Motherhood

Halos and hailstones

Meditation, Mental health, Motherhood

We can be saved in tiny ways every day by people we meet, even just once.

Five years ago, a month after the birth of my first son, I was saved like this by a midwife at the Coombe hospital. I’d had four weeks of steadily worsening mental health. I knew a lot about depression – but this was something very different. My brain was being bombarded by a relentless onslaught of intrusive, nasty thoughts about harming my baby. These thoughts weren’t just occurring, say, every 10 minutes or so. They were happening every moment, every millisecond, with such frequency and force that I could not speak.

I didn’t understand what it was but I knew I was in trouble. I went back to the hospital and sat there. Words were not coming out, but I was crying. A lot.

This midwife took me into a small office, and said: ‘Just trust me. Do something with me, for a moment.’ I had no clue what it was at the time but I did what she said. I thought about my feet, I thought about my legs, I thought about my stomach, my heart, my breath. I followed her words and for a few minutes – moments really – I found absolute respite. Peace. It was Leonard Cohen’s Anthem, the crack: there is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in. Just enough light seeped in so I knew the dark could not end me. I went home to my baby, called my husband. He came home.

I know now that what the midwife was doing was something called a body scan. She had just completed training in mindfulness. She was able to help me slip out of my broken mind and into the comforting solidity of my body. She saved me, on that day.

I can’t tell you her name because I didn’t ask. She is one of the beautiful, hardworking midwives who save people like me, every single day.

I want to thank her.

Conversations with my body at 6am

Motherhood

Mind: Good morning. Have a green smoothie please.

Body: Ugh, no thanks. I don’t want a mucky green smoothie for breakfast. Smoothies aren’t normal anyway. Did we evolve to drink smoothies? No. Did they have blenders in the Paleolithic era? No. I’ll have a coffee please. Scrub the Paleolithic era comment, that doesn’t work here. Look, just give me some coffee. Black coffee.

Mind: Ok – how about a celery juice then? That’s a bit of a trend at the minute. It will probably change your life if you were to make me a straight-up celery juice, this morning and every morning for the rest of time. Something about salts pulling toxins out of your body. Something about that.

Body: A celery juice would make me puke. I’ll have a coffee. Black coffee. Lots of it. Whatever gets me through, right?

Mind: Sigh. Look, you’ll have to have something healthy. Anything. Will you take some of those chia seeds sprinkled over something?

Body: No. Can you put the coffee machine on? I just need a coffee. Like, yesterday. What time is it? 6.10am? That’s ridiculous. That’s too early. I can’t even eat at that time anyway.

Mind: A banana? Some blueberries with yoghurt and some crushed flax seeds on top? Ok, Weetabix. Even just Weetabix then. You can have it with real milk this morning, not fakey milk.

Body: For the love of all that is good in the world will you just give me a goddam coffee, make it strong, I’m knackered, I’ve been up all night feeding or tending to a small child or peeing. Just give me the coffee. NOW.

Mind: Alright, this is the last time though. Tomorrow I’m going to make you have that green smoothie. You’ve got all the gear, you have to use it.

Body: (Drinking coffee, triumphant bells play in background, angels sing Hallelujah) Thank you! Bless you! The day can begin! I knew I could count on you, Mind! Let’s do this again tomorrow.

ducklings

All these things are things

Mental health, Motherhood

So: prenatal depression is a thing. Prenatal anxiety is also a thing. Postnatal depression, tick, that’s a thing. And pregnancy and postnatal OCD. Postnatal anxiety, yep. Postnatal post-traumatic stress disorder, yes, that is also a thing. Some women are also diagnosed with bipolar mood disorders for the first time during pregnancy or the postnatal period. Postpartum psychosis – utterly horrifying – is also a thing.

I’ve had prenatal depression, prenatal OCD, prenatal anxiety, postnatal anxiety, postnatal depression and a truly debilitating, disgusting and distressing bout of postnatal OCD which, although very manageable now, has never fully gone away.

The reason it is so important to talk about these conditions is that lives are at stake. The lives of children, the lives of their mothers. Mothers are at risk of killing themselves because of these disorders. Mothers who show symptoms or who are attempting to tell you that they have it need to be treated with kid gloves. We all need to watch new mothers closely. And not just immediately after the birth. For a long time after the birth. These disorders can last for years after the babies have been born.

I could not communicate my postnatal mental disorder to anyone. I tried, but I couldn’t. I was too embarrassed and I was too ashamed. I was terrified that no-one would understand. I was scared that someone might even take my baby away from me. That I didn’t deserve to be a mother.

Thank God for the internet. Googling what was going on in my head and finding out that other mothers suffered from it too, gave me the courage, finally, to tell a doctor what was going on.

I got help. You can too.



Swindled

Motherhood

When I imagined being pregnant, I was that barefoot woman, possibly doing some gardening while wearing a flowing, floral smock dress. My bump was neat and honestly, it was the prettiest bump you ever did see. I was glowing, the most beautiful I’d ever been, there was just something about me, you know? I was glorious.*

The reality was very different.

My bump appeared almost on conception. It was remarkable. I started vomiting immediately. I couldn’t get any glow going because I only wanted to eat salt and vinegar crisps and those weird small processed Babybel cheeses. I grew rapidly and felt gross, always. I felt guilty for not thoroughly enjoying being pregnant when it had taken me five years to conceive. My mood swings were volcanic. I cried a lot. It was like my body was turning against me, up in arms against a tiny invader. In my second trimester, my libido was savage but because I was being so hateful to my husband, sex was just not going to happen.

Did I mention my bump was almost comically large?

I grew, and I grew, then I read a lot of books about having a baby. Every book in the history of having a baby, even the weird 70s ones with graphic, over-sharing illustrations, I read those books. All of the books. I listened to mind-numbingly boring recordings, trying to hypnotise myself into a sense of calm. I even put evening primrose oil up my vagina at the end (that’s an actual thing). I planned a home birth. How the Gods laughed!

Nothing went as planned. Not even one thing.

*Disclaimer: There are many women who do pregnancy really well. I’ve seen them up close.

emperor penguins are like toddlers

Captive

Motherhood

Parents, all over the country: Are you living in fear? Are you being held to ransom? Are your captors very short and very loud?

Do you tiptoe around them so they don’t lose it and yell at you? Do they pull your hair and swing off your legs and grab at your boobs? Are you… *glances around furtively* …Are you worried about telling them what you really think of their clinically insane behavior? Do you sometimes tell lies and give them what they want just so the persecution will pause just for… One. Second.

Do you feel like crying because the roaring and the bullying has been relentless, for days on end? Are you afraid of their crazy mood swings? Are you concerned that you won’t be able to understand exactly what they want you to do and then you will be left sucker-punched by the force of their rage?

Do you sometimes think about giving up? To slip, relieved, into a vortex of meek Yeses and absent-minded servitude? To finally succumb to their maniacal tyranny? To let them rule, tiny emperors, and be your bosses forever and ever until the end of time?

Don’t. I see you.

Moles

Meditation, Mental health, Motherhood

There is a distinctly non-spiritual reason why I decided to start meditating every day. I read that meditation can give you deeper rest than sleep.

For four years, I had been either pregnant or breastfeeding. I was tired and needed more rest. I’m not a morning person anyway and now brutal, unasked for dawns invaded seven or eight times a night. I woke to feed my youngest child, or to soothe my grouchy middle child or to schooch (grudgingly) over in bed to let the eldest child snuggle up.

I started to do strange things. I’d put the milk in the cupboard instead of the fridge. Once, I glanced at the oven, yelped, grabbed the kids and ran out into the street in my pyjamas. I saw fire. It was just the oven light. Another time, I put the electric kettle on and left the room, to swiftly smell smoke and plastic as it melted on the gas hob. I needed to rest my brain. It wasn’t working. I had three small boys to look after.

The word exhaustion is used so much in tandem with parenting that it has lost its impact. People don’t feel the weight of that word anymore, they don’t see the paper-thin grey around the eyes of the person saying it. It’s not tiredness, it’s not fatigue, it is the king of the states of unrest: Exhaustion. Your brain is slipping out on you. You aren’t taking care of it. It’s trying to make an escape.

Meditation helps. It faces up to the exhaustion and it says: Your number is up. It’s time to rest.

meditation makes you like a rock

Yet

Meditation, Motherhood

‘Answer the why, and we’ll naturally find more courage when it comes to following through on the how.’

Light Watkins wrote this and as soon as I read it, I wrote down why I needed to seek out a particular meditation teacher at a particularly inconvenient time. All the logistics were against me – I was still bruised from the birth of my third son, breastfeeding incessantly, the teacher was in another country, it seemed insane to pay someone to teach me silence, my husband was working 20 hours out of every 24 – but when I made the decision to do it, everything fell into place. Briefly, my life became like a Disney movie, where the heroine clicks her fingers and her desires appear in technicolor across the screen.

It was snowing and viciously cold outside, but I strapped my baby to me and got on a plane. The tiny, mewling little thing stayed cocooned close to me through the next three days, where I learned – through to my bones – how to meditate. Or how to stop telling myself that I was doing it wrong (there is no wrong).

An invisible cord attached to me umbilically, hauling me over to the person who made me understand the simplicity of meditation – and the complexity of what it could unravel.

Two years on, I found my why, scrawled on the back of an old bill. It says: ‘To be the best mother I can be to my children. To be a more loving and supportive person and wife. To love myself after so many years of not liking myself. To turn into a rock. In a good way.’

I’m not the best mother I can be to my children – yet. I’m not the most loving and supportive person I can be – yet. I don’t love myself after years of not liking myself. Yet. As for being a rock, I balance precariously on shifting sands, every day. But in time, I trust these things will happen.

So, what’s your why?

being stable as a parent

Roots

Meditation, Motherhood

‘You, the unstable, must become a tree’

This is what we have to do as parents.

No matter what has happened in your life, no matter where you are, how often you have messed up, how many bad choices you have made, your roots come down when you have children. You stop letting the wind carry you here and carry you there. You stop looking over your shoulder.

You are the shoulder.

Before my three babies arrived, I was like a dandelion clock. I was fragile. I let life blow me around on its violent and gentle whims. I allowed my past to fully dictate my present, like a childish bully desperate for attention.

In the long months after my first son was born, as I clawed my way through a dark and stifling cloud of post-partum mental illness, I began to understand that I had to get stronger. A lot stronger.

I started to meditate.

By increments – and it took a few years – I started to see that the strength was already there. It is there in all of us. The tree had been planted. All I had to do was let it grow, let the good green leaves breathe in the cold fresh air. Sense its solid, immovable trunk. Observe its leaves fall and peek out again triumphantly, marking Spring. I already was the tree.

So are you.

Milked

Motherhood

The first feed after they are born. When they clamp on to your nipple like tiny crabs resurrected from the sand.

The endless (they end) feeds of the first six weeks, when they grow from minuscule buds into blossoming babies. The bleeding. The cracked nipples. The exquisite pain (it goes). The feeding when they are hungry, when they are tired, when they just want to be close. When you just want to be close.

The night feeds. Suckling milk all through the long night. Gulping, drinking. Growing. The exhaustion: Get off my boob I can not feed you for another second. The deep joy: I could feed you forever. Don’t grow.

The blind hunger of an infant. You can feel their primal urge. Come on! Feed me! Any breast will do! The older baby, looking up at you, catching your eye. Smiling. Trying to chat in their baby way between feeds. Love.

And my 18-month-old, my last baby. He’s weaning. The feeds are dropping rapidly. My body is folding back into itself, finally becoming mine again, its liquids flowing through intricate portals and vessels – easing back to nourishing one body, instead of two.

No more babies to feed. I’m milked.

You get what you get (and you don’t get upset)

Motherhood

This has been one of my three-year-old’s favourite sayings of late, nabbed cheerfully from his kindergarten teacher who has been using it a lot with him because when said tot gets what he gets, he pretty much always gets upset.

Apart from robbing the phrase and wheeling it out when my kids are, say, given an apple after dinner instead of a chocolate biscuit, I’ve been internally throwing it at things in my own life to see how my perspective changes – on the little stuff and the big stuff.

Chose the till at the supermarket where someone has just had a weird item scanned and the harassed check-out assistant has to ring a bell to get help and delay the whole queue for inifinity? You get what you get and you don’t get upset. You haven’t achieved what you wanted to with your life (yet) because something terrible happened to you? You get what you get and you don’t get upset.

See how it works? It’s not about pretending things aren’t happening or haven’t happened. It’s about acceptance.

You get what you get and you don’t get upset. Just don’t give me an apple instead of a chocolate biscuit.