Motherhood and my journey to mental wellness

I’m standing on the front steps late at night. The kids are asleep, but only just. It’s been one of those days, weeks, heck, I don’t even know when I didn’t feel like this. I’m numb from exhaustion, numb from thinking, numb from worrying. I feel like I want out but my life is so good, so why do I feel this way? I want to be happy, but I’m terrified I don’t know how to be anymore.

I was a mother to two young children, my second literally weeks old and I already felt like I was drowning. The surges of guilt and failure waved through me every hour, on the hour. I couldn’t really fathom that all of a sudden everything felt so hard. But the reality was that none of these intense feelings were sudden, I had been struggling throughout the pregnancy with my emotions and put all of it down to hormones. When our second son arrived in the world, the joy I felt was quickly followed by sadness, anxiety and disconnection. Every moment of happiness and love I felt was then overshadowed by much more complex and unwelcome feelings.

It was very early days when my partner noticed the change in me, I was “no longer myself” and something was giving him alarm bells. Less than two days later I found myself sitting in a doctors office, with a woman I would come to know very well. She was so kind and had such a beautiful reassuring presence to her, but none of that changed the sting of the words that drifted out of her mouth. I was diagnosed with Post Natal Depression and Anxiety. I held my breath for what seemed like a lifetime, but how is this happening to me? I’m a happy person, I adore being a mother, why?

I knew nothing about mental illness, and to be honest, none of us really do until you’re in it. I was terrified to take the medication and equally terrified if I didn’t. Instead of feeling relief from the answers a diagnosis offered, I felt like a huge failure. This felt like evidence that I was a bad mum, that the one thing I was supposed to do I could not handle. That guilt and shame would wrack through my entire being for years. I was at the beginning of a journey I didn’t want any part of and all I wanted to do was go home with my babies, love them, be happy and forget all of this ever happened.

Navigating mental illness and motherhood over the years has been a devastating initiation into motherhood I could have never imagined. Anxiety and fear crippled me and clouded every decision I made. I was fearful of urealistic things like losing grip of the pram on the travellator, I was paranoid someone was stealing our cars in the middleof the night and I’d check on the kids incessantly to make sure they were still breathing. On top of all of this I had the unshakable sadness, a feeling that I just wanted to escape it all.

The load of mental illness on mothers and fathers is crippling, the two should never go hand in hand. But they do, and more often than we realise. For so many years I shed tears hidden away in silence, I cried mountains more in front of my kids sure that I would be screwing them up. And even though I often reflect back on these times with mixed feelings of this experience, definite and clear pain and a longing to undo it all. There is an eerily comfortable knowing that something intangible happened during those years. Something I never knew was possible.

Instead of messing up my kids, constantly worried that my mental health issues would scare them and impact them in a negative way, they are compassionate beyond words. Inadvertently my struggle taught them how to love someone just through their presence and awareness. And that’s probably something we need a lot more of in this world. I also learnt invaluable lessons about myself. Having walked deep into the darkest parts of myself, overcoming crippling mum guilt, shame, self-hate and a despondency for life I have literally walked out the other side. I believe in myself more, I have more self-compassion and I’m actually proud of myself. Because to walk through all those moments of darkness, to meet that, embrace it and do everything you can do make things better, well it makes you a better person. We are born and shaped by the very experiences we have throughout life. And this experience, although laced with many challenges has literally changed who I am.

I still have moments of “relapse” when life’s struggles get all too much and I can feel my anxiety creeping in. I still have days when I cry from the depths of my soul and want to escape it all. And I think we all do. Every mother has all of these moments and more, regardless of whether her mental health is in a good place. After this experience I knew that sharing my journey in all it’s discomfort and being open and truthful about our experiences of motherhood and mental illness we can break down stigmas and get women talking.

Our biggest enemy is not a diagnosis of Depression, Anxiety or PTSD – it’s actually being quiet about it.

For all the women reading these words and having them reverberate through your cells, I see you in every moment. I know you’re probably tired of trying, tired of fixing and just wshing you could be yourself again… I know that time is coming. Be kind to yourself, that is the one thing that will help get you through some of the hardest moments. And I know you will get through them.