Content warning: complicated labour/birth, post-natal depression, anxiety.

On a Monday in August 2021, I gave birth to our little boy. He was born just a day before his due date, and I’d been singing to my expanding stomach every day for weeks to let him know how excited I was for him to arrive. When he finally made his entrance, my world turned upside down.

It wasn’t the most straightforward birth, though I was lucky that my husband could be there once my contractions started in earnest and that I went through labour in hospital, as I needed surgery and a blood transfusion after a forceps delivery. Due to the pandemic, T could then only visit us for two hours on each of the following five days, until we were finally allowed home, but this has been the case for thousands of women and new babies over the last few years. Many have had to bear far worse entirely alone, and I feel fortunate that we did, at least, have that daily face-to-face contact.

Nonetheless, it was a difficult week, with our little one losing a lot of weight in his first 72 hours, then having daily weigh-ins to see if he was doing well enough to be discharged. I was exhausted: struggling to breastfeed, detesting pumping, trying to cup-feed formula on top as he wasn’t getting enough milk from me, and barely able to walk. Even in my last weeks of pregnancy I’d been outside every day, walking as far as I sensibly could, so to be stuck inside with only a few inches of fresh air drifting through the window for almost a week felt stifling, and I was (irrationally) terrified that my baby would become ill due to lack of food.

I tried to follow the feeding regime we’d been set but wasn’t coping well, and eventually a midwife asked if I wanted her to give the baby some formula from a bottle so I could sleep for a couple of hours. I was desperately tired and said yes. Those days and nights have now all blurred together in my mind; a haze of different faces behind masks and the constant wails and electrical beeps of a maternity ward.

Going home

On the Saturday evening we finally left. My Dad came to pick us up from the hospital, and he and Mum spent an hour or so meeting their grandson before leaving us as a family of three, promising to visit in a few days. I was already emotional, with hormones going haywire, but the relief of being able to snuggle into T that night with our new baby in his little crib at the end of the bed was immense, and I think I was happy. I savoured the silence that night, in the short periods when the baby slept. However, breastfeeding was still not going well and we’d been told to maintain formula top-ups after each go at the boob. I didn’t mind that; all I wanted was for the Goblin, as we’d affectionately begun calling him, to be healthy, and so we persevered with both and set alarms throughout the night.

I’ve always been prone to overthinking things and had struggled with anxiety previously, particularly during the first wave of the pandemic in 2020, but the time in hospital triggered an entirely new level of worry. Those first couple of days at home were overwhelming, as I’m sure they are for every new parent, but I was constantly fretting about Goblin’s weight and was very tearful. Then, when he was eight days old and the day before my parents were due to visit again, T took a lateral flow test and it showed a positive result. This was at about 10pm at night – he’d been slightly snuffly so I’d suggested he do one just to be on the safe side – and I immediately messaged my parents saying not to come. The next morning, I also tested positive. PCRs later confirmed we both had Covid and were confined to the house for the next twelve days. Luckily neither of us were physically unwell, with my only symptom being a loss of appetite, but the isolation was another significant mental toll.

During that time, we made the stressful decision to move entirely to bottle feeding, but I expressed until Goblin was two weeks old, in the hope that he might at least get some antibodies from my milk. I’d always wanted to breastfeed and felt like I was letting him down by not managing to do it properly, but also knew I wasn’t coping with the uncertainty of how much he was or wasn’t getting on the occasions he did eventually latch. It was obvious he needed the formula as well, and at least T could help with those feeds. Nonetheless, the guilt was overwhelming. There’s so much rhetoric around ‘breast is best’ and I kept questioning if we were doing the right thing. Now, with the benefit of hindsight, I know we did what was best for us, but in the throes of new parenthood I genuinely felt that yet another of my expectations about what our first weeks with our baby would be like had been shattered, and that I was failing.

Not just the baby blues

For as long as I can remember, I had wanted to be a Mum at some point in my life. And now I had a tiny, precious human and all I could do was cry. To begin with I thought it was the baby blues, then that it was the Covid isolation; but when we were finally allowed outside – a huge mental and physical hurdle in itself after the enforced isolation – I couldn’t smile for a photo of our new little family. My face just wouldn’t do it. I sat on the sofa weeping, day after day, craving routine and wondering how I would ever do anything outside the house again, let alone return to work or finish my PhD. By the time I began writing this a year later, I could see that I wasn’t myself during that time, but back then it felt like this sinking depression was an interminable state of being. Every decision felt monumental and agonising, from what changing bag to buy, to when we should attempt to bathe him.

I like being organised, having plans and making lists. I love chatting to people and ironing out details. A new baby has no sense of night and day and can only communicate through crying. And I felt so, so guilty that I wasn’t enjoying these early weeks that everyone said were so special. My husband was amazing, but I know he was struggling too and it can’t have been easy seeing me so down. Again though, I find myself thinking how lucky we were and are: friends and family dropped home-cooked meals on the doorstep while we were isolating, brought nappies and other supplies, sent us brownies through the post, and checked in through WhatsApp and phone calls. We were surrounded by love, even at a distance, and once people could come to visit, they often did the dishes. Nonetheless, I was still struggling with being a Mum, and found it impossible to believe that other repeated line ‘it gets easier’. I loved my baby but couldn’t see then how I was ever going to enjoy life again.

Writing that sounds melodramatic and feels ridiculous now, but such feelings were my reality for a while. I couldn’t see past the cycle of nappies, feeds, sleeps, screams and bottle washes. Cooking meals was a struggle and I fretted about the pile of clean washing that sat on a chair for nearly a month. My physical recovery also affected my mood: while NCT classes had gone into the implications of a C-section in detail, next to nothing had been said about the trauma that can be caused by a vaginal birth. Suffice to say I had to fight to get an in-person appointment to check things over – a stressful process in itself – and that the physio consultation I subsequently had three months later gave a different opinion. Things heal, but things also change, and not enough people talk about the very real, lasting physical impact labour can have on your body.

‘Post-natal depression’

By the time October came, it was quite evident that I needed some more help. I had resisted medication for the first couple of months, but knew I couldn’t carry on with the multiple daily crying sessions and fretting over every tiny thing. My health visitor suggested I probably had post-natal depression and the doctor prescribed Sertraline to help alleviate this and my anxiety. I didn’t really know how to feel about such a diagnosis, but I suppose, in retrospect, attaching a label to some of what I was going through made it feel more legitimate. (What an odd, uncomfortable sentence that is to admit and to write). Luckily, I responded well to medication and didn’t experience any unpleasant side effects. While it doesn’t work for everyone, anti-depressants were clearly what I needed and in hindsight, probably something I should have taken at certain times in the past.

I slowly began to feel better and the Goblin also started to smile, which was wonderful. I still worried hugely about whether he was feeding properly, no doubt a result of that first week – one morning in hospital I had been asked ‘is this the weight loss baby?’ – but gradually I started to accept that if he was hungry, he would eat. The fatigue, as any new parent will know, continued to be crippling, but I did learn that even this is something your body adjusts to. Fears about him hurting himself or being ill still exist, however they now lie beneath the surface of my consciousness rather than impacting on every decision of every day. And somehow, by the time my maternity leave was approaching its end, we’d travelled to London by train for a wedding and had a wonderful weekend; something I thought would be impossible when the invitation had arrived the month after the baby.

On the other side

The first time I wore my favourite dungarees again, the first time I put in earrings after well over a month, the first time I actually watched something on the telly and really listened to an audiobook, rather than just staring at the screen or having headphones in without processing any images or sounds: each of these was a significant event, another step back towards a happy existence. Becoming a parent is the hardest thing I have ever done, but even with the initial tribulations and the extreme lows I experienced, it is also the greatest.

Putting all this into words is both cathartic and upsetting, but also feels immensely selfish; so much I, I, I, and not much about my son. But I am so proud of him and love him more than I can express. I’m also proud of my husband and I as we continue to learn about being parents and share this adventure together. The Goblin is a joy and those early weeks I’ve recounted here seem detached, somehow, from the happy reality the three of us soon began to share as a family, and continue to do so (poonamis and teething aside). Other things have happened since he was born that have affected me deeply, and I still struggle with intermittent anxiety and ‘down’ periods, but most days I just reflect on how very lucky I am to have my son, whose grin and cuddles light up every day.

So, that’s why I haven’t written in so long. I’m trying my best to be a good Mum, wife, daughter, sister and friend, alongside working a full-time job and doing a part-time PhD (don’t even get me started on the phrase ‘full time Mummy’). I feel guilty that I’ve spent some time finishing this off, six months after I last opened the word document, instead of contemplating the structure of my thesis while the now-toddler naps, but I accept that’s probably just me being me. One way or another, I will get there, as I did before, with the support of many lovely people and the knowledge that I have the most wonderful tiny person. If you’ve got to the end of this, thanks for reading. I wish you happiness.