The Power of Asking for Help - Joanne Mitchell
/The Power of Asking for Help
*TRIGGER WARNING* - this post may trigger or upset you. If it does and you need some support please seek advice and support from your GP/Counsellor/Mental Health Professional.
When I submitted a pitch to write an article for Issue 14 of Positive Wellbeing Zine for Mums, in all honesty I think I did it as much to help myself come to terms with my experience, as well as to comfort any other struggling mothers out there. This is the story of my journey to complete low self-worth and how I am pulling myself back.
I had a really good pregnancy with my son Elliot, nothing to report at all really, that was until I finished work for my maternity leave and it all started to go wrong.
My blood pressure crept up higher than the midwives would have liked. It was still classed as borderline, so when I should have been relaxing enjoying my last freedoms before becoming a mother I suddenly had a number of additional appointments at the hospital for blood pressure profiles. Each time my blood pressure was a little raised and then settled, in line with the white coat syndrome I knew I always had.
About 2 weeks prior to my due date I was sent for a consultant appointment. Again, my blood pressure was duly checked except this time the nurse struggled to find an actual working monitor. My arm was pumped and squeezed over and over again until a blood pressure reading was obtained. Funnily enough it was high! I don’t think anybody would have a normal blood pressure reading after all that! The consultant decided that based on this reading the safest thing was to be induced. This is where the control over my situation started to slip. I really wanted to argue my case that this blood pressure measurement wasn’t entirely accurate. Added to this, the knowledge that I would never have agreed to an induction if I had gone overdue heightened my stress and panic. However, having never been pregnant I put my faith in the fact that the specialists knew best and agreed to be induced the next week. Looking back I really wished I had had conviction in the fact that I knew my body best and had made the decision I wanted, however hindsight is a wonderful thing.
Once outside I burst into tears. I hadn’t really had a definite birth plan, but I mourned the birth I thought I might have had; birth suite, birthing pool, dim lighting.
Looking back this is when those first seeds of self-doubt for my ability as a mother were sown. This was all happening because of my body’s blood pressure. Maybe if I had exercised more or eaten better?
The day of the induction came around and we trudged to the hospital; I was feeling sick with worry. As I was a member of staff at the hospital I was able to have a private room (lucky me!) but that still didn’t detract from the horribly sterile clinical environment.
The induction process was started. I won’t go into all of the details of the different stages, but it really isn’t that pleasant. The first intervention was unsuccessful; cue a day of not much happening and trying to just feel remotely normal whilst having to stay in hospital. We went for food in the main hospital and things were relatively calm. My husband James had to leave at 8pm and I was left alone for the night. Trying to shower whilst heavily pregnant and with a hand you can barely move due to a cannula making it swollen and painful is pretty hard. I didn’t get much sleep either.
The next day as the previous pessary had failed they tried another. This was when things started to spiral; I was advised that the next dose can cause contractions to occur too often, and that’s exactly what happened. My baby’s heart rate was dropping with every contraction but there wasn’t enough time for it to recover in-between either. The induction was paused and I was monitored for the rest of the day. That day and night was utterly miserable. I was in pain with cramps, and various examinations to see how dilated my cervix was were excruciating. I say this believing I have a relatively good pain threshold. Again, James had to leave for the night and I became really down. All I could think was how unfair it was that I had been robbed of having those first stages of labour at home, surrounded by my own home comforts where I could perhaps have a bath or just watch TV. Sleep evaded me again that night as me and my baby had to be monitored fairly regularly.
A real low point came when it was suggested that despite all these interventions, my cervix still wasn’t dilated enough in order for them to break my waters. All this could be for nothing?! I began to really call into question why we as humans have to interfere so much. I can’t begin to imagine how those other women on that ward went through all of this in a shared room. My heart went out to them as at least I had some private space.
The next day, exhausted, a final examination revealed that they would be able to break my waters, so we were moved to the labour ward. I can only describe the room we were given as grim, nothing like those comfortable birthing suites we see on our antenatal tours. This room was bare, sterile, with just a bed, a plastic chair for James to sit on, a radio that didn’t work and a bathroom. We were to be there for the next 14 hours.
My midwife was fine, competent, but I can’t say we hit it off and gelled as I wished we might. However, there was a student with her who was kind and enthusiastic. Once my waters were broken, things progressed slowly. I was able to cope with the contractions for a long time with just breathing exercises I had learnt from baby yoga. I really didn’t like how the gas and air made me feel.
My breaking point came a few hours later, when the pain was increasing but an examination revealed I was still only 4cm dilated. I was exhausted and had had enough. I desperately wanted pain relief. The only options available to me were an epidural or diamorphine. I definitely didn’t want an epidural (each to their own but I didn’t want anybody going near my spine with a needle) so I opted for the latter. Looking back though I really wasn’t aware of the consequences of this decision. Earlier on the staff had gone through the pros/cons of the pain relief options, but when you’re at the point of needing pain relief I believe you aren’t really in the best state to make a sensible decision. I still totally regret mine, although with the limited options available to me I’m not sure what alternative decision I could have made.
At this point things got a bit strange. It made me violently ill and was told that this could have been a side effect, so I then had to be given anti-nausea medication. In amongst me feeling absolutely horrendous, the midwifes shift had come to an end so staff changes and handovers were also going on in the room. I’ve heard other people talk about this strange politeness that comes over you when you’re in labour and the need to feel like you’re pleasing the midwifes and staff and being conscientious when really none of that should matter as you’re in the middle of having a baby. I was definitely like this. I remember trying to say thanks and goodbye to the midwife and student in the gaps between throwing up violently into a cardboard bowl. I laughed about it after but now, looking back, it shows what a back seat I was taking in my own labour. I’ve read other people describe it as being a passenger in your own journey.
I then had this urgent need to go to the toilet. My new midwife wasn’t keen to let me go as, unbeknownst to me, diamorphine makes you extremely drowsy and they were worried about me passing out in the bathroom. Despite this, she let me go and I can remember feeling extremely woozy and out of control. I just about made it back to the bed and then the rest of the memory of my labour is extremely patchy. Afterwards James said that I was basically asleep unless I was having a contraction. This may sound extremely relaxed but it wasn’t the birth I had hoped for, nor did I have the control of the situation which I had intended.
I remember at one point a consultant and group of medical students around the bed. I was having to have extra monitoring as my baby was in distress. The consultant examined be and proclaimed that I was still not very dilated. Next thing I remember (time became strange) was the need to push. The consultant who had been in conversation with the midwife looked alarmed but said “I think she needs to push”. Apparently this can happen when you are induced, that it can be very slow progress to begin but then things can turn a corner and everything happens at lightning speed.
Our baby boy was born at 23:22, 6lb 1oz on a Friday evening. The relief! I enjoyed the much talked about tea and toast and after a while we were escorted to the ward. The midwife offered me a wheelchair but I chose to walk, as I felt strong enough and in little pain.
James stayed a little while until he was told to leave and Elliot and I had the night together. Let me tell you though, postnatal wards are not nice places. You’re basically dumped in a room with 3 or 5 other mothers, similarly shell shocked and not sure what they’re doing and desperately trying to bond with their new baby. Nobody gets much sleep as somebody always seems to be up, and add to the mix the feeling that you are under intense scrutiny from the staff. At about 4am an assistant came to help me breastfeed, something I was willing to try, but I was scolded for not lifting up my baby in the right way and I was left feeling completely stupid.
The next day passed as normal...my parents visited and we shared nice times as a family, all interjected with those silly moments where a midwife was trying to extract my colostrum with a syringe as Elliot (as he was now named) wasn’t quite getting the hang of the breastfeeding. All your inhibitions are left at the door when you have a baby.
The next night when Elliot and I were again left alone, the midwives discovered he had a bit of a slow heartbeat whilst doing their rounds. He was taken away for ‘further examination’ but at the time I wasn’t worried, I was half asleep and the midwife seemed to insinuate it was normal procedure. A little while later she returned and said they were going to keep him a while longer but not to worry and that when James arrived in the morning they would take us to where he was. I returned to slumber thinking he was just in another room on the ward, blissfully unaware what the next day would bring.
At around 9am the next day, once James had arrived, a nice midwife I hadn’t met before arrived all smiles and said she would take us to see Elliot.
Now we will never know what led to the breakdown of communication which meant that the first time we knew our baby was in NICU was when we saw the words above the door. Our world crashed around us and we were led blindsided to our baby boy in an incubator hooked up to lots of monitoring equipment. Why had nobody thought to pre-warn us?! The only explanation I can come up with is that they didn’t want to worry me in the night when I was on my own and thought they would tell us when James arrived the next morning, however that step never happened.
We were informed that Elliot had an extremely low heart rate and oxygen levels, probably due to an infection he had picked up at birth. What proceeded to follow was the worst 6 days of our lives.
Amazingly at the time, we remained really strong and coped pretty well. After all there were other much sicker babies than Elliot in there. However, when we looked back there were some really pretty awful things that we had to endure during that week. I won’t go into every single detail, but a couple of instances that stick with me are firstly, being told off by the nurse for not putting his nappy on properly which meant it leaked. How are you supposed to know how to put a nappy on a tiny baby that can only be accessed through holes in an incubator if you’ve never done it before?! Secondly, I was criticised that my milk failed to ‘come in’ properly, despite a harsh timetable which meant that I attempted to breastfeed or express milk around the clock. For me the simple explanation is that I was going through an extremely stressful time and also being separated from my baby resulting in the hormones not kicking in. We were continually scolded for little things we did wrong, such as if we did Elliots ‘care’ in slightly the wrong way or order. Basically, what became abundantly clear was that for those particular nurses this was just their job and sadly they had little or no empathy to offer.
Meanwhile, all of this was chipping away at my self-worth and making me feel like a bad mother and a failure. Two friends we had made through NCT managed to give birth and go home the next day, whilst we were still stuck in this hell. I managed to put on a brave face to go and meet their babies, and then crumpled when I returned to my ward, where the empty space next to my bed where my baby should have been rather than down the corridor in ICU was a glaring reminder of what we were going through.
Somehow we made it through the week, soldiering on when we were told that I would have to be discharged without Elliot as they needed an ambulatory ECG to do a 24 hour recording (Elliot also had an abnormal heart rhythm which was being investigated during the week) but there was nobody to bring the kit from the nearby children’s hospital until a few days later, to then being told we could both be discharged the next day as his heart problem had resolved. It was utterly incredulous and an absolute emotional rollercoaster.
Despite a mix up of epic proportions relating to Elliot’s transfer back to the ward so we could be monitored together for the night prior to discharge (I won’t go into the details of that, but this and many other occurrences that week lead us to ultimately lodge a complaint to the hospital about our treatment), we made it home on the Saturday. The relief and joy to be out of that place was immense. I hadn’t left the hospital in 10 days and had been left climbing the walls. Home was utopia!
For a while everything was good. I think that I was so relieved to be home that I was really positive about everything. People remarked how chilled out I seemed and my Mum even said I’d had a personality transplant. In hindsight I think I was probably in some sort of shock due to the trauma of my experience, but in time I reverted back to my ‘normal’ self, sometimes a bit of a glass half empty type. Eventually I became a worse version of myself, constantly criticising myself for all of my missteps as a mother and feeling like I was the ultimate failure. It took a while for this to become a constant bedfellow though.
Elliot was a poor sleeper from the start and the sleepless nights took their toll, however for the first 12 months I sucked it up and got on with it, after all Elliot wasn’t unusual waking every couple of hours in the night. This was normal and those friends whose babies slept through the night from 12 weeks were just the lucky few.
There were other ‘failings’ though. I’ll call them that as that was how I saw them. Breastfeeding wasn’t successful. At the time I wasn’t too bothered, I’d given it a good go, expressing every day until Elliot was 10 weeks old as he just wasn’t one for the breast. However, subconsciously I added this to my list of faults. I say he wasn’t one for the breast, he wasn’t really one for the bottle either. He would scream and cry as he was hungry but just wouldn’t take the bottle. I lost track of the dirty looks I received when I was out and about for virtually having to force the bottle into his mouth.
Then there were the times I returned from meet ups with friends and broke down as Elliot was the only one screaming the whole time. Photos sent on WhatsApp groups of babies all lined up looking angelic except for Elliot, contorted with his wailing, would send me over the edge. Once I couldn’t help but cry in the middle of a baby swim class as all the other babies smiled and splashed in the water and Elliot cried. I’m still proud of how much I actually managed to do with Elliot that first year...baby classes,trips out and making the most of my maternity leave. But looking back I think I was trying to prove to myself that all was ok and I was doing it, I was one of those Mums you see posted everywhere, doing it all and enjoying it all. But under that facade the rot was setting in.
At the time I did start to recognise these negative thought patterns, enough to make me try to remove some of the triggers. I left some of the WhatsApp groups that triggered me. I know for some people they can be a source of comfort, for instance knowing you’re not alone for those feeds in the middle of the night, but for me they were both a bit of a blessing and a curse. To me they just highlighted all of the milestones that other babies were reaching but Elliot wasn’t. Even now I struggle to distance myself from those picture-perfect images. A recent share of all of the toddler’s birthdays left me wondering if I should have done more to celebrate my own boy’s special day. Don’t get me wrong, some groups have been a lifeline and I have made lifelong friends through them, but other groups I cut loose if I thought they weren’t serving me well.
When I returned to work we’d notched up a lot of failures (in my mind); Elliot was a poor eater (weaning wasn’t going well), sleep was still broken and he’d been unwell quite a bit. But the juggling act of childcare and work was about to tip the balance hugely in the wrong direction.
In spite of the hard 12 months I wasn’t itching to go back to work like some people. I hadn’t been particularly happy in my role when I’d left to go on maternity leave, and I was also resentful of returning to work at the hospital that had let me down so badly when I gave birth to Elliot. Add into the mix that there was no contingency put in place for the fact that I was the only person who undertook my role and I was now part time (they expected me to do full time work in 3 days rather than 5) and it was a recipe for disaster. I tried to make it work, tried to recover the pride I had once taken in my job, but I just wasn’t feeling it. Later on I would realise that my mental health was beginning to suffer at this point. A particularly low point was when I was rushed off my feet doing back to back visits, which does happen sometimes. However, when it got to 3:30pm and I still hadn’t taken my lunch and the rest of my team were having a meeting about mental health and how to support our colleagues and notice warning signs, I pretty much lost it. I managed to finish the patient visit, inwardly seething, and basically walked out. That was pretty much the beginning of the end for that job. I handed in my notice and it hurt me deeply when I learnt that my manager, who I had previously had a good relationship with, had told people that she didn’t think I had been the same since I returned, but never thought to talk to me about this or offer any support.
Whilst all this had been going on, Elliot had started nursery and made friends with all the bugs that that brings with it. It was relentless. I started to make notes when he was unwell as I started to get concerned that maybe he had a weak immune system or something. I counted it up and in 12 months he had 12 bouts of illness for a duration of at least a week each. Each time we would have days of minimal sleep, screaming and crying. My husband’s shifts meant he was hardly ever home before bedtime, and I was beginning to fray at the seams.
One night, James was sleeping in the spare room as he was on an early shift the next day. Elliot had been in with me as he was really unsettled and eventually I had managed to get him to sleep in his own room. Our cat was crying at the front door and James got up to let him in, and it woke Elliot. Anger overtook me and I stormed downstairs to get some milk out of the fridge to try and settle Elliot again, however in my anger I broke the shelf when slamming the milk bottle back in the fridge and glass bottles shattered everywhere. I completely boiled over and when James came down to see what the racket was about I completely lost it with him, shouting and screaming about how the cats meant more to him than Elliot. That’s when I realised things were not good. James is a brilliant father and couldn’t be more supportive, I was being completely unfair. I was becoming quite unstable.
Only now, looking back, can I see how irrational sleep deprivation made me. That, and the fact that Elliot was going through a phase of only ever wanting Daddy, really lowered my mood. My thoughts spiralled and not even a change in job helped to alleviate the juggle as I thought it might. Every day my mind raced with a constant negative chatter, condemnations that I should never have become a mother, that I was useless for not finding it easier, not being able to cope like everybody else did, that Elliot and James would be better off without me. More than once I contemplated just leaving the house and starting a new life somewhere, cutting all ties, as I was so convinced I was just worthless.
But to the outside world I put on a front. To everyone, except James, I was coping and just like any other mother. Things came to a head however when lockdown hit. We didn’t get regular help with childcare from family ordinarily due to circumstances and distance, but the extra restrictions made me feel more isolated than ever. Unfortunately, it culminated in me having a massive falling out with my parents. I felt let down that they hadn’t already realised that something was wrong and they felt hurt that I seemed to be saying they didn’t support us. I was ashamed to outwardly ask for help though, to me that was the ultimate failure, admitting I couldn’t do it, but because of that my family didn’t have any cause for concern and didn’t think anything was wrong. They had no idea how bad things had got.
It was at that point when Elliot was almost 2 and a half, that I realised I needed professional help. I referred myself to my local psychological services, and after a few months on a waiting list, commenced a course of cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) which they had recommended for my circumstances.
CBT aims to teach you to recognise your negative thought processes and gives you lots of tools which you can call on yourself to stop these unhelpful thinking styles. It also helps you to determine the core beliefs and rules/assumptions that you live by, often unconsciously. My therapist was lovely, and being a similar age to me in similar circumstances it was like talking to an old friend. It really helped me to notice my own triggers and what my perception of a good mother was. It helps you to recognise that nobody is perfect; we are all on a sliding scale of what is perceived to be ideological.
I won’t go as far as to say that CBT has cured me, unfortunately I don’t think I will ever be the same person I was before I had Elliot. However, I’m improving everyday but I am still a work in progress. It has helped me immensely to let go of ‘comparison’, one of my major triggers. In this world we live in, it is so hard not to be bombarded with a picture-perfect version of what it is to be a mother and, even though I don’t actively engage with social media that much, this was a real downfall for me. Although my rational brain knows these posts/photos aren’t the whole truth, I still felt that the struggles I was experiencing weren’t the norm. For example, Elliot still isn’t a great sleeper. Unfortunately, this continual sleep deprivation makes my irrational thought process begin to question yet again ‘What have we done to deserve this? Why is it some people deserve to have babies that sleep and we don’t?’ Obviously, it has nothing to do with being deserving, it’s just purely luck of the draw, but my mind would filter out people in similar circumstances to us and only concentrate on those lucky enough to have good sleepers. As discussed earlier, this is still an ongoing battle for me, but at least now I recognise this spiralling of my thoughts.
Another thing that truly helped me was opening up and asking for help. It’s so hard to do if you are in that negative mindset but it really was a weight off my shoulders and now I speak about my struggles to anyone who will listen, as I think it might have helped me to prepare for the motherhood journey if I had heard stories like mine.
Another thing my journey has taught me, from being on the vulnerable side, is to be considerate to other people. If you are a midwife, remember this is a scary experience for that mother. This could be a really stressful time for them. Please don’t just treat midwifery as a job with statistics. I’m certain that’s not why you chose that profession in the first place. If you are a mother, don’t just send that video of your baby eating olives to that WhatsApp group of 20 mothers just because you can, as maybe that might tip that mother whose baby won’t even eat a carrot over the edge. Just save it for close friends and family. And be mindful of friends, ask people if they are ok, and if they aren’t don’t feel the need to try and offer a solution. That mother will have definitely tried all the usual hacks so just listening is enough. Telling them that ‘we’ve all been through it’ isn’t really helpful either. In my experience I just felt like this was invalidating my feelings and made me feel even more worthless as I struggled to cope with what ‘everybody’ does.
So why did I want to write this article? I guess I just wanted to say to the other struggling Mums and Dads out there, it’s ok not to be ok. It’s ok not to love every moment. That does not mean you are a bad parent. Just because you’re struggling does NOT mean that you are failing. Life has its curveballs it’s always going to throw and everybody’s circumstances are different. If you start to recognise negative thinking patterns, ask for help. It really did change everything for me. There is support out there, be it friends, family or professional. Unfortunately, Elliot and I still don’t have the closest bond, but I’m working on it and that’s what matters. It really is the age old saying, but things do get better. I’ve come through the worst of it and every day is better for us. And it makes me proud to think how loved Elliot will feel when he’s older, and he learns of the struggles his Mum faced, to make sure he has a really special life.
Bio:
Joanne lives in South Manchester with her husband and extremely lively 3-year-old son. When she is not busy chasing him around parks on his bike, she works part time in the NHS as a Physiologist. Currently working in research, she helps children and adults with various respiratory conditions.
After becoming a first-time mum in 2018, she suffered with her mental health for the first time and was prompted to write this piece as she believes being open and honest about her experience of motherhood may help others who might be having similar feelings.
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