Nailing Motherhood: The First Year & Beyond
On November 21st 2019, I spoke at the launch of the new Perinatal Mental Health Service as part of the SWLSTG Mental Health NHS Trust. The brief? To talk about my experience with perinatal mental health. I thought it would be a breeze - after all, it’s all I’ve talked about on social media for the last 5 years - but to stand up in a room of people I didn’t know and describe my experience was one of the scariest, and yet most empowering things I’ve done. The transcript of the talk I gave it below. Please feel free to share it, send it, post, shout about it, print it out and read it to somebody if you think it might make them feel a little less alone.
Thank you,
Cat x
NAILING MOTHERHOOD - The First Year & Beyond
On November 16th 2013 my daughter was born. It would, in the years to come, be the day we celebrated her birthday...each one a milestone representing the wonderful, kind, polite absolutely not shouty, vegetable swerving, sassy human she was becoming. But it would also be my ‘birth day’ and for a long time, that wasn’t so wonderful.
It all makes more sense when I tell you a little more about the old me. I was a control freak, a Type A, a high achiever - all words we use as badges of honour, but actually, I’d argue they are the opposite. Less badges of honour and more PR friendly labels that we use to justify damaging and harmful expectations of ourselves. More on that later. But, at this point, pregnant for the first time, I been brought up to believe that I was the master of my own destiny; that with preparation and hard work I could excel at anything. When I discovered I was pregnant, I instinctively approached birth and motherhood in the same way. It wasn’t a conscious decision. It was simply my MO, the blueprint for my life, the way I defined myself - hard work + preparation = success.
My birth was traumatic and went way off plan. And when I say ‘plan’ I mean it. I was the obnoxious pregnant women who turned up to the hospital with a four page (double sided), colour coded, laminated - I swear to god - birth plan. I want to punch myself in the face for that, but that’s where I was. After 38 hours, two crash carts, a tear that made my vagina look like rare steak chewed by rabid dogs, my eldest girl was born.
And here’s what’s crucial - my birth was traumatic FOR ME. It might not have been premature, there may not have been high levels of blood loss, and for the medical staff involved it probably seemed fairly routine, but it was far from routine for me. To use the word ‘trauma’ may seem dramatic and it’s only with the benefit of hindsight that I realise just how traumatic it was. But, at the time, how was I to know that? I’d never done it before? Everyone joked about how terrible childbirth was and this seemed to fit my experience so rather than recognise the need to unpick that trauma and work through it, I just accepted it as normal. And I accepted all the feelings that came with it as normal. But, preparation and hard work - that’s how I was determined to nail motherhood. And so I started to ‘brave-face’ everything.
And she was beautiful and tiny and loud and demanding and yes, miraculous. I know she was all of those things because I can look back on the pictures and see it, but what I also see is stunned fear in my own eyes. I see sadness and pain because I knew, even then, I wasn’t feeling all the ‘right’ emotions. In the ensuing days and weeks I didn’t feel that overwhelming sense of love that everyone bangs on about. I didn’t feel connected or bonded with my baby. I felt adrift, disconnected and lost. I think part of me was screaming inside, desperate to say, ‘This isn’t right. Something’s wrong,” but saying that felt like an admission of failure, that I was unable to do what every other mother on the planet could do. So, I continued brave-facing it. I went back to my old mantra of preparation and hard work - my identity’s bedrock. I’d always had high expectations of myself and motherhood was to be no different. Sure it had been a shaky start but I’d pick myself up and nail the motherhood thing...and then breastfeeding came along.
If I’d thought my birth experience had been traumatic it was nothing compared to my breastfeeding experience. I don’t know if there’s any evidence to support this (but I’ve believed this in my gut from the very beginning...and that’s good enough for me) but I know that my birth experience affected my ability to breastfeed successfully. I know because it affected my confidence, my bond, my sense of self. Even if I didn’t consciously recognise it, subconsciously I was telling myself that I couldn’t do this motherhood thing, that I didn’t want to do it and perhaps even more damaging...that I shouldn’t be allowed to do it.
Blisters, cracks, recurring mastitis, nipple thrush…that’s sexy isn’t it…each new obstacle not only brought with it an exceptional amount of pain, but it also made feeding traumatic. I would start physically shaking every time Billie woke up or starting crying because I knew I would have to feed her. I knew it would be agony and I knew I would hate every minute. That in turn made me feel like a terrible mother and an even worse human. How was I failing so badly at this when everyone else seemed to be nailing it and society had told me my whole life that motherhood and, of course, breastfeeding was the most natural thing in the world? None of it felt natural to me.
The trauma that occurred due to my breastfeeding experience was worse, far worse, than the trauma of birth. Part of me, despite my birth plan (let’s not talk about that again), had always expected birth to be a bit shit and once it was over, it was done (I was NEVER doing that again...until the next time) but feeding? Breastfeeding for me was equivalent to 8-10 traumas every day, for 9 weeks. I felt that trauma both physically - the pain! - and emotionally - the guilt! - and I know, to this day, that it was THAT that finally broke my spirit.
After 9 weeks my mum pleaded with us to give her a bottle. She’d sat back determined not to get involved but had seen me crumble slowly, bit by bit. Jimmy, my husband and I, were so far off the reservation at this point that we had to hold the first bottle of formula together so that, down the line, we couldn’t blame the other for ruining our daughter’s life chances - after all, formula, we were made to believe, was like feeding them a combination of tequila, cocaine and dung beetles. It was frowned upon and not matter how many times I spoke about how hard I was finding breastfeedin, I was told, “Just keep going.” So I did. I kept going and I kept sobbing through every feed watching my tears splash on her tiny cheek, as I imparted a meal to my baby that was made up of half milk and half blood from the cracks in my nipples. This wasn’t helped by my experience with a health visitor who I called sobbing after we’d finally given Billie a bottle, saying, “I’ve just given my 9 week old a bottle of formula and I need you to tell me I’m not a terrible mother” she replied, “Don’t worry you can always undo the damage you’ve done when it come to weaning.”
And weirdly enough that was my moment. It was my lowest moment, but it was my epiphany. That was the point at which the lightbulb came on and I realised that it was all so ridiculous. All of it. The expectations, the pressure, the ‘advice’. Since then, I’ve realised that we as mothers are exceptionally strong, resilient and brave. That while breastfeeding might not be as much of a natural skill as they’d like us to believe, our gut and our intuition truly is. I knew, in my gut, what the right thing to do was but I ignored it because I let everyone else tell me how I should ‘mother’. I was trying to be what I thought a mother should be, what I thought other people expected of me. I’d got so lost trying to be something that doesn’t even exist - the perfect mother - that my confidence, self-esteem, joy and yes, my identity went of the window. I had no idea how to recover, but I knew I needed to start tackling this motherhood thing different.
Of course, things didn’t get better immediately. This realisation when my baby was 9 weeks didn’t reduce the pain. It didn’t make me feel any less guilty or worthless as a mother and it definitely didn’t prevent the post natal depression that developed severely over the first year. It didn’t immediately make me bond with my baby or feel like I was nailing motherhood. It didn’t stop my relationship taking an almost fatal hit nor my career stalling abruptly. For a year, I floundered. That first year was, the worst year of my life. It sounds awful to say that - how can the first year of your baby’s life be ‘awful’? But it was. For a long time I believed it was awful because I was awful but now, I know that a host of circumstances convened to make me very unwell.
As a mother, and as a woman, I was numb. Sure, I would have jumped in front of a bus for my baby on instinct, but I couldn’t feel LOVE for her. I drifted from my husband - he was away a lot and when he was home, he’d take the baby to support me but all it did was make me feel alone, isolated and incapable. We didn’t have the wherewithal to address this, so this resentment grew between us: mine because he focussed on the baby so heavily, he forgot to check in with how I was doing as a person, as his person, as his best friend. Even to him, I felt like I was no longer his partner. I was the mother of his baby and I was rubbish at it. For him, he just wanted me to be OK. He was frustrated too. He couldn’t understand why I couldn’t ‘mother’ like everyone else seemed to be able to do. We were both suffering from the same high expectations. We just couldn’t communicate about them.
I was also barely sleeping - not because of the baby...she slept from 7-7 at 10 weeks (I know I know...I used to lie at Playgroup and say she was always waking up because I didn’t want to be that mum) but my insomnia was off the scale. I’d had depression before I’d given birth but I missed this because I simply thought: well, I’ve just had a baby. OF COURSE I’m going to be exhausted, down, tearful, sad, stressed, lonely. Right? It wasn’t right but it was a whole year until I eventually realised, looking at my daughter on her first birthday, that I felt nothing. Nothing at all. And as I’m sure some of you know, there’s simply nothing harder than admitting that you don’t think you love your own daughter.
But admit it I did. I had to. I sobbed in my GPs office for 40 minutes while my one-year-old daughter crawled around the room and to this day, I’m thankful everyday that my GO heard me, understood what was happening and helped me. It wasn’t an instant fix but through medication and therapy I started to recover.
But I also realised problem was bigger than I’d first thought. This wasn’t just MY struggle, this was every woman’s struggle to a greater or lesser extent. We weren’t just struggling with being mothers, we were struggling with our entire identities because the arrival of those tiny humans had shifted everything. We couldn’t be the wives we wanted to be, we couldn’t be the employees we wanted to be, we couldn’t be the friends we wanted to be and we certainly felt like we couldn’t be the mothers we wanted to be.
The more I talked openly to individuals, the more they all admitted it. We were feeling the same things but no one was talking about it. It was a lot and it was overwhelming, so I started writing, I started talking about it, I started shouting about it being ok to struggle, to find motherhood hard, to even hate it and wonder why on earth you ever thought that hoofing a human through your love tunnel was a good idea and the more I talked about it, the more I normalised it, the smaller it felt and the more I heard back from women, time and time again that they’d felt the same way.
It’s hard to recognise myself since that first year of motherhood, six years ago, almost to the day. There is no doubt in my mind that having a baby and becoming a mother was the hardest, most traumatic thing I’ve ever experienced. It destroyed my confidence, my mental health, and almost my marriage. I lost myself completely and for a while I desperately tried to reclaim the ‘old me’. What I’ve learned though, is that, that person - the old me - is gone. For good. Instead, I’ve had to build and believe in a new me. In someone who yes, is a mother, but is also a woman, a wife, a best friend, a business owner, who happens to have children. I’ve had to carve out a new identity - and it wasn’t easy but recognising that the old me wasn’t what I was aspiring to anymore, and instead accepting that I was now in unchartered and, frankly terrifying (broken) waters, was so key in helping me move forward.
I now work tirelessly to shout from the rooftops to new mothers, old mothers (that came out wrong)...experienced mothers, shall we say? Dads and everyone else…that we need to be resilient against the weight of expectation that is placed upon us by society, by our own families, by ourselves. Becoming a new parent is a seismic shift and more than anything we need to be gentle, gentle, gentle on ourselves.
When that baby first arrives, lower you expectations until all you can see is yourself, naked, exhausted in bed, cuddling your newborn, doing whatever it takes to keep them alive whether that’s a bottle or a boob. Lower them until you can see yourself with unwashed hair, hairy legs, eating Chinese, in your husband’s dirty tracksuit bottoms and watching reality TV in bed. Lower them until you can see yourself preventing guests from entering the house unless they have food and agree to leave after 45 mins (and while they’re there get them to whip the vacuum around or do some laundry). Lower them until you understand that becoming a mother doesn’t happen the second you give birth, that it’s a process that you’ll work on for the rest of your life. Lower them until you understand that not very much comes ‘naturally’. That it might physically hurt. That it might emotionally hurt. That your relationship will struggle. That your career will struggle. That your friendships will struggle. Lower them until there is no pressure on you or your baby to do anything, in those first few weeks, except exist, stay alive, survive. Because once you’ve survived those first few weeks, I promise you there will be time to thrive. There will be decades for you to learn to be the mum you want to be but, for now, for the first year be gentle on yourself and your baby. Protect yourselves, and as my friend Steph says, pull up the drawbridge and, when you’re ready, you’ll then be ready to nail motherhood.
But here’s the caveat…and I’m sorry if you were expecting the holy grail, the trick to ‘nailig motherhood’…you’ll never nail it. It’s not possible. We hope it’ll never be as hard as it was in those first few weeks, but it might be. Motherhood is messy and emotional and exhausting whether you’re new to it or a veteran. And here’s the real takeaway from today: that’s ok. It’s how it’s supposed to be.
The ones that look like they’re nailing it, aren’t. They might be for that snapshot of time you witnessed, but rest assured, they’re still struggling, screaming at their kids to put their shoes on 75 times, they’re still worrying about whether the dummy will ruin their teeth or leave them with a lisp. They’re wondering if they’ll ever have the energy to have sex with their husband, or whether they’ll ever wear a matching set of underwear again. And what’s even more hilarious, is that they’re probably looking at you thinking that YOU’RE nailing it. I’ll say it again - there’s no such thing as nailing motherhood - so take that off your to do list right now and just take every day as it comes.
So if you walk away with anything from this talk, please take this: if we try to be what society thinks we should be and look like as mothers or parents. We will fail. If we try to be what WE think we should be as mothers or parents. We will fail. All those expectations you have or that people around you have? Lower them. Then lower them again and again. And a little bit more.
