We Were There
BY MADDY HILL
Photo Courtesy: Maddy Hill
Content Guidance: This story references experiences with Postpartum Depression and birth-related PTSD.
Before we decided to have a child I was a little anti-mothers. This seems like a bad place to be admitting this, but I found it frustrating that they would fall off the face of the earth once they had children. That people you had known for years would transform into something almost unrecognisable, and when you did eventually meet up with them, they would only talk about their child, or manage to turn every conversation topic into a parenting anecdote. When we decided to have a child, and then got pregnant (I know, I know, I’m very grateful), I was ABSOLUTELY determined not to be that woman. I was going to have a child, and be exactly the same person. And I know many of you will be reading this and laughing and thinking ‘you foolish woman’. But I really did believe it.
And then motherhood ripped me up and spat me back out. No matter how I dealt with the first few months of newborn life, I was never going to achieve that dream. And now it seems almost whimsical; that hazy time when I thought I would discover my maternal instincts and sing my son lullabies to sleep. Sometimes I wonder whether I knew I didn’t know anything, that the ignorance was a cotton wool blanket I was gently pulling over my heart, protecting me from the chaos that would ensue.
My son was born all in a whirlwind of pain and hopelessness. The birth messed me up, in more ways than one, and by the time we got him home, I think I must have been in a state of shock. It seemed so surreal that after going through hell and back there was suddenly this tiny person in my arms that seemed to look nothing like me, and all I knew was that I was meant to be keeping him alive – something I instantly failed at (I can hear my therapist tutting from here) and landed us back in hospital a mere 24 hours after being discharged. My first failure as a mother. And then after the second trip home with him, this time armed with formula and two different breast pumps, the sleep deprivation started to rear its ugly head. And then the breastfeeding collapsed like a slowly sinking ship, despite my desperate pumping and tearful determination. My second failure as a mother. And then after weeks of gripping onto my sanity with white knuckles, I realised that sometimes when I looked at my son’s face, I could see blood on the floor and feel the ghost of my contractions. I was diagnosed with PTSD, the name of my third failure as a mother. Looking back on that time now fills me with a quiet sadness. I felt that everything was stolen from me, like the birth I was meant to have, the precious few weeks with a newborn, and falling in love with my own baby. That it was all taken away from me, and made into something raw. There were days of normalcy which filled me with a blessed relief, and days that felt like I was wandering the wastelands, barefoot with muslin in hand, scrabbling for my old life back. But despite those feelings, we survived. My son is one now, and when people ask me how he’s doing, I joke that he’s still alive. Most people laugh, and I laugh with them. But something inside me twists as well. We all made it through alive. I didn’t think we would at some points.
There are days now when I’m almost looking for it to be difficult still. And don’t get me wrong, they can still be impossibly hard. We managed to get a baby who hates the car, won’t sit still AT ALL (trust me, I’ve tried everything short of knocking him out) and has a psychopathic tendency to bite me when he’s happy. But even on the good days I’m still measuring how things are going, silently scoring hour by hour. I’ve done some soul-searching, and I think it’s because I feel like if things are easier, and we’re not going through the wars, that we won’t have any proof of what we’ve made it through. That we’ll forget those days that seemed longer than a millennium, when the air was heavy with my tears. And without those, how can we appreciate where we are? How will our journey be marked? But I remind myself that nothing can change the fact that we did go through it, and there were some dark days. We were there.
The days are lighter now, as we draw into his second winter. He understands some of my words. He laughs when I sing to him. I can look at him and only see love and peanut butter smeared on his cheeks. And we can sit in the living room and play together, and there are only slivers of those dark days, only whispers of those wastelands. I am changed in all the ways I was dreading, but now I understand – it is the baring of ourselves against motherhood that creates the new us, and leaves us new and damaged, swapping anecdotes like sweets.
Now I stand at the departures lounge in Stansted airport, our first trip away with Little Bear, and I am watching myself. I see a tired mother who is craning her neck for the gate number. She looks a little blank-faced, but I know she is counting a million ways she is going to keep her baby distracted from realising he can’t crawl around on the floor of the plane, and that he is strapped in with a seatbelt. She has a smear of biscuit-dribble on the shoulder of her top, and her bag has an eternal supply of crumbs in the bottom, but she is a different woman from the one who bought that bag. She talks about children and frequently drops off the face of the earth when her friends message her. She is different to how she was before. And she is trying to forgive herself for that, after everything. It’s alright. It’s only what being a mother did to her.
MADDY HILL lives in the West Midlands, United Kingdom with her husband, son and cat, and puts to page her experiences of a traumatic birth and her awkward first attempt at motherhood. The first time she read a poem about someone’s traumatic birth, it made her cry with the overwhelming relief that she wasn’t alone in her experiences and thoughts. She hopes more than anything that she can return the favor to someone else who may be feeling isolated by how they feel.