One Down, One To Go

By Merryn Watson

I approached motherhood with a wholly misplaced confidence. I was a teacher, specialising in early years. Children were my thing, they responded well to me; I had taught, helped and cared for hundreds in my career. So while I knew my transition to being a mother wouldn’t be seamless I had no concrete concerns aside from the common-knowledge exhaustion and some new restrictions on my life.

So used to being in control, I imagined as many people do the perfect birth. I attended yoga classes, practised calming breathing techniques and visualised my baby arriving in a beautiful haze of love and power. My mum is of a very different generation and spoke almost contemptuously of the fuss that many women “these days” make about giving birth. I laughed along. I was strong, I thought, and healthy. My body would know what to do and I wouldn’t be one of those fussing women.

Of course, reality was going to serve me up something very very different. My son’s birth was horrific, a blood bath of a labour that lasted four days and culminated in a haemorrhage and two transfusions. My partner Grant held our minutes old baby and watched the life drain from me as they placed a metal bucket beneath my open legs to catch the blood.

On the post natal ward I could barely recognise myself. I felt detached, weightless, separate from my body and from what it had just been through. I looked out the window at the scrubby hospital lake and wondered how long it would take for anyone to notice if I floated the tiny baby next to me away in his see-through plastic crib, a dismal reworking of Moses in the rushes. How far away from all this could I get before they found me?

However desperate I felt I was also dimly aware that if I was to voice anything like this out loud there was no way I’d be allowed home with my baby. Visitors came, smiles were exchanged, I cuddled my son, we called him Ned. I fed him, I met his needs, but I felt like a fraud. I was one of those women. I had made a fuss. My belief in myself had shrunk, cowed beneath the ugly hulking shadow of failure. My body had failed me, had failed in its most basic physiological duty. Fifty years ago I wouldn’t have survived that birth.

Things got worse once I was home. My body, spitefully, wasn’t taking to breastfeeding in the way it should. It was agony and I dreaded my tiny desperate little boy waking up to feed. I spent much of the first months of his life in tears of pain. I saw doctors, midwives, health visitors who all stuck firmly to the line that there was nothing wrong. I left appointment after appointment totally dejected, sobbing in the front of the car while my baby screamed in unison in the back. My body couldn’t even do this right. 

I began to turn my negative thoughts towards Ned. I resented him, the pain he was causing, the loss of self I felt, how lost I was and yet how tied to him forever I was. I wanted to know I wasn’t alone and spent time awake at night googling terrible things like “I don’t like my own baby” and “I hate being a mother”. Seeing hundreds of similar stories somehow didn’t make me feel better but worse; as if I’d suddenly become aware of a misery that was everywhere.

Things started to change after three or four months. I had been obsessing about Ned’s sleep and routine in an attempt to claw back some control. He should be asleep now, why wasn’t he? Why won’t he just nap when he’s meant to? It made me exaggeratedly angry when he wouldn’t do what a baby book picked at random from the library said he should do. A one sided power struggle that somehow I still wasn’t winning. 

During peak routine hysteria I furiously packed him into his pram to stalk around the neighbourhood to try and get him to sleep where all else had failed. No luck. Something in me snapped and I left the pram where it was, crossed the road and shouted over to Grant “I JUST DON’T WANT HIM”. By the time I got home I was shaken and ashamed. More so by Grant’s sad, resigned but unflinching response. He had taken the walk home to come up with a plan which nearly broke my heart. He would move out and rent a flat and take care of our baby there if I really didn’t want him.  Something had to change.

I calmed down on the routine and stopped berating myself and Ned when sleep went wrong.  I gave myself one more week to try and sort out the breastfeeding problem and hired a private lactation consultant. She took one look inside Ned’s mouth and diagnosed severe tongue tie and lip tie. It just needed to be snipped at the hospital she said, and no wonder it had been so painful, and I should be proud for carrying on so long. I cried (again). At least one failure had been scrubbed from my record.

Around that time I also realised that my optimistic pregnant self had signed up to run the Hastings Half Marathon for charity in a month’s time. I decided to still do it, even if I walked. I trained when I could. Having something to focus on that wasn’t baby related made me feel like I had a self again. I ran the marathon, five months post partum, with swollen painful breasts after four hours sleep. Grant waited at the finish line so that Ned could feed immediately and for the first time I felt proud and powerful that my body could do such an amazing thing. Slowly I found more confidence in myself, by body, my abilities. The weather improved, my son grew more gurgly and chubby and full of personality, and the bond I had been desperate to feel with him grew and grew. It took a long time but 18 months later I feel like we’re where we should be.

So now I’m pregnant again, due in one week, in the middle of a pandemic. I am nervous. Nervous of another terrible birth, nervous of history repeating itself. I now have a fantastic bond with Ned but guilt dictates that I feel bad for the start he had in life, and I am worried that the same things will happen with baby number two. Nervous of catching the virus in hospital, unsure if I will be alone for the birth while Grant looks after Ned, certain that I will not be allowed visitors afterwards, certain that our families won’t meet our new son for a long time.

I am watching the new baby’s movements ripple across my tummy. He doesn’t know any of this and I must try not to project any fear onto him. I know now that guilt and worry are a waste of emotional energy, and I try and stay calm and quiet.

So I spend my time in the garden. Ned, Grant and I potter around planting things and I try and snip off dead flower heads, dandelion clocks, fresh tendrils of fear. I sit around eating ice lollies in this strange, false April summer. The lockdown has brought an enforced sense of stillness which can only be doing me good. I don’t know what is going to happen this time, but I think we will all be ok.