‘I despised my life’: After my son was born, I thought I’d feel lost forever
There was a moment in my six-week postpartum check-up when the health visitor, reading down the list of questions, asked cheerily: “are you depressed?”. A simple yes or no. My answer felt like it could be a thousand words long: I didn’t think I had postnatal depression exactly, but I was voluble in my hatred of this new reality. I was frightened, untethered, overwhelmed, shattered and then wired, and in pain.
On balance then… no? The relief was almost tangible down the phone line.
The truth was that my son’s birth, in the pasta and toilet-roll hoarding era of the pandemic, spun my world off its axis. The surgeon hadn’t just cut through four layers of skin and muscle, she’d managed to end my life as I knew it in just a few minutes. (He was pulled out to the Artful Dodger’s Re-e-wind, which I think says it all.) There was none of this earth-shattering love, no hormonal swoop to bind me to this eight-pound mass of blood and flesh. There was just nothingness. I wanted to melt into the operating table and disappear.
Sentiments like this, I soon learnt, didn’t exactly endear me to other mothers in my neighbourhood, London’s baby belt. I couldn’t understand why everybody kept reaching for the tired, unexamined tropes of “it was the best thing I’ve ever done” or “a love like I’d never felt” – was it really, I wanted to ask scornfully after two espressos? What was wrong with me, given I felt the exact opposite? Working as a journalist, my life pre-baby was grounded in travel, stimulating conversations with my friends, the selfish millennial lifestyle of doing exactly as I pleased. This new reality was grey, soundtracked to my son’s cries and the 6am whirr of my coffee machine. How I despised how flat and narrow-focused my life had become.
What I didn’t know at the time was that there’s a term for this: matrescence. When a child is born, a mother is too; and she’s sent on an emotional rollercoaster. We recognise postnatal depression (and the far more serious postpartum psychosis), which according to the Royal College of Psychiatrists affects around one in seven new mothers; but there was no language to describe the shit sandwich that was the fourth trimester. It seemed clear to me that the mother’s mental state in the early months couldn’t be described in a simple binary way: either happy or sad, and I was doing a disservice to other women to not describe it plainly. Like most of my son’s babygros, the reality was grey, somewhere in between.
Family fun. Beautiful shadows on wall of mom playing with her daughter. Childhood concept, harmony in family
A psychologist I spoke to about a year later said this feeling of ambivalence and resentment was entirely normal. I was in mourning for my old life, and this in no way meant I wasn’t grateful to have my son, whom I knew I loved with the same vigour I used to reserve for my travel plans – I just didn’t like looking after him 24/7.
My son is four years old now. He’s a lively, kind child who loves nothing more than kicking a ball about in the playground. As the years tick by, our family life has just got better and better. One friend said to me once that some people are “just not baby people” - a heart-startingly obvious thing I’d never considered. No question that I’m one of them. Being able to have a sensible (ish) conversation with him, where I’m not just the bovine caregiver, has improved our relationship enormously. Childcare has been non-negotiable, so I could return full-time to a career I loved which gave me far more satisfaction than wiping spills off the floor and navigating nap times.
We’re redressing the balance of what I felt four years ago, when all I could see was what I’d lost rather than what I’d gained. In fact, one of the biggest benefits is an adult one: I’ve now got a close-knit network in my neighbourhood, other parents I can call about child quirks and sleep issues, as well as for coffee and wine.
I still can’t quite bring myself to say having children aligns itself with the Hallmark sentiment of “it’s the best thing I’ve ever done”. The truth is far more mundane than that. It’s bloodily confronting. Watching him grow up feels more like continuity and renewal. My experience of motherhood is constantly in flux, but whatever happens, he is there, growing and learning all the time.
We’re even trying (unsuccessfully) for a second, a sentence that has surprised no one more than me. Whether our family grows or not, I now recognise that everything is a phase. Every feeling is valid: recognising the dark side of parenthood has made me appreciate the lighter parts too. And that’s okay.
Cathy Adams is a writer and editor at the Times and Sunday Times