POSTNATAL ANXIETY;

Trigger Warning: This piece discusses postnatal anxiety. If you do not have the mental capacity to read this right now, please don't, or if you think this may trigger you, be mindful while you're reading and stop when necessary.

LET'S GET REAL ABOUT MOTHERHOOD

In January 2019, I found out I was pregnant. I was 28, had a great job and was living in Bangkok with my partner Martin. We were elated (albeit a bit nervous given our zero baby experience). But we were excited to become parents and we felt ready.

I was lucky enough to have an uncomplicated pregnancy. However, I hated being pregnant.

I know I am so lucky that I got pregnant easily when so many women cannot but it doesn't mean I have to pretend I enjoyed it. There was no 'pregnancy glow', just constant nausea (like a really bad hangover), exhaustion and feeling so uncomfortable in my expanding body.

I missed having the energy to go to the gym and I felt like I couldn't perform as well at work because I was so tired. I was counting down the weeks until my son was born. Hearing other women say they loved being pregnant baffled me but I shrugged it off, knowing it was temporary and once my son was born, everything would be great.

Fast forward to October 2019 and I am in labour in a Thai hospital. I ended up needing an emergency caesarean and the whole experience was traumatic for both Martin and I. As soon as my son was born he was taken away to be monitored while I was rolled into a sterile recovery room alone and was not allowed to see Martin or my baby. I had no idea if he was OK, I only knew that I hadn't heard him cry and I heard a nurse say something about needing to monitor his breathing. I lay there alone, freezing cold, crying, and imagining the worst.

It was eight hours before I saw my son and luckily he was completely healthy. I instantly felt protective of him, but he seemed like a stranger - it was not quite the euphoric feeling I had imagined. I told myself that the 'bond' would come with time.

We spent the next three days in the hospital as I recovered from surgery and we learned how to be parents. That's when it started to get real. Everybody knows new parents are tired but nothing could have prepared me for this level of exhaustion. My entire life I've struggled to fall asleep - it always takes me at least an hour which is very inconvenient when you have a newborn. Newborn babies feed every 90 minutes or so which for me meant zero sleep. No matter how tired I was, I couldn't fall asleep fast enough before my baby would wake up and need feeding again. I was so tired that I was hallucinating and this was only the beginning.

The night we brought our son Henry home Martin and I decided to try a 'roster system' so we could each get a few hours of uninterrupted sleep. I was on the first solo shift that night. Martin was sound asleep, Henry would not stop crying and my thoughts were racing.

'What is wrong with him? Why won't he sleep? Why is breastfeeding so painful? How do I know if he's getting enough milk? Maybe I'm starving him. I'm so tired. I just want to put him down and sleep but he's hysterical. Where are my motherly instincts?'

I realised I had no idea how to look after a baby and I couldn't believe they let me leave the hospital with him. I counted down the minutes until it was my turn to sleep, I then woke up Martin, handed over the baby and went to bed. I felt like I could sleep for weeks. But that doesn't happen when you're a new mum. You wake up after three hours with rock-hard painful boobs that need to be emptied ASAP before they explode. So that was my life for the next couple of months. I was sleeping for three hours at night until my boobs woke me up. Slowly losing my mind, becoming more anxious each day.

But I figured this was normal. This was parenthood.

I told myself I could handle it because 'everybody else does.' I even decided to take Henry to New Zealand by myself (disaster) and then Martin and I took him to see Martin's family in Sweden. When we got home we declared we would not travel with him again until he was at least a year old.

By the time Henry was four months, I was a complete mess. I felt like my body was constantly full of adrenaline which made falling asleep impossible. I would lie in bed crying because I couldn't sleep but I was so desperately tired. I would frequently go up to 60 hours without any sleep. I would worry obsessively - not just about Henry but about life, our future, anything you can imagine and it's all I would talk about to Martin. We realised I needed help.

I went to see a doctor who prescribed me sleeping pills and advised I stop breastfeeding as the medication would be dangerous for Henry (which suited me as I hated breastfeeding and Henry was already preferring the bottle). I finally got some sleep but the sudden cessation of breastfeeding made my hormones go haywire and my anxiety spiked. Just the sound of Henry crying would cause me to have an anxiety attack where I felt like I couldn't breathe. There was also a looming deadline - going back to work. How would I be able to do a good job when I could barely function? The thought of having to attend meetings, give presentations and be mentally sharp terrified me and intensified my anxiety.
Then COVID-19 stepped in.

My family and I returned to New Zealand at short notice and were required to self-isolate in a hotel for two weeks. During this period, New Zealand went into Level 4 lockdown so we spent about seven weeks in a hotel with Henry now five months old and my anxiety was out of control. We flew to New Zealand the week before I was due to return to work so I was attempting to work remotely while looking after a teething, restless baby and having multiple anxiety attacks per day. It was all too much and I stopped functioning completely. I stopped eating. I couldn't even read an email let alone compose something comprehensible or be a supportive manager to my team.

The only person who knew what was going on was Martin. I've never been one to tell people if I'm having a hard time because I don't want to be a burden and perhaps I've been too proud. But now for the first time in my life, I had no choice. I couldn't do my job so I had to tell my manager what was happening.

I was terrified of what people would think of me, especially in the midst of a global pandemic as I thought my problems would seem so trivial.

I called my manager and I burst into tears. I will never forget her response and am so grateful for how kind and understanding she was. She even opened up to me about some of her own life experiences which made me feel less vulnerable and allowed us to have a real human conversation.

That's when I started to open up to everybody. My family, my friends, some colleagues. Not everybody was understanding or kind and I even felt let down but some. But the vast majority of people have been supportive and let their own guards down - many with their own postpartum stories. I've never felt more supported and this has been the biggest lesson I've learned from my experience. Nothing good comes from pretending that everything is ok. Humans are not designed to go through tough times alone. I have received amazing support, encouragement, deepened friendships and I no longer feel guilty.

Having a baby is the hardest thing I have ever done. But struggling does not make you a bad mother. It's OK to not enjoy pregnancy or breastfeeding. It's OK to feed your baby formula (either by choice or necessity). It's OK to have a caesarean and it's OK to find motherhood extremely hard.

If you are one of the rare unicorns who has a glowy pregnancy, your baby flies out of your vagina with one push, breastfeeds like a champ and you love your postnatal experience, that's great - but you are lucky. That is not the reality for most mums, nor should it be the definition of a 'good mum'. 90% of the mums I've spoken to have either had a negative experience with pregnancy, birth, breastfeeding or postpartum (or a combination of these).

The best thing we can do to support each other as mothers is to be honest. If you're not OK, don't pretend to be. Being honest will not only invite others in to support you but it will normalise what we all go through and prevent us from feeling like failures for not living up to unrealistic expectations.

While the ideal of taking the 'earth-mother' approach (which is particularly prevalent in parts of the Western world) may have come from a good place initially, the reality is, idealising one kind of mother is harmful to mothers who either cannot achieve this or simply don't want to and then feel judged accordingly.

Henry is now seven months old. He still hardly sleeps and he's mastered the commando-crawl so he's constantly on the move. I'm still exhausted, I'm still not my pre-baby self and maybe I never will be - but that's OK. Henry doesn't care. He doesn't care that I hated being pregnant, had a horrible birth or switched to formula when he was four months old. He doesn't care that I really struggled as a new mum. He's a smiley, giggly baby boy who loves me as I am and I love him unconditionally. That's the definition of a good mother.

If you can relate to any of the above please share your story with others to help normalise the hard parts of motherhood. If you know a new mum or mum-to-be, ask her how she's really doing, listen to her and don't say unhelpful things like 'just you wait until he's a toddler' or 'the hard part is yet to come.'

Acknowledge her feelings, remind her it's common to feel this way and offer to help and support her however you can.