A story of PND

Guest writer

Throughout my pregnancy I was filled with dread that I was going to loose the baby. Let me give you a bit of a background -

I’d had two previous pregnancy’s that had ended in miscarriage and I just felt “doomed”. My first miscarriage was unexpected in every sense. I was 19 and had decided to keep the baby. Before I knew the decision had been taken away from me. It was something to get my head around. I turned to drugs, dropped out of university and went on a downward spiral of depression.

I’d struggled with mental health since I was 14/15. When I was 7 My mum had an affair with a woman , it was the early 90’s, Divorce wasn’t really a thing then, let alone same sex affairs. I was bullied throughout school because of it. My relationship with my mother impacted because of it and I ended up moving in with my father shortly after I turned 15.

The week I got married I discovered a friend from work had delivered her baby around 20 weeks and lost him. My heart broke for her. It was always a fear that something like this would happen to me , having just a very small glimpse of what it might feel like to loose a child , I couldn’t believe someone would have to go through this so far into the pregnancy. My mum had told me of many miss-carriages my gran had had. I know one of the boys had even lived a few hours , and given modern medicine he would have survived now. I remember my aunt having 5 miscarriages, she didn’t successfully fall pregnant until she had started the menopause. All the baby loss on my mother’s side of the family really instilled feared into me.

My second miscarriage was just after I got married, my husband and I had been trying to conceive but I knew I would loose that baby too. I just had this dread that when I did fall pregnant it would end the same. I knew there were a lot of miscarriages on my Mothers side and I had just decided the same would happen to me. Pretty much as soon as I found out I was pregnant, I was convinced I was losing it again. I had convinced myself this was going to happen and then it did. My experience in A&E was traumatic and I had to have an ultrasound scan for the second time in my life to be told my womb was empty again. I was lucky enough to fall pregnant after my next cycle.

To my shock that pregnancy was perfectly normal, apart from the severe anxiety I experienced because of the fear of losing the baby again. I was hospitalised once due to my anxiety toward the end of this pregnancy. My daughter was born, full term and healthy. She was beautiful. I had a perfect labour, I couldn’t have asked for anything more. It just felt too good to be true.

I still felt I was going to loose her. I didn’t feel that immediate “In love” feeling I’d heard so much about. I was more impressed and overwhelmed with what I had just done. All my friends who had babies at the same time as me told me how amazing it was , this “love at first sight”, I just couldn’t stop thinking about everything I had been through and the fact I didn’t feel that way.

Nobody told me it was ok to feel the way I felt.

I found breastfeeding really hard, nobody had prepared me for the mental and physical strain it was going to have on me. Every one around me kept telling me how easy I had it, how some women really struggle and I was having no problems with latching / supply etc so I was just so lucky. This of course just made me feel guilty for feeling the strain of it. My daughter refused to take a bottle of breast milk from anyone until she was about 6months and even then it would only be from My mum she’d take it from. I felt trapped, I couldn’t escape from feeding this child. My husband resented her too, he wanted to help but he couldn’t.

From the very start we noticed she cried, a lot. Some days I felt she spent her entire day crying, the sound when she started just made my whole body retract. I couldn’t handle it. By 6 weeks old I would dread going to bed, another night battling to get this baby to sleep. I would cry every morning as I just couldn’t face the day. I had a group of NCT mums who all seemed to be getting on just fine, none of them had expressed the level of desperation I was feeling. I started flaking out on coffee mornings and social gatherings all together.

I had a group of mums I had met through pregnancy yoga, a couple of them seemed to get it a bit more but they just seemed to be handling it better than me. I felt judged by all the mums , I didn’t want to let on all these mixed emotions I was having, they seemed to be really enjoying their babies. The level of anxiety I was now experiencing meant that even if she was sleeping I couldn’t sleep.

My husband would come home and find me crying in the shower and our daughter crying in the cot. I would feel so guilty for leaving her because I just had this gut feeling she was going to die. How could I be so cold to this tiny beautiful baby who was about to die, should I be making the most of our time together? But then what was the point, surely I shouldn’t bond with her as it would only be harder when she did die. I felt like the most terrible person , so ungrateful and so unnatural as a mother, how could anyone feel like this?!

I started to have counselling, I hadn’t realised how many issues I had with my own mother. After speaking to a lot of people I’ve realised it’s only natural you start really evaluating what your upbringing was like when you become a parent yourself. When I was pregnant I really struggled to get my head around the fact that my mum had kicked me out when I was teenager, I had this tiny person growing inside of me , how could I ever be so cruel to that person. And then when I had the baby I started to obsess over my relationship with my mother. I resented my mum and her partner but I was also filled with self loathing.

Even though my daughter was born and thriving I was convinced she was going to die. It came to no shock to me that she had something wrong with her. She had a hernia. I was told it would be a simple operation when she turns two, if it hadn’t rectified itself before hand. Of course in my mind she was going to die from this. Either through complications leading up to it or during the procedure itself I was going to lose this baby.

My daughters hernia did naturally rectify itself and with a good dose of medication and some more counselling for myself my anxieties finally started to subside. But I think a lot of damage was done in those early days. I still have so much guilt over it.