17 | Jess
“The GP was ready with the medication, the psychologist was ready, so I had all the supports there ready to go. But then when you’ve got a sick baby, you don’t worry about what’s going on for you... all my follow up appointments were completely neglected. So none of the physical checks, none of the mental checks, it was all thrown by the wayside... We all knew I wasn’t okay, but we all knew I also wasn’t leaving him, so it was really hard.”
With a history of anxiety and depression, Jess and her care team went into pregnancy with a plan to protect her mental health during postpartum. Unfortunately, serious and sudden medical diagnoses for her son, Jasper, immediately after birth meant Jess’s mental health was neglected amongst relentless surgeries, a two-month NICU admission, and full-time caretaking for a sick baby.
The NICU experience cast a long shadow over Jess’s motherhood journey, leaving behind a trail of self-blame, overwhelm, uncertainty, and doubt. Through the support of caring helpline staff, changing medication, making mum friends, a GP that took her seriously, and reclaiming her passions, this is the incredible story of one mother’s journey to come into her own light and to help other mothers know that they do not have to struggle alone.
Follow Jess on Instagram @jesscareywrites and visit her website https://jesscareywrites.com/ to find her collection of books about mental health for both children and adults.
”It was just a debacle from start to finish.”
“I've had a history of depression and anxiety many, many years, and then we'd sort of had issues conceiving, and then had a horrible pregnancy. And then my son was born with a lot of medical drama associated. So it's just one thing after another.”
“I don't think I've ever felt completely on top of my mental health until fairly recently. I had been sort of in and out of psychologists, on and off antidepressants for a while.”
”Once we found out that I actually was pregnant, it was just oh, dear God. What have I done? This was not a good idea, I can't do this. This is what we wanted. Obviously, it was very exciting, but then it was that, oh, I don't know if I'm going to be very good at this. I've got my own mental health drama and I've got to keep myself alive and keep myself healthy and, oh, my God, now I'm going to have to look after something else and what have I done? So, yeah, it was just like, oh, I wanted this, but was this really a good idea? I'm not so sure now.”
“I made the decision to come off my antidepressants before travelling because I found that they didn't so much make me feel happier, but they tended to numb a lot of my feelings. I thought, if I'm going to take four months to travel around the world, I want to actually experience it. So I decided to come off the antidepressants, then felt amazing.”
“We don't really know when it happened, but my ovaries had just stopped working. We still don't know how or why. I'd always had really heavy, painful periods as a teenager and a doctor when I was younger said I could end up with trouble conceiving later, and at the time I thought, well, I don't want kids, so it doesn't really matter.”
Jess was prescribed the contraceptive pill to temper the pain and it wasn’t until she came off it that she realised she wasn’t getting her period anymore. “One thing led to another: Yeah, your ovaries aren't actually producing any eggs.”
“Modern medicine is amazing. Luke and I, my husband and I, were both very adamant that we weren't going to go down the IVF path. We did not think that my mental health would survive that. We've seen other people who've been through it and we've seen how devastating it can be. So we sort of said, well, if there's an option, we can try before that, we'll give that a try. There was. So lots of drugs, lots of injections, all that sort of thing. But eventually, I think it was the fifth or sixth round of trying that that cycle worked.”
“And yeah, then we found out that I was going to have hyperemesis the whole way through and my goodness, that is a thing! I will put my hand up, I'll be the first to admit I didn't think it was a real thing. Wow. I was wrong. I was so wrong. It was debilitating. I couldn't get out of bed in the morning without throwing up. I'd roll over and I was sick straight away. The first, I think probably five or six months of the pregnancy, I was losing weight instead of putting it on. For a while, I lived off pretty much nothing but potatoes. Like, there were potato gems and there were chips and there were mashed potatoes and there were roast potatoes and you'd think with all that starch, maybe I'd start putting on some weight. I did not.”
“So then like, a lot of guilt as well from that. I'm not even eating well, I can't exercise. Couldn't get myself into work because motion set it off really badly. So to get up and get on a train for 45 minutes in the morning, couldn't do it.”
“Things at work didn't end up very well… I ended up being made redundant about three or four weeks before I would have qualified for paid maternity leave.”
“We'd also bought a new house somewhere in between, so we had to move house as well. So I remember getting the phone call from work telling me that basically I didn't have a job anymore while I was running back and forth from packing boxes to the bathroom to throw up.”
”So like I said, it was just shambles.”
“During the days, my husband's obviously at work, I didn't talk to anyone, I didn't see anyone, I stopped contacting friends. I absolutely did not go out. There's no way in hell I would have gone out for dinner or a birthday or anything like that. I did not leave the house at that time. We were living in a two story townhouse and to get from upstairs to downstairs, that was a saga that took all my energy and it would be some days literally crawling from the couch to the bathroom. I had nothing left. There was nothing in me to even physically get up and walk.”
“So I would often just spend my day would be sitting on the couch with a bucket next to me, the dogs curled up on top of me… Most days I would not make a sound, would not speak to anyone until my husband got home from work. And even then, it wasn't much of a conversation because I just didn't have the energy to even to talk. So it was very isolating. And then compounded by that is guilt, because everyone tells you, this is meant to be the best time of your life, and you're so lucky, and you should be so happy. But I'm not. I'm miserable, this is awful.”
Jess credits her husband with helping her cope throughout pregnancy. “My biggest fear in having kids had always been I don't want to leave him having to look after me and a kid… you don't want to put anyone in that position when you love them. You don't want to be a burden to people you love.”
“We hadn't really told anyone either that we were doing fertility treatment, so we chose to go through it alone. Then when I was pregnant, I mean, what can anyone do, right? Like, you're sick, you're just sick. I was taking all the medication that I was being given. I was trying not to over exert myself or anything. I was still sick. Nothing short of a miracle was going to be helpful at that point.”
“So, yeah, what was front of my mind was, I need to make sure this baby is safe. That is my number one job. If that means that I need to get to an appointment to have it checked, then that's what I'm going to do. And if it means that I'm written off for the rest of the week, doesn't matter.”
”The whole pregnancy, I had convinced myself something was going to go wrong. I was sure that there was. My ovaries weren't working. There's something obviously defective in me. I'm not confident I'm carrying this baby safely. So when it came time for birth and the obstetrician started talking about it, I said, just get him out safely, I don't care what you need to do, I don't care what happens, just get him out safely.”
“I was lucky. I had a very good obstetrician. He was very on the ball. He knew from the start about my mental health, so he was quite proactive with that.”
“Our obstetrician was on paternity leave when Jasper decided to make his entrance. So we'd spent all this time getting comfortable and confident and having faith in this obstetrician, and then we had his fill in and said, who was lovely and he was amazing, considering everything that happened, but, yeah, the birth was not good for any of us."
“We did not know that there was going to be anything, I guess ‘wrong’, if you will. I don't like using that word and a lot of people have used that to us over the journey. A lot of people have said, ‘well, did you know there was something wrong with the baby before he was born?’ I know people don't mean to be offensive, but you hear these things and you're like, hang on a minute, there's nothing wrong with my baby, thank you very much! But we didn't know there were going to be any medical issues.”
“As far as we knew, he measured well the whole way through, had a strong heartbeat the whole way through. Everything was fine until it wasn't.”
“I had a bit of anxiety over the birthing process, but in the last couple of weeks I just thought: look, I know it's going to be over. This sickness has gone on and on and on. That's been horrific. The birth, I know it's not going to last for another nine months. So I got to the point that I was a little bit anxious, but also I'm confident, let's just get this done.”
Following her waters rupturing, Jess was induced. “It was a really long day. It was a really long night. So we sort of had monitors on both me and Jasper because things weren't going as quickly as they'd hoped. Both of our heart rates jumped up really quickly all of a sudden and you could just see on the obstetrician face, okay, we need to get this baby out right now! So I had an episiotomy, Jasper got vacuumed out. It all happened very quickly.”
“I really don't remember much of what happened after that, but, yeah, we held him. I don't remember him crying or anything. I later found out that's because he didn't cry, because he had to be resuscitated at birth, which I had no idea at the time. We got to cuddle with him for about 5-10 minutes. A nurse had my phone, I didn't even know where my phone came from, but she'd taken a photo of us and then they called in the paediatrician, they said, ‘oh, look, it's pretty normal, when we've got a rough birth, we like to get the paed in just to make sure everything's okay’.”
“At that point, I'd lost almost a litre and a half of blood. Like my placenta was stuck… I didn't know what was going on. I was in shock.”
As she was being stitched up, someone suddenly poked their head over Jess’s shoulder and said “‘Do you understand what I'm saying? There's something wrong with your baby. We need to take him away to special Care now. We need to go now.’” I've sort of turned around and Luke's just white… At that point, the epidural had worn off, so I could feel all the stitching up going on. I had no idea where he was. I didn't know what was wrong.”
“A nurse came in like, oh, you can call your family now to tell them the good news. Like, what good news? I don’t even have a baby right now. I gave birth, but there's no baby here.”
“So, yeah, it was warped time. It was so confusing, like, the blood loss, the shock, the trauma of it all. It was like being on another planet. It was just such an out of body experience.”
“Jasper was in the special care nursery. When I got to see him again, he had a feeding tube in one nostril and oxygen in the other nostril and the paediatrician was spot on. It's a really, really rare condition and he picked it up, which was incredibly lucky because I've spoken now to so many other families around the world who didn't have it picked up and it's dangerous, it's really dangerous.”
“So the condition that Jasper was born with is called Pierre Robin Sequence (PRS). It's about one in 20-ish thousand live births. What happened was his chin didn't grow while he was in the womb. So he was born with a really, really tiny, sort of pushed back chin, which meant that his tongue can't come forward. So every time you lay him on his back, his tongue would roll into his throat and close his windpipe, so couldn't breathe. He also, because of the way the chin didn't come forward and his tongue was sort of tucked up, he was born with a cleft palate as well, so he also couldn't drink anything. So babies, all they can do is sort of breathe and drink, and he couldn't do either. So, yeah, we were really fortunate that the paediatrician picked it up, otherwise, had he been laid down on his back and no one had picked it up, he would have stopped breathing.”
“So that sort of was the beginning of the medical journey, because then there was more stuff that came on to that as well. More diagnoses, more conditions. But, yeah, at that point I'm thinking, ‘what have I done? This has to be my fault, I've done something wrong’. All I was meant to do was just keep this baby safe in my womb for nine months. I couldn't even get that right. How am I going to keep him safe now that he's actually here? I've got this baby that I've held him for five minutes of his life and that's it.”
“He'd gotten to about a week old, I hadn't changed a nappy, I hadn't fed him, I hadn't bathed him. Like, nothing, absolutely nothing. And I just thought, there's no way I can do this. Even if we make it through, this kid is going to hate me because I was not there for him. And that's my one job. I'm meant to keep this baby safe and be there for him and I can't even do that. I was right the whole time. This is an awful idea. I'm going to be an awful mum. And so you spiral and you spiral. And that first week or so, I thought, I shouldn't be here. I'm going to be detrimental, I'm going to cause more harm than good. This was a terrible idea. I've done the wrong thing.”
“When you're pregnant, you are this very important person and everyone's so worried about your health and your well being because you're growing this life and you're amazing. And then the baby comes out and especially this happens normally, but when the baby is sick as well, you're forgotten about, you're the vessel who has been discarded. And now we need to focus on this sick baby or healthy baby, whatever the case may be. And I've spoken to mums who've had sick babies and who've had healthy babies and they've mostly all felt that way, that once the baby is out, you're sort of pushed aside a little bit and you're not so important anymore, which I definitely felt.”
“I was fortunate in that my obstetrician, I'd been pretty honest with him from the start about my mental health issues and once I got to almost the third trimester, he said, ‘I want you to link in with a psychologist now so you have someone to talk with before the birth and you'll have someone to follow through’. We assumed that given regular depression was an issue, that postpartum depression would be very much present. So my GP was also on board. The plan was to go back on it to antidepressants when I was ready to after the birth, but certainly not leaving it for too long. So the GP was ready with the medication, the psychologist was ready, so I had all the supports there ready to go. But then when you've got a sick baby, you don't worry about what's going on for you.”
“Jasper was transferred over to the Royal Children's the day after he was born and I got really lucky. There was a bed in the maternity ward that had opened up the same day, so I just by pure sheer luck, I was able to stay at the Children's with him. So it was up and down from my room to his room all the time. And that was amazing, having that opportunity there. But that also meant that all my follow up appointments were completely neglected. So none of the physical checks, none of the mental checks, it was all thrown by the wayside.”
“I knew that I needed help and follow up, but I also knew that there was no way in hell I was not following my baby there. So, yeah, it took longer than it probably should have for me to go back and see the psychologist and all that sort of thing. I knew I was not okay. I absolutely knew I wasn't okay. I'm sure the nurses knew I wasn't okay. But when you've had your baby sort of ripped out of you and you've been told there's something wrong with him… We all knew I wasn't okay, but we all knew I also wasn't leaving him, so it was really hard.”
“He had his first surgery at four weeks old. It was a pretty horrific surgery… He had to be kept in an induced coma for almost a week after the surgery. He was on morphine and fentanyl and everything. It was insane. Constantly having feeding tubes changed, x-rays, blood tests. There was not a single day in that NICU that he did not have some sort of procedure or something done to him. It was just absolutely relentless.”
“I wanted to learn how to do things like changing his feeding tube… It was really weird. While we're in the NICU, I call it that I learned to turn off ‘mum mode’ and turn on ‘nurse mode’. And I know that it's probably not healthy to compartmentalise, but that was the only way I could get through it, learning how to do all those procedures. My anxiety was level 15, and if I'd stayed in that anxious ‘mum mode’, I was not going to be of any help to my baby whatsoever. And he needed me to do what needed to be done. So it was day after day, I would get into that hospital, I would power down ‘mum mode’, power up ‘nurse mode’. I put the emotions to the side, like, okay, what do I need to learn? Show me what to do.”
”And then the anxiety ramped back up again. It was a real roller coaster of emotions and to do it not just for a couple of days, but over and over and over again. And then you're finally out of NICU and we get home and he's got more surgery, so we're still back in and out of hospital… It's just completely relentless and you just think, if only I had time to breathe, then maybe I could look after me again. But I don't have time. There's no space, there's no time to breathe because this baby needs me and I don't have time to fall apart and I don't have time to address what's going on.”
“It never even occurred to me that I could take a step back and let someone else do it. In my head, he's my child, therefore he's my responsibility, therefore I must be the one to do it. And that was a massive cause of a lot of my anxiety. And that stopped me asking and accepting help a lot. Because in my head, and I know how stupid it sounds saying it out loud now, but at the time, in my head, because he was in the NICU for so long, I had the nurses being his mum. I wasn't the one tucking him in when he woke up screaming at 2 in the morning. I wasn't the one feeding him at 3 in the morning. It was the nurses who did all that. So once he finally got back home, despite the fact that I was absolutely drowning, I, in my head, thought, ‘well, I've cheated at being a mum for this long because someone else has been doing it’.”
“So now I can't accept any help because what does that make me? He's my kid. I can't let other people come and hold him for an hour while I have a shower and wash my hair because I had that chance. The nurses did all that for me and now he's my responsibility and I have to be able to do that. Otherwise people are going to know that I'm not a capable mum and they'll take him away from me… that sounds ridiculous, right? No one's going to take your baby. But when you're in the middle of it, it's very real and you're in the hospital and you've got a sick baby and you know that your file will say that mother has mental illness or blah, blah, blah. And so all that's going through your head is ‘if I'm not here and I'm not present and I'm not doing everything every single day, they're going to say, oh yeah, that's the mentally unstable mum, she can't take that baby home.’”
“I can't let people know. I know I'm not a good mum, I know I'm a failure, but I can't let anyone else see that. I have to prove it. And yeah, like I said, it's just a vicious cycle because you don't want to ask for help, you don't want to accept help. And it just keeps going.”
It came as a shock to Jess when Jasper was suddenly discharged. “It seemed so bizarre to us that after all this time, he was not hooked up to these monitors and it was, ‘okay, off you go’. And we got home and it was like, ‘oh crap, we don't have any help now. What do we do?’”
“Thankfully, Luke had a few weeks at home, but then when he went back to work, yeah wow! It was terrifying. I remember the first day, there are a lot of very, very blank spots in my memory through all the hard stuff, but very vividly I remember Luke went back to work and it was just me and Jasper, and he had woken up from a nap and I just sort of had him in front of me. I was just looking at him. I just remember saying, ‘what the hell do we do now?’ I freaked right out. I panicked.”
“I'm so used to nurses telling me if he's stable or not. I'm so used to looking at the machines. Like, I knew exactly what every single monitor meant. I knew what every number should have been. I knew what to do if the numbers weren't what they were. I didn't have any of that at home. It was like, how do I know if he's okay or not today? I haven't got anyone here. I've got no monitors, I've got no husband, I've got no nurses. What if something happens? And it's just completely spiralled.”
“And it just went in peaks and troughs over the next couple of months.”
“I think people assume that you're going to be really happy and excited when you get your baby home. What I have learned is that most NICU parents are not, you're not taking home a newborn. It's not the same thing. And people would say to us things like, ‘oh, you must be so excited. You can finally get him home and have that newborn experience’. Like, no I can't. He's almost two months old and he's already had his face reconstructed. This isn't the baby I gave birth to and we're not going to get that back.”
“So that was really hard, that there was this expectation that we should be so happy and so grateful and like, this is going to be amazing. And inside I'm thinking, this isn't what was meant to happen. This is not how it's meant to be. And I still don't think I can handle it. I still think that I am going to be more detrimental and helpful to this kid. So, yeah, really, really confronting coming home.”
“The NICU became a second home to us. I spent more time there than I did in my own home. I think for me, you expect to go home and that's your safe, familiar surrounding, but it's not anymore. When you bring home a sick baby, your home becomes an extension of the hospital there's still the tube feeding and there's still the monitoring and there's still nurses coming in to check. It's not your sanctuary anymore. Like you bring home all that stuff from the hospital and then you combine that with the fact that you're a new mum, you're not sleeping, you don't know what the hell you're doing with this baby. They scream and you don't know why. That's all that normal stuff. Then you add on the sickness and the constant appointments. My God, the appointments were relentless! We got home from NICU and we were still back at the hospital all the time because the appointments kept going. And then you've got this voice in your head saying, ‘you don't know who you are anymore, you're not doing a good job at this, you're a terrible mother and your baby would be better off without you’. Just bang. It is just the absolute perfect storm.”
”Probably the biggest turning point for me came, Jasper had either just turned or was about to turn nine months old. We'd finally gotten rid of the god forsaken feeding tube a couple of weeks before and I was finally starting to feel like, okay, maybe I've got a handle on this. Now that the feeding tube is gone, we were two surgeries down. We knew that the next surgery wasn't going to be coming for another few months, so we had a little bit of breathing space. I was starting to connect with other mums as well because I didn't really have any mum friends at all. So that's a game changer.”
“And one day I said to my husband, ‘I'm going to take Jasper out today’. And he was like, ‘are you sure you want to do this on your own?’ ‘Yeah, I'm going to do this. It's going to be fine’. We drove down to, like Brunswick Street or something because I used to love hanging out Brunswick street and Smith Street and stuff when we were at Uni, so I'm going to take him there, we'll go to the market, it'll be great. And we had an awesome morning. He was such an awesome little dude and he was so happy and we had a great time.”
“We got home and he was exhausted and he would not nap… I snapped. I don't feel good about it. I was mortified, I was embarrassed. It made me feel like the worst human on earth. But he would not stop. He was kicking, he was screaming, he was scratching me, he was biting me. You know, so exhausted they just completely lose the plot. And I had no way to calm him down.”
“And I'd been out and about all morning with my happy face on. ‘Look at me, I'm being a mum. This is awesome’. And by the time I got home, I just needed a minute to not be that happy mum. I just needed him to go to sleep so I could have a cup of tea and breathe for ten minutes. And he would not give me that, obviously not intentionally because he's a baby. But he screamed and he screamed and he screamed. And then at one point I looked at him and I just screamed right back and he screamed harder and I started crying. And then he started thrashing. And then I picked up a pillow and threw it across the room and I was just not coping.”
“I will say at this point, he was safe the entire time. He was in his cot, he's rolling around and kicking his cot. And I was sitting on the couch next to the cot and just I didn't know what to do. I did not know what to do. And I screamed until my voice was hoarse. Not at him. I wasn't even screaming words. I just felt like I needed to scream and I just screamed and I had nothing left. My voice was gone. Jasper still bawling his eyes out and I just sat on the floor and I just cried and I cried and I sat there and I kept crying. Eventually, Jasper cried himself out and I picked him up and I held him and I balled my eyes out on top of him and he slept. But that was the moment.”
“And then I remember thinking, ‘maybe I'm better off just not being in his life if this is how it's going to be’. And then I was like, ‘oh crap. Did I really just think that?’ So that was my big I-know-something's-not-right-here. Yes, it was scary. That was a really scary wake up call.”
“Over the next twelve months, things were pretty up and down I was back on antidepressants. We decided that I needed a job, I needed something to do because being full time carer for twelve months was not in my plan. That was hard on me. I'm not someone who can sit around and do laundry and cooking all day. I know some mums love doing that and I wish I was one of them. I needed to be mentally stimulated and I needed to do something that was giving back. So I started working in community health three months before COVID kicked off. Yeah, that was ugly.”
“Jasper had another two surgeries in the middle of the year done under really strict lockdown, which left him with really bad separation trauma that we're still dealing with that fallout now. And then we had more diagnoses, tested him for one thing and found something else and that had happened a couple of times and things were really just looking bleak.”
“His fourth surgery happened in July 2020, and we got out of that and I went back to work a week or two later and I just thought, ‘I can't do this anymore. I don't want to leave my family. But I don't think I can still be here and live this life because I can't. How many times can we go through this? How many times can I pick myself up just to be knocked back down again with another diagnosis or another problem? I can't envision a future where it's not this hard and it's not this painful and I don't want to be here for it’. And that was the next sort of big wake up call.”
“I was really fortunate that I linked in with an amazing GP and she took me seriously.”
“I told everyone that I was okay because I was scared that we're going to take my baby away from me if I didn't. And he needed me because of how sick he was and I needed him. So I put on my brave face and I pretended like the meds were doing their thing. They absolutely were not. And it's sad that this is a state that things are in, but I was shocked that she wasn't judging me. She was just incredibly empathetic.”
This GP encouraged jess to try a different antidepressant. “‘But on the proviso that you need to actually be honest with me if they're not working, because I'm a mum too, I know how hard it is and I need you to be okay for your son. I can't help you do that if you're not honest’. And it was just this massive relief that, okay, I'm being validated and I'm being given a safe space to be honest, and I'm not going to have any repercussions. Yeah, it shouldn't be like that. Everyone should have that sort of experience with their GPs, but yeah, it was a really big moment for me and that was sort of a turning point where there is actually help.”
“And I guess the biggest change was that instead of constantly fighting it, I've been fighting depression and fighting for anxiety for as long as I can remember. And I just thought one day, you've been fighting and fighting, and it's getting you nowhere. I need to stop fighting and just sit with it, just be with it. It's part of me, it's on the bus, but it can't drive the bus, sort of analogy. You're not going to get rid of depression and anxiety. I always liken it to something like diabetes, where it's there, you've just got to manage it. You're never going to be cured of mental health, it's going to be around. But for me, I've now found that the best way to manage it is to let it be there.”
“I wish I'd learnt that 20 years ago. Something really helpful for me is saying, ‘okay, I know I'm feeling really anxious about something that's my brain just trying to protect me, but you're safe, you're safe, it's okay’. But, wow, it's a long, slow process.”
“I just thought, I don't want my son to grow up thinking that he is not allowed to have these feelings and emotions. I want him to know that being depressed or anxious, it's not a character flaw, it's not a deficiency in your character, it's okay… We know that it's not just all in your head and we know that saying to someone who's depressed, ‘just cheer up’ we know that's not going to cure it. So I do my very, very best to normalise that with Jasper.”
“I think that maybe our generation, generations before, those feelings, obviously were not looked at as okay. And people were often told that if you are depressed, there really is something wrong with you and it is a personality thing and you should fix that. And we know better now. And I don't want my kid to be feeling like there's something wrong with him just because he's not feeling it.”
“It's really, really hard to know how to fill your own cup while you're balancing the needs of everyone else and feeling like you're not letting people down. And when you are anxious or depressed or whatever else the case may be, makes filling that cup up so much harder. Because I don't know for everyone else, but for me, my depression and my anxiety tell me that I'm not worthy of having my cup filled. And so I know, logically, I can't help my kid if I'm unwell. But the devil on the shoulder says, yeah, but you don't really deserve to put yourself first. So, yeah, it's really hard.”
”We still have our really crap days. But knowing that I had that space to be honest about it made a big difference and it sort of really hit home to me.”
The GP also provided Jess with the number for the CATT team. “I remember thinking, ‘oh my God, am I that person who needs this phone number now?’ And that's what really drove it home. We're not messing around now, I do need to be honest about this because this lovely woman, she can't even see me in person, she's still managed to work out that this woman's in trouble here. That was really a light bulb moment.”
“I had been seeing a psychologist who was a perinatal psychologist and she was awesome, but through COVID, the appointment waits were ridiculous, which obviously was not her fault. I work in health, I get it, it's a mess. But I found it really hard to have a really in-depth session and then have to wait three - four weeks for another one because I felt like I was leaving those sessions so raw and opened up. And then I was just alone with all this heavy stuff, and I didn't feel good or safe or okay processing it on my own, knowing that I wouldn't be able to speak to someone for another few weeks. So I did eventually step away from doing those sessions because I was starting to feel like they were doing more harm than good.”
“I did use the Lifeline chat I found incredibly helpful because it could be done as a chat, so I could do it on my phone and I didn't have to actually speak to someone or set up anything.”
“Yeah. I've spoken to a few of their online counsellors now and they've just all been very empathetic. I don't know how to say it, just kind! You think sometimes they might want to rush through because there's going to be a lot of people waiting and you think, is this really that important? Again, it goes back to, ‘am I really worthy of being helped?’ But everyone I've ever spoken to on them has just been really kind, very patient. Even if you haven't typed anything back for a few minutes, they'll say, ‘are you still there? Do you need us to call help for you?’ Or anything like that. So, yeah, it's pretty amazing.”
“Just talking it through with someone who is out of the situation - Because our family and friends, they obviously want the best for us, so they can be a bit biased. But to just be able to chat with someone who doesn't know what's going on and they can give you their, like, ‘oh, how about this? How about that?’ Like, oh, my God, I haven't even thought of that. It's amazing. So I'm a massive fan of chat lines. I think the people who staff them are incredible. I think they're a great resource, especially for mums. You might not have ten minutes to chat on your phone while babies asleep on your lap and all you can do is text. So I think those sort of things, they should be used a lot more.”
“I think it was starting to look after me again. I think growing up, being quite anxious and introverted, you spend so much time trying to fit in to everyone else's expectations that you don't really know who you are. So for me, wanting finding things that made me want to be here, is what turned down the volume on those thoughts. The mum guilt, though, actually being able to make it okay for me to spend time away from my child, to look after me, was so hard and it still is sometimes. I still feel enormously guilty. But being able to do that and slowly start to work out who I am, not just as Mum, who am actually I? Who do I want to be when no one else is around? That's what's helped me a lot. Because when you kind of know more who you are, you've got more of a reason to be around and to do the things you love. Right? So way easier said than done, to be honest. But that's sort of where it started, I guess.”
”For me, before Jasper was born, I had every couple of months I would sort of go away for a night on my own, like, just say, to Airbnb or something, like somewhere cute and country like that. And I'd just have a night on my own to read a book or do some yoga and just sit down because my anxiety likes to pretend it's in control. So I like to write lists. Lists, like to placate my anxiety. So I would literally go away and take my notepad and a pen and I will just sit down, like, okay, what's going good right now? What's not going good? What do I wish I had more time to do? So I did that once COVID allowed us to move around again. I did that and yeah, I looked at the list and it was stuff that I always used to love doing when I was younger. And I love photography, I like drawing and watercoloring, I like making things and crafting. I like creativity, I guess. It's like, okay, so how do I actually introduce that in my day? So for me it was then just looking at little things I can do.”
“I love writing. I didn't write at all, really, when I was pregnant because I was just that depressed that I couldn't even pick up a pen. But then as the fog kind of lifted a little bit when Jasper came home from hospital, I had this idea to write a book about his condition because I got very frustrated when I started Googling what he had when he was born, that there was only worst case scenarios and really horrible things out there.”
”I would have Jasper as sleep on my chest and I'd have my laptop balanced on my knee and I'm like Googling medical journal articles while he's snoring in my ear for ten minutes at a time. And slowly, slowly, a book came out of that, which is great, and that's sort of like, ‘oh, yes, I can still write and I do still have something worth saying that might help people’. And I just sort of got back into that again and yeah, that's brought me back to life the most, I think.”
”I've been writing for a long, long, long time. Last year, my sister and I self published a kids picture book that sort of looks at how maternal mental health can present in a way that kids can understand, which was really, really fun to work on. And then the book that's coming out later this year will be a memoir about, I guess, my time looking after and being full time carer to a sick baby while managing my own mental health. So the kids book is called ‘Mummy is your brain okay?’ You can have a look at that on my website. We're really lucky, a lot of libraries have jumped on board, so you can always check if your library has it as well at the moment. And the memoir is going to be called ‘Not Enough’. And the little subtitley bit, I guess, is ‘a memoir of motherhood mental illness and making it through.’”
“I paused writing it for about six or eight months because it was just too heavy and I don't think I was healed enough. But the more I rehashed it, the more I rewrote it, the easier it was to accept it and to just sort of let it be… Writing the memoir was rough, but if it helps somebody else know that actually, ‘you're okay, you're safe, you're okay, there's not something wrong with you’. It's totally worth it.”
“I think when you're going through it, it's very easy to think, ‘this is just me, no one else is dealing with this’… Listening to podcasts where people are talking about these sort of stories, seeing Instagram accounts and Instagram posts, reading blog posts - just for anyone who's brave enough to share, they have no idea how validating it is to someone else who might be going through it. That's what I needed. I needed to know that it wasn't just me. I didn't have to go through it on my own.”
“I needed to hear from someone that yelling at your baby once doesn't make you a bad mum, or needing to have antidepressants doesn't mean that they're going to take your baby away from you. I needed to know that there wasn't something wrong with me.”
“Truly, these resources are completely invaluable. I think they're more helpful to me than any amount of medication, any amount of psychologists, just hearing from real people that have had real experiences.”
“We grow, our kids grow. Things are going to change, we're going to learn more and know more and know better. But you can't get all the advantages of learning more and knowing more without going through some hard stuff first. But you don't have to go through it on your own. So use some of the resources that are out there… Reach out. I think social media gets a bad rap, but I've found that the mum community has actually been incredible. If you're a mum out there and you're struggling, reach out to someone. Just look after yourselves, look after each other. It's hard. It is hard! You're not imagining it, but it doesn't have to be hard on your own.”
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