Up until that point I had been paralysed either in bed or on the sofa, petrified to stand up because I felt so shaky and dizzy, and with the completely irrational thought running round my head that if I stood up I would either die or completely lose my shit. By sitting still I felt safe.
So I challenged myself to get up and make myself toast. I remember the look on my husband’s face as I talked to myself, willing myself to stand up, spending half an hour in self-conversation trying to convince myself that this wasn’t a big deal, it was just toast right!? When I finally got up I was crying uncontrollably and shuffled slowly into the kitchen waiting for the moment when I would drop dead. My hands trembled as I took the bread out of the packet and I dropped it more than once trying to get it in the toaster. The few minutes it took the bread to toast were interminable and I spent them bent over double, trying to catch my breath and battling with stomach-churning nausea. When the toaster popped I almost jumped out of my skin. I took it back to the living room where I wept so hard with relief and confusion that I couldn’t actually eat it. Why was this so fucking hard? How could I look after a baby when I couldn’t even make toast? What the fuck was I going to do?
That is the nature of anxiety though. It will fill your brain completely with irrational thoughts and make the smallest task seem like climbing Everest. It will erode your self-confidence and make you feel more weak and vulnerable than you have ever felt in your life. For that to happen when you have just had a new baby and are supposed to be relishing motherhood seems more cruel to me than anything I’ve ever experienced.
The other problem with anxiety is that when it is left untreated and unmanaged for too long, it begins to erode any sense of hope and opens the door for depression to creep in. That’s where I found myself when my daughter was four months old.
We were at home late one evening, the baby sleeping soundly in her cot. We had just got into bed when I was taken over by yet another panic attack, a particularly bad one. I tried my best to get it under control but it just kept washing over me again and again until I could bear it no longer. I got dressed, lifted the baby out of her sleep and put her into the pram and asked my husband to come on a walk with me. I felt so trapped and claustrophobic indoors, I just needed to be out in the open in the fresh air. I say fresh, it was the depths of winter and the weather was atrocious.
We walked and walked around our neighbourhood, with me sobbing all the while and generally looking like I had lost my mind. Eoin listened patiently as I rehashed my birth experience for the thousandth time and poring over the last few months of anxiety which had gotten completely out of control. I had been obsessed with getting sick to the point that I overcooked our dinners so we didn’t get food poisoning. I held my breath as I passed people in the street in case they had germs. I visited the doctor with a handwritten list of things I thought were wrong with me and asked for tests. I spent my days walking around town so that if I suddenly collapsed, there would be people around to help my baby.
Anxiety controlled my every thought, my every movement. I consciously took each stair at a time in case I tripped and fell with the baby. If Eoin was five minutes late in from work, I had horrible “daymares” imagining him crushed in a car wreck. My body wasn’t to be trusted either with every twinge, every pain, and every strange sensation blown out of all proportion to the point where I was just waiting around for the inevitable heart attack to take me.
On that night when we went walking, I was at absolute breaking point. All I could see stretched out in front of me were years of dark, grim and difficult times. Everything seemed so bleak, it was like all the colour had gone from the world. My pervading thought was that the world was impossibly cruel and I had brought a baby into this hell. I felt so selfish for bringing her into the world for her to suffer like I was suffering and I wanted to rewind the clock and forget about having children altogether.
I could imagine her at my age, going through this horrendous ordeal and nothing was more painful to me than thinking that my precious baby would ever have to go through what I was going through. I couldn’t see a future where there was anything but pain and suffering. It was that night that I wept to my husband that I really didn’t want to die but that I couldn’t go on much longer living this hell and if I had a gun or a pill I would put myself out of my misery. The only thing that kept me clinging to life was the pain that my death would cause to my family. That night was a turning point for all of us.
Michelle is a working mum of three living in Belfast. Her debut book “Pangs: Surviving Motherhood and Mental Illness” is available from Amazon. It focuses on her personal experiences of perinatal mental illness but which also provides a self-help and resource section for anyone seeking to help themselves, or to support someone else going through mental illness. You can also follow Michelle on Facebook. She runs PANGS NI, an online peer support group for women with perinatal mental illness as well as a blog and resource site www.wearepangs.com. She is also the founder of ALC Events that focuses on “events that matter” and has been instrumental in bringing the first Maternal Mental Health Conference, and Positive Birth Conference to Northern Ireland.
