Blithe Meat

For moms with postpartum depression (PPD), Postpartum Progress is the world's top resource. It was created by moms for moms, with a community of thousands who've recovered and understand. You're not alone.

I went into labour two weeks ‘earlier’ than my due date, at 38 weeks, on 12th January 2015. My midwife had told me a week before on one of my regular checkups that there was no way I was going to give birth in the next few weeks and we hadn’t even discussed my birth plan…I’d been to one antenatal workshop that gave me a bit more information about my options but basically everything I found out and researched was through my friends/family/internet/ books etc. 

I felt really prepared for labour in a lot of ways, I had a clear plan of what I wanted to do, knowing full well it was an unpredictable process and it would probably all go out of the window when it came down to it anyway.  I wanted a water birth, in the hospital, with no pain relief but gas and air. In retrospect I wish I had had a home birth, and I would definitely consider that if I have more children, but our small flat with it’s crazy cats and annoying neighbours would have been just plain weird.

My water’s broke at 4am whilst I was asleep. It was like in the films where someone’s shopping or on the bus and it starts pouring out of you - that did happen. I wasn’t expecting this to be the first sign of labour at all so I was quite surprised. I got up and phoned the labour ward and they arranged for me to come in at 8am to check if it WAS my waters breaking…Er, yeah I think I can tell the difference between a wee and about a million pints of weird sickly sweet water coming out of me!!! YUCK. Anyway I decided to sit up watching Celebrity Big Brother and waited for whatever was next.  Contractions - oh yes. So they started about 5 minutes after getting off the phone, and they started fast. I was having them every 5 minutes from the get go, and they gradually got stronger and stronger.  I can’t explain what a contraction feels like. There are no words to describe the experience of your body pushing another body out of it.  In a way iit’s not PAIN, but it hurts and FEELS more than anything else I’ve ever felt. At 11am after struggling to cope anymore I went to hospital, and lo and behold was 4cm dilated - labour had BEGUN. I went straight into the birthing pool and continued to breathe through the contractions, which is the only way I could cope with the pain. 

I found that taking myself away and isolating myself from my body was the only way I could try and combat the contractions which were of the most intense and immense pressure that I’d ever felt.  It was a completely primal, out of this world experience.  Women’s bodies are made to be able to cope with this amount of pressure and pain. We are made to create and push another human being out of us by our bodies alone., and we can not experience anything more than what our bodies can deal with. We are stranded in this inbetween state of life and creation, and it is amazing what our bodies are capable of doing. 

Unfortunately, my temperature shot up and I had to move to another room to a bed to be monitored. It was on this bed that I gave birth, with Henry and my other at my side, although I didn’t want them touching me or talking to me! At around 2pm I was fully dilated and began to push. Pushing a baby through your body is another experience in itself, don’t even get me started about the ‘ring of fire’ but let me tell you this - it certainly burned.  When she popped out (quite quickly, in the end) all the pressure, all the pain, everything went immediately. It was the biggest rush and most overwhelming feeling of relief/exhaustion/bewilderment. You’ve just been through the most traumatic experience of your life - but there’s no time to recover because now you have a baby!

"The lost discourse of woman's unconscious" 

Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen's avant-garde film 'Riddles of the Sphinx' (1977) is a 'complex treatise exploring feminism, motherhood and sexual difference'. The film's narrative circulates around the everyday life of a woman (a mother) bringing up her young daughter alone in a patriarchal society.

"Initially the soundtrack (by Soft Machine's Mike Ratledge) is devoted to her rhyming, circular stream of consciousness; only as her husband announces that he is leaving her does it break into synch-sound. Throughout, Louise's oblique progress with motherhood is depicted in a series of thirteen 360-degree panning shots. The effect is to rotate the boundaries of her world in a slow delirium. As its title suggests, 'Riddles of the Sphinx' is meant to raise questions. To that end, it succeeds admirably." J. Hoberman, The Village Voice

Announcing the HerStories Project's next call for submissions and a writing contest for Mothering Through the Darkness

My friend Em has recently started the brilliant GET REAL blog - exploring real experiences of tackling the difficulties of mental health in a positive way and they are currently looking for submissions. They also have a facebook page here. Em told me about Michelle Tea's online MUTHA Magazine which I've just started exploring and it's an amazing resource for feminists punks queeros and weirdos in their words 'exploring real-life motherhood, from every angle, at every stage'. I was lucky enough to have the Sister Spit's stay at my house once years ago during the UK tour that my friend Em was also part of and it was such a positive and exciting experience. SISTER SPIT is a feminist spoken-word and performance art collective based in San Francisco founded by Michelle - you can find out more about them here.

A few words about the possibility of post natal depression

Every health professional I have seen during my pregnancy has told me my chances of having post natal depression are high because I already suffer from some sort of mental illness. Even my mother (who meant well and was only looking out for me) kept pointing out that myself and Henry (my partner) had to be on the lookout for the signs and that I might not recognise it in myself, however clued up I might think I am.  Henry's mother told me horror stories of her own struggle with post natal depression after an extremely traumatic birth and a very 'high maintenance' (hate that expression) baby in Henry's older brother.  

What about the possibility that maybe I WOULDN'T have post natal depression?  It got me thinking that despite the well-meaning of everyone in letting me know before I gave birth what to look out for and to be AWARE of it, it was also making me feel more nervous about the whole thing.  I AM aware of post natal depression and I AM aware that I MIGHT be more susceptible to it because I have a history of depression and personality disorder BUT it doesn't necessarily mean ANYTHING. I guess every woman about to bring a child into the world has the fear that she might not love her child, or might not be a good mother, or might need help, but I think I knew that already, without a million and one people telling me I'll PROBABLY be depressed once I have a baby.  How about a little positivity before it's even happened? I'm already on medication that is prescribed for depression so maybe i'll just sail on through. Here's hoping! And if not, then I know I have a brilliant support network in place if I need it, and I won't be afraid to ask for help.

When I became pregnant I was on beta blockers for anxiety as well as 40mg citalopram daily. I don't really suffer from depression anymore but I do experience day to day rapid mood swings, impulsivity and anxiety and the citalopram had been really great at keeping me on an even keel, and stopping me going too far when I felt myself getting upset/angry/emotional etc. Before I was on it I was prone to quite emotional violent and impulsive rages which would come often out of the blue, so I was obviously very hesitant when my GP advised that I stopped the citalopram during my pregnancy.  Beta Blockers yes - I only took them when I needed to and didn't find them that useful anyway but I was very concerned coming off the citalopram.  I weened myself onto 20mg daily and decided there was no way I wanted to come off them completely. After a few weeks I went down to 10mg.  For a while this seemed ok, until my partner pointed out that I was acting quite erratically and that he had noticed a distinct difference since I cut down.  Speaking to my midwife, she informed me that 20mg was actually the active dose (10MG WASN'T DOING ANYTHING!!!!!), I felt pretty dumb that I hadn't figured this out seeing as I have always been pretty clued up on medication. Anyway whatever, she called the pharmacist and they said it was fine for me to take citalopram during pregnancy, so I went straight back up to 20mg which I am still taking.  I was pretty annoyed that my GP didn't give me that information, as I had been playing around with my body for weeks and once I started taking 20mg again it felt like I was back (slightly) to my 'normal' (no such thing) self.  

To learn more about the disorder generally, I've included an in-depth description on the What is BPD? page.  On a personal level, I’ve had BPD since I was about 14 when I was also misdiagnosed as having Bipolar Disorder (Manic Depression).  The two can share very similar characteristics (such as mood dysfunction, emotional instability, impulsivity, recklessness, self harm, self medicating, depression etc) but after a lot of psychiatric evaluation (and common sense) it was pretty clear that I had Borderline Personality Disorder and not the latter, which was also very hard to diagnose in children. BPD has many different pseudonyms including Emotion Intensity Disorder and Emotional Instability Disorder and is something I've struggled with throughout my life. I guess the best way to describe how I live is like I’m on an emotional see-saw, one second I’m up the next I’m down, and it’s extremely hard to balance in the middle.   There is so much stigma attached to this mental illness (name doesn’t help much either) that I often find myself reluctant to talk about it to people I don’t know. People often brand it as a women’s illness which is a load of rubbish, although it is more commonly diagnosed amongst women than men.

One major point about this disorder is that people often would never guess that you struggle with this stuff - people comment on me being quite outspoken and dramatic and have a tendency to say what I think all the time which on one hand is obviously part of my my personality, but is something that ties in with this also and can sometimes prove to be problematic.  At least I can say I'm not boring I guess! 

I discovered I was pregnant in May, after my Mother guessed I was while we were on holiday in Wales. She likes to think she has this special intuition or something with me, although she's been right every time in her predictions so far so I can't really argue it.  I was terrified of telling my partner Henry as I thought he would think I had tricked him into it. I am incredibly impulsive and don't think things through properly and I had already messed up my pills which is why I'd got pregnant in the first place. It was something we'd talked about doing in the future, it just happened a little sooner than planned, and of course he was nothing but supportive and happy about it (more so than me!)

Obviously it was the worst time I could be pregnant - bang in the middle of studying nursing, but then again, I don't think there would ever be a convenient time for something like this to happen in my life, which has always been turbulent and manic to say the least.