Every hug makes me see I’m a great mother
Feb 6 2008 by Emma Pinch, Liverpool Daily Post
Every hug makes me see I’m a great mother
Motherhood should be a wonderful time – but who will help if you suffer post-natal depression? Emma Pinch reports
EVEN now, when she needs a bit of comfort, Jenni West takes out her old maternity blouse and wraps herself in warm memories.
“I always remember how good I used to feel when I wore it and how the material felt covering my little baby bump. I remember how I used lie on my back and stroke my stomach and how wonderful it felt to have Lucy’s little body growing in my stomach.”
Jenni’s pregnancy had been a shock at the time. Doctors had told her she would never conceive because of problems with the lining of her womb. But grateful at the unexpected blessing, she thrilled at the changes taking place in her body, and prepared to swap her carefree life for the well-worn path of all new mothers: the treadmill of feeding, washing and changing, the snatched hours of sleep, the obstinate pounds that would linger round her stomach, and even the unexplained bouts of tearfulness.
What she could never have prepared for was a slide into a depression so savage and annihilating that suicide seemed the only way out.
The birth, on January 29, 2006, was traumatic because the umbilical cord became tangled, but Lucy was born perfectly healthy.
“When she was born, I was grateful more than any sense to see this little tiny angry person screaming at us,” says 27-year-old Jenni, from Halewood.
“I know I’d gone in to have a baby, but it still felt like a surprise to see her. I absolutely adored her from that minute.”
But she couldn’t breast feed her daughter, which every expert insisted was the best possible start for baby. She tried for three fruitless, sleep-free days. “I started having my first panic attacks in the hospital. I thought I was supposed to feel like that because I didn’t know what the sensation of breast feeding was like.”
Her partner Bryan, an engineer, had become ill, so Jenni had a lot to shoulder. “I thought I would get home after having the baby and still keep the house spotless, look after Bryan and sort the washing out in one go.”
She went into over-protective mode, obsessed with the thought that Lucy was not getting enough to eat, and convinced the house wasn’t clean enough. She vividly remembers getting up at 4am to frantically Hoover the skirting boards.
“I thought I was letting her down by not breast feeding,” she says. “If she didn’t finish her bottle, I thought she would die.”
Over the following weeks, a thought lodged in her head that Lucy hated her.
“I started to think, maybe Bryan didn’t think I was good enough. I stopped going out because I assumed everybody who looked at me thought I was a terrible mum and didn’t deserve to have a baby. I had nightmares where I’d dream of Lucy dying. I’d keep rushing in to check on her and other nights I’d be rigid in bed, too scared to move. I was in complete darkness.”
Jenni’s midwife began to suspect she was depressed and she was put on medication. But Jenni couldn’t make the link between what she was feeling and the birth of her daughter. “I thought I was just feeling a little bit low and there wasn’t that much wrong with me,” she says. “Like the rest of the population, I thought post-natal depression was lying in bed listlessly not bonding with your baby.”
She went back to her job as a betting shop cashier eight weeks after giving birth, going through the motions while her internal monologue was driving her to the brink of insanity.
Nine months after Lucy was born, Jenni reached her lowest point. “I never had any thoughts about harming Lucy – I planned to kill myself,” she says quietly. “Three times I took my baby down to my partner’s mum’s house, where I knew she would be safe and looked after, because I saw her as a great mum. I had to plan for two weeks. I waited for a shift when Bryan wouldn’t be back until 10pm, and I wouldn’t be breathing when he came home. I was stuck between taking all of my tablets at once, plus the ones in my medicine cabinet and cutting my wrists. I decided cutting my wrists would be the easier thing to do, and found myself standing in the kitchen with a carving knife at my wrist. I don’t know why, but I didn’t go through with it.”
She explains: “It’s easy to look back now and see how little feeling and movement there was, and it was post natal depression; a chemical imbalance. But, at the time, I didn’t think I was depressed. I just thought I was a rubbish mum and I was weak for not going through with it.”
The overwhelming nature of the despair Jennifer experienced isn’t unusual in post-natal depression. Several of the trickle of celebrities opening their hearts about their post-natal depression – Natasha Hamilton, Brooke Shields, Sadie Frost, Courtney Cox, Susannah Constantine and Jordan among them, have admitted the condition produced suicidal thoughts.
