Tag Archives: postnatal depression

You have to lose you to find you

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There’s a lovely piece in the Guardian today about how illustrator Angie Stevens (who blogs at Doodlemum) “drew” her way out of PND. With three children, she found next to no time for herself, and yet it was exactly what she needed. As she says in the article, “You lose your identity. It’s such a cliche to say that, but you need to find out who you are. You go for years not sleeping because you love them but you wonder how you fit into this. You look in the mirror and don’t recognise yourself any more. What I’ve discovered through doing this is that I’m still me.”

I could have written this word for word – except that my escape is writing, rather than drawing. I am fortunate (as is Angie), in that my escape is also my livelihood. But I can honestly say that I have felt most alive and energised when writing Fertile Thinking (after the birth of son no.1) and The Postnatal Survival Guide (after no. 2).

It’s a two-pronged approach – finding what makes you feel like “you” – and then carving out the time to do it. For some people, it’s about going back to work. The act of having your own space and separate identity from “mum” may be enough. But if you’re working to pay the mortgage and don’t feel inspired by your job, you’ll need to find this elsewhere, maybe in a hobby or learning a new skill. Or it can be volunteering (which is also great for getting you out of your own head and connecting to a wider world).

Tapping into something where you’re so absorbed that you lose track of time and your negative thoughts is a magical process, and doesn’t need to be time consuming. I’d love to hear about your “lose yourself” activities and whether they’re related to work or play.

 ***Stop Press***

You can download free copies of my book, The Postnatal Guide, for the next 10 days from Smashwords.com. Please feel free to share with anyone you think might benefit from the book. And if you do read and enjoy it, don’t hesitate to leave a review :-) .

Postnatal Survival Guide – the tour

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Hear ye, hear ye!

I’m going on the first phase of my tour – (sadly without the big bus and adoring groupies) with The Postnatal Survival Guide over the next few weeks. Next Tuesday (15th Jan), I’ll be heading over to Jennifer’s Little World to guest blog about something topical and <ahem> discreetly plug the book :-) . Then on 22 Jan, I’ll be appearing on A Mum’s Internal Monologue, at Daftmamma on 29 Jan, and on Prozac Withdrawal on 5 Feb.

I’ll be announcing other dates as they are confirmed.

Please come and take a look (and follow these marvellous women’s blogs too) – and, as ever, leave a comment if you’re moved so to do. If you’d like me to add you to my tour list, please let me know and I’ll be more than happy to do a guest post on your blog.

Introducing…The Postnatal Survival Guide!

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<drum roll>….It’s here!

Well – sort of. The Postnatal Survival Guide, my new ebook about getting through PND is finally here. It’s currently available on Smashwords and Amazon, but in the next few weeks you’ll be able to get hold of it via Kobo, Barnes & Noble, Sony, Apple and Diesel too.

I’m offering it free for readers of my blog – it’s a minor faff, but to get it free from Smashwords, search for the Postnatal Survival Guide, register to buy it, then enter the code: DN57R at the checkout.

Let me know what you think – and please feel free to share the code with your friends. If you’ve got a few minutes spare you could even review it on Amazon or Smashwords for me :-) .

The true cost of sleep deprivation

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I am on my knees with exhaustion again. B has one of those autumn viruses that are going around and he is awake and crying all night. It is pretty extreme at the moment and I know it will pass, but when added to two solid years of regular broken and short nights, it is starting to feel like Too Much.

While I lay awake at 4am (the killer hour in terms of self pity and jump-off-a-bridge-type-thoughts) I began counting the cost that this incessant sleep deprivation has had on my life.

Financial cost

Neither I nor my partner are working full time at the moment, because it is physically impossible. Luckily we are both in professions where we can freelance, but two part-time, freelance wages are simply not cutting it. With more sleep, we would both be able to take on more work and earn enough money to get by. At the moment, our savings are subsidising our work patterns, but this cannot continue indefinitely.

Emotional cost

When you are constantly exhausted, all your relationships suffer. In a couple, you bicker and snap more. You are less patient with your children. Friendships are harder to maintain because you don’t have the energy to go out, and when you do you’re clock watching, ever aware that with each hour that goes by you’ll feel that much worse the next day, and you can’t bank on a solid seven or eight hours the next night to catch up.

Physical cost

Our bodies simply aren’t meant to go without sustained periods of rest for any length of time. Aches and pains set in. Injuries take longer to heal, you get ill more frequently and for longer as your immune system is shot to pieces. Your body feels like it’s falling apart. Exercise really helps your mood (and has recently been proved to reduce incidences of PND in this Australian study), but you can’t guarantee that the opportunity to exercise will always coincide with having enough energy to do it.

The worst of it is the sense of powerless it gives you. Yes, I realise it is totally self-inflicted (in that I took the decision to have two children), but you don’t know when you make that decision what kind of baby you will get. Some people have children who sleep through from relatively early on – and for those people, life is qualitatively different. Of course, they will have other struggles – I’m not suggesting that life is a piece of cake if you have good sleepers. But when your every decision is taken through a veil of physical and mental tiredness, life is more limited. You don’t visit friends and stay overnight because you know the screaming will keep your hosts up all night, and creeping round strange houses at 4.30am, trying to keep quiet for the five hours until everyone else wakes up is unrelaxing in the extreme. You don’t apply for interesting sounding jobs because they might involve evening work or overnight stays – both of which would put intolerable pressure on the one staying at home. Your world becomes very small and predictable – in order to make things manageable.

I know this is just a rant, and I apologise to anyone who has read this far and is waiting for something uplifting, inspirational or hopeful. I guess I just want to explain why I might turn down your offer of a night out or a weekend away – or an international, jet-setting job for that matter.

I also know I am fortunate in that (I hope) this situation will not continue indefinitely. I know parents of children who have disabilities that mean they will never enjoy an unbroken night’s sleep, and I feel guilty for complaining. But right now, I would donate any number of non-essential body parts in exchange for a couple of unbroken nights’ sleep and am praying to the karmic gods to make it happen. So if you see me helping old ladies across the road (whether they like it or not) or picking up other people’s litter, know that I am doing what I can to encourage the universe to give me a break on this front. Because no buggering other approach has worked thus far…

 

And the prize for “most exhausting narcissist” goes to…

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… Barbara Ellen, for her incredibly patronising and misandrist article in the Observer yesterday about why fathers cannot possibly suffer from postnatal depression because they have not given birth. Apparently, those who dare to claim experiencing it have “womb envy” and are trying to find yet another area to eclipse the achievements of women.

She is commenting on a new study from Oxford University that found that half of the new fathers they studied (whose babies were three months old) suffered from depressive symptoms and struggled to bond with their babies. They suggested that this could have knock on behavioural effects later in life.

Rather than highlight the fact that couples (who tend to live in nuclear units without the support of extended family) both suffer physically, mentally and emotionally when the baby is born, she lambasts the men for expressing their negative feelings because they have not gone through the physical pain or childbirth, felt the chemical change or hormones or are feeding their babies from their own bodies. According to her they are “exhausting narcissists” who are simply expressing “sulky self-absorption”.

Apparently, they should just say they are suffering from “depression”, because adding the prefix “postnatal” belittles the role of the woman- in case anyone was unsure about whether men could be pregnant, give birth or breastfeed.

It’s a real shame because in turning this into a gender war she has missed the opportunity to open the conversation about shared parenthood in the 21st century and how we can all help each other better so our children benefit from the role models of having two parents both engaged in “the hardest job in the world”.

Maybe she would have us return to the time when men were not expected to be involved in childcare at all, didn’t help with night feeds or nappies or pacing the room holding the screaming baby at some ungodly hour of the morning. But if we want to continue to move towards equality in the early weeks and years of parenting, we need to enable both sexes to speak out about their feelings, whatever they might be.

The old black dog’s still here…

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I started reading a thread on the ante/postnatal depression section in Mumsnet last night and was very moved by how raw the poster’s feelings seemed, how desperate she was for help, and yet was struggling to seek it. It was lovely to see such a warm and supportive community responding with kind words and their own experiences.  It brought back my own feelings of shame and anxiety, and with both babies it took me until they were 6 months to finally see my GP. I remember writing in a notebook “I need help” as I sat crying. I covered the whole page with my plea. Everything hurt. Everything felt mad.

How far away from my current feelings, I thought. Then this morning, I totally lost it when trying to get my son off to nursery and me and the baby on a train to London to meet a friend. I rarely do anything like this, and it was a real expedition for me. I felt panicky, lost, out of control. The fact that I had a specific train to catch made me very stressed, I snapped at the children. I felt the madness return and almost burst into tears as I left the house.

Once on the train I was fine. But it felt like I had ripped a hole in the atmosphere of my bubble. The old pain returned, if only briefly, and I realised that I wasn’t as “cured” as I maybe thought. How ironic, too, as I think of my previous, pre-children London life. I lived there from when I was 17 until two years ago. My life was busy, varied, fun. I now appreciate how small my world has become. I find comfort in its safety and predictability. On any day of the week I can tell you what we’ll be doing. I know small children thrive on routine, but I wonder if I’ve been using that as an excuse not to venture out of my comfort zone. I wonder if I’m doing both them and myself a disservice by not being more adventurous.I’m going to have a think about this and see if there are some areas where I can push the comfort zone a bit further.

On another note, I’ve signed up for a PND research study – I’ll be given some CBT sessions and I guess they’ll monitor my progress. I don’t know much about the study yet but they’re going to call me next week. I have trained to practice CBT myself (as part of my lifecoaching diploma) and know it can be useful for a variety of things. It’ll be interesting to be on the receiving end of it and see how it helps my anxiety levels.

Some thoughts…

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When I went to see my GP in June I began with a very rambling and stream of consciousness rant about how I was feeling. I was tearful, I explained, and exhausted. Anxious too – and even when my children did give me a chance to sleep, I was too wound up to drop off. I felt angry, irritable and pretty fed up with my life.

‘The thing is’, I said, ‘I am extremely sleep deprived, my baby has been an inpatient in hospital for a month, he cries all the time, my toddler is very jealous – it’s no surprise I’m feeling rubbish. Maybe it’s not depression after all. Just a reasonable response to circumstances’.

‘Does it matter?’ he replied. ‘Your symptoms exist, regardless of what you want to label it.’

He was right. I had been in this situation before, almost two years to the day, when my first son was 6 months old. I went to the GP, feeling a failure for not dealing with motherhood as well as I should. For not being grateful enough to have a child at all, when so many women struggle with their fertility.

On both occasions I was prescribed the anti-depressant, Sertraline. And both times, after about a week, I began to feel much better, more human. I remember the first time being terrified of what might happen to me. I was afraid I would be unable to feel anything, or turn into someone else.

As it happened, I just ended up feeling strong enough to start looking at my situation and trying to do something about it. I know a lot of people have mixed feelings about medicating PND, or are very anti, but I can safely say that both times I have hugely benefitted. As the doctor said, ‘they won’t change your situation, but they’ll make you a bit more resilient’.

Although the ADs have been fantastic, they are only part of the picture. So much about my feelings is mixed in with other issues: my identity, my child’s health, sleeplessness (of lack of it), work, and the very fact of being a mother in 2011, and what that means for my role in society.

I want to use this blog to explore these different issues, and to see where I can help myself. Some are existential, and can’t be altered (such as the fact of my being a mother) but others may be more practical.

I love solutions, lists, exercises – doing things. That’s why I subtitled this blog ‘doing something about postnatal depression’. Because I want to help myself through it, and hopefully others too.

First post

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The title of this blog comes from my son’s favourite book, ‘We’re going on a Bear Hunt’. The whole ‘chorus’, if you could call it that, goes:

‘We can’t go over it

We can’t go under it

Oh no! We’ll have to go through it’

In the book, this refers to forests, grass, snowstorms, etc, but it resonated with me in particular regarding my postnatal depression.

I suffered PND for the first time after my first son (now nearly three) was born, and again this time with my second son (who is currently eight months).

I will detail in the blog my various attempts to get through it, but one of the ways that works for me is to write about it, and share my experiences with others going through the same thing. I hope to find and offer ideas, support, and, hopefully, some laughs along the way.