PND - Having a baby made me sad

Novelist Sarah May was fine after having her first baby, so why did she suffer postnatal depression the second time around?

I'd been sitting on the end of the bed, semi-dressed, staring at the clothes hanging up in the wardrobe and sobbing for hours. Ever since the midwife rang, in fact, and cancelled the appointment we had scheduled for that morning. She was deeply apologetic and deeply overbooked owing to a complication with another patient. Was I OK? Her tone anticipated that she could see no reason why I wouldn't be, and circumstantial evidence was in her favour: I was 31; I didn't live alone; this was my second baby; I'd given birth naturally to a healthy boy; I seemed relatively intelligent and competent.

At that precise moment I felt utterly abandoned and so heavy with despondency that I could barely contemplate the walk down the hallway to the foot of the stairs, but I was up against the patient with a complication who was haemorrhaging over her kitchen floor, and it felt wrong to take up any more of the midwife's time. Of course I was OK.

We rescheduled and she hung up. I don't know how long it took me, but I eventually made my way back upstairs. The wardrobe doors were still open, but as the midwife wasn't coming, getting dressed became an impossible feat; one I knew I'd never accomplish that day. Then, with a realisation that brought on more sobs, I suddenly understood that it was how her life had sounded so busy and full that had really affected me and not the cancelled appointment.

I'd given birth three weeks previously in the way I wanted, thanks to two hugely supportive delivery-room staff, an aggressively determined partner and a bottle of Neal's Yard Remedies massage oil. Our baby was delivered safely and naturally; our older son was now an older brother and in the outside world my third book had just been published. I was on a complete high.

So what had gone wrong? Sitting in front of my wardrobe that day, I concluded that my post-birth high came to an end around the same time as my partner's paternity leave. The sound of the front door slamming shut in the morning - when my older son left for school, and then again when my partner left for work - gained a whole new resonance that I came to associate with profound loneliness.

My first pregnancy was unplanned

Having a baby hadn't felt like this first time round, and circumstances couldn't have been more different. Our older son was unplanned. I had him when I was 19 and my partner and I were still at university. Our son's routine was dictated by our lecture and seminar timetable, and if there was a play or film we wanted to see, we took him with us. I was exhausted and anxious, and yet I never got depressed.

We were still growing up ourselves and every upheaval we experienced, our son went through it with us. I started to feel increasingly guilty about this and by the time I became pregnant again, I was obsessed with doing it “properly”, despite the fact that our 11-year-old son was happy, healthy and thriving academically.

The “doing it properly” package consisted of a planned pregnancy, a home of our own and a fixed routine. But while the package may have worked for others, it just didn't for me.

I was terrified of revealing the helpless, hopeless person I felt that I'd become to those who knew and loved me, especially my partner, in case they started to see me in a different light - or even stopped loving me at all. Every time my partner so much as mentioned the word “depression”, I felt as if I was under attack.

I put what little energy I had into concealing my feelings from my son and my husband. The consequence of this was a self-inflicted feeling of isolation. There was a strong local parent/baby network, with countless drop-in groups, that I could have gone to, but the few I tried had a competitive element that was counterproductive: from who's got the best buggy to who can publicly love their baby the most? We were all going through the same thing, learning to become mothers, and all pretending that we were absolutely fine.

Society has a lot to answer for in being so slow to acknowledge that the myth of motherhood is precisely that. Having a baby is the most emotional and psychological experience of a woman's life, whatever her class. Some women get happy after having a baby, some get sad, and most get both. Until recently postnatal depression wasn't even supposed to exist, which was why our mothers' generation was treated for it on general psychiatric wards.

Today, a readily available variety of support is available at primary care level in the shape of cognitive behaviour therapy and/or a pharmacological approach.

I should have spilt the beans

Just as the depression started when my partner's paternity leave finished, so it ended - gradually abated would be more honest - when my son started sleeping through at three months old. I started to plan my days; to leave the house and seek company rather than avoid it. My energy was back. My depression had been relatively mild, but I started to realise that I would have had far fewer bad days if I'd even once spilt the beans at a parent/baby group and brought the monster out of the closet. Likewise, if I'd answered the phone when my partner rang and I was sobbing uncontrollably rather than ringing back when I was done with the tears.

The more I think about it, the more I have come to realise that postnatal depression isn't a condition so much as a process - unavoidable and even necessary - that all women go through. In my case, there were no indicators that it would descend unannounced; I'd never suffered from depression. But just how realistic is it to assume that a combination of acute sleep deprivation, disorientating hormone imbalance and overwhelming love for 7lb worth of human being who shares the same genes as you will leave a person emotionally unscathed?

Having a happy family takes hard work, and knowing how much work has gone on behind the scenes in our family, not a day goes by when I take for granted that I have two wonderful children and a loving partner.

Sarah May's new novel, The Rise and Fall of A Domestic Diva, is published on Monday (HarperCollins, £6.99). It is available from Times Books First at £6.64, free p&p. Phone 0870 1608080; or log on to timesonline.co.uk/booksfirstbuy

 

 

Original Source -The Times Online

Authors -Sarah May

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