me.

  • Dealing with visitors

  As we were living abroad, the visiting period from UK family and friends was intense. Expectations for me to be a social butterfly were high, everyone pushing to spend as much time with my new tiny human as possible – dropping in unannounced, asking to babysit overnight and commenting how little they had held her or suggesting that I was being ‘unsociable’ for wanting some downtime with just me and my new baby.

  Looking back, it was one of the most horrendous times. My undiagnosed illness was chipping away at my confidence, leaving me unable to stand up for myself or to put my needs first and say when enough had become enough. Too much.

  Needless to say, I breathed an almighty sigh of relief when they were finally over. As difficult as these few weeks were, they also taught me some invaluable lessons – which eventually made me resolute about how I would do things differently if we were lucky enough to have a second baby, and which have made me passionate in my belief of how new mums should be treated.

  As a new mum in the early throes of motherhood, we should not be put under any additional pressure to be a certain way, to attend a social gathering or to pass our new babies around as much as possible, if we don’t want to do so. Those early weeks are some of the most precious and most vulnerable for every new mum, and all mums (whether ill or not) need unconditional support, care and space to figure out their new roles and lives – no judgement.

  Some mums don’t have the energy or confidence to voice when enough is enough. So it’s up to the rest of us to be sympathetic and supportive and to treat them with the respect they deserve for the amazing act of growing and bringing a tiny life into this world. No one knows the complexity of emotions running through the mind of a new mum. No one knows what she may be battling internally or feeling overwhelmed by. We all need to remember that every new mum is a goddess in her own right, she is the queen of her little universe and deserves nothing but our love, admiration and support.

  • Leaving the house

  Leaving the house during these first few weeks at home was physically impossible. I remember thinking I needed to pull myself together and stop being such a wimp, and just get myself and our new family out of the house for our first walk. So on one sunny morning, I decided we were going to take her for her first walk – and it was going to be amazing. I made it twenty metres down the road, grimacing in agony with every shuffle, holding onto the buggy for support. Then my hubby took one look at me and asked if I was OK; I’d started turning green. I admitted through bitter tears that I thought I was going to pass out. As much as I wanted to, I could not take another step. We turned ourselves around and returned home, me feeling like a terrible mum because I’d failed at what should have been one of the easiest and most fun things to do as a new mum – to take my daughter on her first walk.

  I tried to reassure myself that, once I’d recovered physically, everything would be OK and I’d go walking with her every day. What I didn’t foresee was that once the physical pain barrier had been lifted and I could walk without wincing, the mental barrier on most days would render me incapable of leaving the house for fear of something awful happening to her. There were days that I couldn’t scale that mental barrier, but on the days when I did finally make it out of the house I would be racked with such anxiety that every nerve ending in my body was on high alert to the slightest noise or movement that might cause potential danger and the death of my precious baby girl.

  Now, we were living in a mountain resort in the French Alps at the height of winter, so as you can imagine, navigating steep icy paths sent my fear and anxiety into overdrive: my knuckles were white as I gripped the buggy with pure terror over what would happen if I fell a
nd let go. Every walk resulted in me feeling sick and left me with hands that ached constantly from how tight I was gripping the handle. White-knuckle rollercoaster rides had nothing on me and my wintery buggy walks.

  During these walks my little girl would be sleeping peacefully, blissfully unaware that her sleep-deprived mummy was fighting down the fear rising like bile in the back of her throat. I envisioned the buggy and my baby slipping from my vicelike grip and plummeting to her doom or a car losing its control and crashing into us on the pavement. So vivid and real a fear was this that I started to avoid walking along pavements on busy roads. Instead I chose the quieter roads that would take me safely down to the river running through our town. There, surrounded by silence, I would push myself and the buggy through the snow-laden paths: my tiny human was wrapped up warm and snuggly against the winter elements while I walked so hard I would finish drenched in sweat and fighting to catch my breath in the ice cold mountain air. Sweaty, but safe: mission accomplished. I’d managed yet another walk without causing the death of my baby. I could relax.

  • Wanting to escape and outrun my mind

  I now realise that walking through the snowy wilderness, my tiny human sleeping as I methodically trudged through or over snow drifts as fast as I could, was my form of escape. And when I say escape I actually mean it. It was my way of escaping from my mind – or at least was a determined attempt to outrun it. I felt tormented. I could never switch off. My mind was always racing. It was filled with random thoughts and fears, ranging from feeding schedules to sterilising bottles, from how best to rearrange the nursery drawers (for the tenth time that week) to how I was going to prevent the death of my baby. But whilst I was walking along the river, surrounded by nothing but white – snow-covered trees and glistening icicle-edged peace, – it was just me and my tiny human. I would get on that snowy path, my nose frozen, my heart starting to race, and I would push my legs and my body to move as fast as I could, as I tried to outrun the noise in my head – if only for a few moments. To run and get ahead of it, to set myself free, to escape and enjoy the silence.