Picture from the wonderful Sue Kerr www.suekerr.ca
I now have a 4-nearly-5 year-old and a nearly-7-month-old. This is my first attempt at writing since I went on maternity leave in July 2019. I was ready for a break from my desk then, and now I’m ready to write.
Two things happen to me when I give life: I put on 20kg at least during pregnancy which sticks around, and I get a mental illness called Post-natal Distress (more commonly known as post-natal or postpartum depression, PPD or PND). With my firstborn it was worse and I was in denial for a long time, which meant it didn’t get accurately treated and I was in a very bad space for 7 months. I eventually got on the right trajectory and started healing, but it took a year to gain the beginnings of a sense of normality. Obviously my husband and I were reticent to have another child after barely surviving that period.
And we did. I was in a great space, I had done a lot of healing and was vital again, it was a good 3 years down the track. I’d had a miscarriage not long before and I felt very resilient through that experience, sad, but resilient. I worked with the health professionals in my life to put a lot of preventative measures in place, so I could avoid it happening. I strategised, I planned, I thought of every little detail. I prepared our friends and family thoroughly, and was clear about what kind of support we would need for those who wanted to give it. I put a lot in place to cope with it, if it happened. Yet, that optimistic part of me thought I was just playing lip-service to the whole thing, not truly believing it could possibly happen again. Not this time.
It happened. It hit us at 4 weeks postpartum, just like last time. I was highly anxious and permanently in fight-flight, just like last time. However, last time I had a long stretch of anxiety and then a long stretch of depression. This time I would yo-yo back and forth between the two, as if my nervous system couldn’t decide where it wanted to be: one day intense anxiety and the next intense depression. Unlike last time, I had another child to consider and care for through it all. It has not been easy. We all have our own challenges and ‘crosses to bear’ so to speak. This is my struggle, and I own it as it is. It may or not be better or worse than others have it – who knows? It is however, my own personal struggle and journey.
I was unwell, it was yucky. I’ll spare the details.
My strategising and pre-planning wasn’t enough to stop biology (unfortunately – perhaps nothing is?), but it did mean we were supported and I passed through the worse of it a lot quicker. I’ve been my ‘normal’ self (whatever that means) 98% of the time for a good few months now. I threw every and any treatment I had available to me at it – which I will be talking about in subsequent posts – the conventional and the non-conventional. Who knows what worked, when, and what combination of things? I remember a number of significant and specific times where I turned a corner. And I kept on turning those corners, and still am.
I woke up one morning recently and I felt that this truth had settled upon me in my sleep somehow: This Is It.
My life is happening right now. And I’m choosing to participate in it RIGHT NOW. Every messy, non-perfect part of it. My mind can trick me into a an imaginary time line that says ‘things will be better when…..’ or ‘I can be happy when…..’
when the baby can sit
when the baby is older
when life is more organised
when I can socialise more
when I can sleep more
when Pup goes to school
when we can walk everywhere
when we can go on holiday
when I’m skinny
when I can go back to work
when we get a pay rise
when…when…when……..
The list is endless, right?!
It’s an effort to stay in this place of NOW – of fully participating in life in the present and messy moment, and not waiting for the ‘if/whens’. Can I pull it off all the time? No, it’s hard. Yet it is worth the effort. There’s no fantasy future where all the parts of your life are tied up into neat little bows. The journey and the struggle is real. And, two seemingly opposing things can be true at the same time – more on that in the next post.
Can you be aware of your ‘life will be better when….’ thoughts, and challenge them by waking up into the present moment? Just gently focusing on your senses, what you can feel, hear and see? What can you pay attention to that brings you in to this RIGHT NOW moment in your life?
Charlotte x