World Mental Health Day, Baby Loss Awareness Week, International Day of the Girl

So this week it was World Mental Health Day, Baby Loss Awareness Week, and International Day of the Girl.

For me these are all sort of related. And I’ve struggled to say one thing about any of them.

I think being a girl brings with it particular mental health challenges. I suppose they start with hormonal imbalances… and power imbalances. Expectations, from others and then from yourself. Pregnancy, pregnancy loss, baby loss, infertility, post birth PTSD, post natal depression, the whole-life upheaval of motherhood, shaped by both biology and society.

Life batters women’s bodies and minds and it’s supposed to be normal but when it’s you it’s not – and the thwarted expectation of normal is probably the hardest of them all. It feels like there’s a conspiracy of silence around being a girl, that minimises our pain, and leaves women very much isolated as a result.

We’re not supposed to tell anyone we’re pregnant until 3 months, becuase early miscarriage is just a thing that happens and should be gotten over, and God forbid it might make others uncomfortable.
We have to grieve our losses, appropriately, in private, at the correct volume, for the correct duration or we are unstable, hysterical, need to get over it now, have you considered taking up a new hobby?
We’re supposed to live with the pain of endometriosis because that’s normal and we should stop complaining when the decorators are in, it can’t be that bad.
We’re not allowed to address or even process a traumatic birth because at least the baby is healthy and that’s the main thing, isn’t it?
We can’t say how awful and hard and boring our new baby is because that’s ungrateful and some people would kill to be in your position, you know – you don’t deserve to be a mother.
We can’t share the thought the baby would be better off without us, in case they take it away.
We can’t say we are struggling – with motherhood, work, life, our marriages and relationships, with crippling loneliness and disconnection because that’s failure, other people are doing it all, look at the Facebook pictures.
We can’t talk about waking up in the middle of the night terrified the baby has stopped breathing, even when they’re 8, living the worst case scenario in our heads and fighting off crippling fear every waking moment of every single day – of which there are too many – in case the world thinks we’re mad, because maybe we are.

And those silences leave women alone in their heads. They leave women’s mental health untreated. They leave too many too normal things a taboo.

If there’s anything that I’ve learned about my own mental health, over the years but particularly recently, it’s that you need to be able to feel your feelings. They are not wrong. Ever. No one else should tell you how to feel, when, for how long, or how to express it.

Not feeling a feeling, suppressing it, denying it, trying to shape it to fit someone else’s expectations, replacing it with another feeling like anger instead of fear or sadness – turns it dark. And it will eat you up from the inside out.

We owe it to ourselves – and to each other – to come out of hiding. To say the things we’re afraid to think out loud. To share our pain, so it is heard and we are witnessed, and so that others can find comfort in the mirror of their own feelings.

I suppose really, that’s what this page has become about. It’s a bit about motherhood, sure. It’s a bit about mental health. It’s a bit about being a girl. But mostly it’s about truth. It’s about not being afraid anymore. And stepping out of the shadows.

October blues

It’s been a funny old month, October. For a number of reasons.

The light is going. And the twinkly Christmas ones to replace it are still a long way off. Dark days often breed dark thoughts…

It was, of course, mental health awareness day, an issue close to my heart (and head), but that I’ve struggled to write about, because I’m… struggling.

It’s also baby loss awareness month (and day earlier this week) and like so many others I’m remembering, keenly, my miscarriage. Perhaps because my Big baby turns 7 this month, perhaps because my Small baby is losing her squidge, perhaps because of the increasing certainty she is indeed my last baby – perhaps because it’s the birthday month of the baby inbetween, that never was.

But perhaps mostly because I can trace the rot in my marriage back to this loss… Which meant everything to me, maybe too much. And not enough to him.

This is also the month Dadoffthenetherege officially left, a year ago. It has been the very fastest and tortuously slow year of my life. And things are currently more uncertain than ever. I still don’t know where we’ll live, how to make it all work, how to support the kids through it, how I’ll support us going forward, or what to do for the best.

The common theme that draws all of this October stuff together is the loss of a vision for the future.

I didn’t lose a baby, you see. I lost an empty egg sac. But it was real to me – I yearned for it, I invested in it. And when it was gone, I grieved it. The same for my rotten relationship. I lost a future – and a family I wanted so badly that I hung on to the false vision for far too damn long. I still pine for it.

This loss of future vision is the crux of mental ill-health, for me. The source of the very darkest days. As a child, my OCD left me without being able to see a future for myself that didn’t include debilitating rituals – where I could only see the gloom and falling doom of not completing them. Similarly my depression and anxiety are all about interrupted vision – not being able to see clearly through the fog, the wood for the trees – or only being able to see potential disaster, and choking on it daily.

I have never yet reached a stage where my vision for the future is so distorted or obscured that it looks better without me in it. But I can feel and understand how that pathway unfolds. And that is frightening enough.

People are built on their visions for themselves, their families, and their futures. And when something rocks that, blocks that – whether it’s loss or life or something else – that’s when we struggle. That’s when the dark creeps in round the edges, or rushes in all at once.

The thing I’ve learned, I suppose, is that your vision can’t always be trusted. What you see or can’t see, in front of your face or into your future, isn’t always real.

Sometimes it’s idealistic, and just isn’t true or achievable.
Sometimes it’s catastrophic, and that isn’t true either.
Sometimes it’s just blurred, and you need to give your eyes a good rub and your glasses a good clean.
Sometimes it’s a dream, and you need to wake up.
Sometimes it’s a mirage, an hallucination, and you need medical intervention – or at the very least a bit of a lie down.
Sometimes you’re just looking at it from the wrong angle, so you can’t see it properly.
Sometimes everything you can see really IS completely awful and empty and black – but it’s not really everything. There are still some good bits underneath the big bad bits.

The point is, you can’t always believe what you see. And you can’t always see what you believe. Vision changes. And if you can wait it out you will see things differently. There will be a new vision. Always. You just have to live through the loss of the old one. And be brave enough to look again.

Right now, I am between visions. And I’m not going to lie to you, it is a scary place. I daren’t look at anything in too much detail, or look too far around or down – in case I fall.

So I’m going from day to day hoping for the best, refusing to worry about the worst, and trusting it will all work out in the end – or that someone will catch me before I hit the bottom. I’m living for the light days. And there are more of them.

And one day, I know there will be enough light to see a new future, and enough stability to build it.

It just probably won’t be a day in October.

New Year – true you

I have always hated New Year’s Resolutions, because I have always failed spectacularly at them.

The trouble, I think, is that too often our resolutions are to change ourselves. A diet. An exercise regime. A new hobby. A new outlook. A new philosophy.

And change is hard.

It is even harder when the foundations upon which you are trying to build that change, are crumbling.

About this time last year, though, I started to think. Not about changing myself – but about trying to strengthen my foundations. Trying to find myself again.

No, no! Not that way. I didn’t feel the need to go on a pilgrimage to Nepal or to explore the wilderness’ of Borneo, to seek refuge with Tibetan monks or Swedish yoginis. Travel has never been my thing. (I get homesick after a week in Devon).

I felt the need to write.

I have always best processed my thoughts and expressed my emotions in text. Words are always where I have found solace, succour, sanctuary. It started with novels as a small child. Each book had a self-illustrated cover and back-blurb about it being one of my ‘best ever books’. Inevitably this escalated into astonishingly bad angsty poetry in my teens, and then became the focus of my studies and even my work.

Not writing had become – quite honestly – physically painful.

I didn’t lose myself because I stopped writing. I stopped writing because I got lost.

Parenthood was part of it. Miscarriage was part of it. Infertility was part of it. The physical trauma of ongoing procedures. The obsession of it, the tunnel vision. The all-encompassment. Sleep deprivation. The impact of all that on my relationship, my job, my friendships – the stabilising factors of my life. All the things I’d carefully constructed around me to allow me to cope, all of the things that had tumbled down around my ears one by one. And I couldn’t write any of it down because I got lost in the middle of it all. And by the time I realised how lost I was – by the time I could look up – I couldn’t find my way back. To the life I knew, to the ME I knew.

So last January I didn’t make any resolutions to change. I simply make a decision to try and be me – and do the things that make me feel like the best version of me. That would help me to think clearly again, explore hurts, expound on the ridiculous, and express – something. Anything. Everything. Whatever was blocking me from me.

And that’s where Mumonthenetheredge was born.

I worried – and still worry – that some people might think I’m trying to be the next Unmumsy Mum, Peter and Jane or Hurrah for Gin – or any one of the marvellous parent bloggers I personally follow and love, and who have blogging awards or book deals or millions of followers. I honestly don’t think I’m any of them. The point is – and has always been – to be me, to find me – not someone else. I don’t need to be the biggest, brightest or best fish in the pond. I just needed to to swim again. I just needed to write it all down.  

What’s more, if I was suddenly struck with notoriety and ostentatious success I would be both alarmed and terrified, and either run away or sabotage it, as that’s basically what I do whenever I’ve sniffed any kind of personal triumph or success, because yes, for unknown reasons I am apparently that fucked up. (I really wish I could blame this on some set of interesting personal trauma, but I can’t. I’m just a drama queen knobhead with astonishingly low self esteem, OCD, and a fulfilment phobia.)

Anyway, instead of just talking about it, or thinking about it, or persuading myself out of it, or second guessing it, or worrying what other people might think of it, I actually did it. I started a blog.

My first posts got about 14 likes. But gradually, people started responding. Not in vast droves, but in dribs and drabs. And whether placing value in the validation of strangers is sad or desperate or not, each one FELT like a connection. And suddenly I wasn’t lost. Suddenly I found something.

And I think – I think it was me.

Not all of it has been great. I’ve struggled with not feeling good enough. The posts that bombed. The friends I told about it who haven’t liked it, or haven’t found anything to connect with (I quote, and it still hurts). The people who have taken the piss when I’ve been vulnerable, or taken me seriously when I’ve been taking the piss. (Shout out to the guy who thought I seriously wanted to garotte farmers over the October clock change).

But actually, all of that, all of that I’ve needed, in a way. Because actually it’s good for me. I need to question myself. I need to check when I’m being an eejit. I need people to tell me to lighten up, or to knuckle down. I need to grow a thicker skin. To stop letting doubt freeze me. To stop being afraid.  

In many ways I’ve gotten off lightly – I’m sure if I carry on blogging the negative bits will get worse. But so far, so far the good bits have very much outweighed the bad.

Because it turns out the thing I needed most of all, was simply to know that I wasn’t lost alone.

Oh I’ve got people I can call on, but the truth is I don’t, not when I most need to. And even when I do I can’t really articulate what I want to say, or why I want to say it. It’s like I need to write it down to think it through. To process it. To understand my own narrative.

And like any story, it has two halves – teller and listener. And it is the act of listening that really brings life to any story – that really completes any narrative.

Writing wasn’t enough – I needed to be heard, too.

So I’d like to say thank you, to everyone who’s listened. Anyone who’s read something I’ve written, and liked it, or commented. I really, really appreciate it – more than you can know.

I would like to say a very special thank you to the people who’ve got in touch in private – especially after my Rainbow Woodlice post. I’ve talked to some wonderful women, also struggling, also lost, also trying to get back to themselves. One new stranger-pal in particular talked about needing to write things down to get them out – something I totally, totally get. So I told her how ridiculously easy it is to make a start – so easy even I could do it – and her first blog appeared on Selfish Mother the very next day. It’s a hell of a read. And for me that’s been a rainbow woodlouse in and of itself.

In fact, it’s been one of many.

Mumonthenetheredge has helped me connect with all sorts of people, in all sorts of ways. It’s helped me reconnect, for instance, with some old friends – people I’d lost a bit when I lost me.

Then there’s the wonderful group of mummy mates I talk to about writing, including a writer who works on a grander scale than I, and who is infinitely better than she thinks she is. There’s the brilliant Kate over at Little Sheffield (a fantastic resource for Sheff parents – go check it out) and the other pals who support the blog willy nilly, good or bad, and boost my Facebook ratings whether they’ve read the bloody thing or not, because they know the algorithms kill me if it doesn’t get out and about fast enough.

It’s also helped me find some other creative Sheffield types, of which  there are quite a few. There’s the poetry guys – check out Lyrical Events and Verse Matters, and then there’s the fabulous Sophie over at Imogen’s Imagination (seriously stylish retro hats and hair stuff) and lovely Lydia at Studio Binky (cute designs, cards and prints) and all the other Sheffield Etsy folk. These are all people who also need to create to be themselves, and I’ve found a foot-hole in a community I never knew existed, and I never knew I needed.

So if you are thinking about making a resolution this year, I’d implore you to make it about you. Not someone you want to be, one day. You. Now. And whatever makes you the most you. The best of you. The real, authentic, bone-deep you.

Whatever makes you feel the most like yourself, do more of it. And do it for you. Not your kids, your employer, your partner. Just you. If you can’t remember you, find the people that do and spend time with them to remind you. Avoid those that drain you, or bring out the worst in you. Spend time doing the things that are special to you. It might be something creative. It might be learning, or sport, or fashion, or music, or walking – or just laughing – or ANYTHING. Find it, and do it.

Don’t reinvent a new you for the new year – recognise and reinvigorate instead. Regenerate YOU.

Go get ’em tigers. Or woodlice. Or fish – big or little. It really, really doesn’t matter. Don’t compare yourself. Don’t compete. You don’t need to be the best. Just listen to yourself. Just stop for a moment, and think about you for a change. Nobody else.

Because come February you really can’t fail at being you – the true you. You are uniquely qualified. And you can rock the shit out of it.

And maybe you can join me in stepping away from the (Nether) edge, wherever or whatever yours may be.

Cheers all. Happy new year.

Mumonthenetheredge

 

The loss

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A poem for pregnancy and baby loss awareness week.

Words are important to me. They help me make sense of things, understand the world around me, and shape my own narrative. It helped me to write this. I hope maybe it helps someone else to read it. #babyloss #waveoflight

The blood, just a spot, a smear on the gusset.
The beat in the throat; the rush in the ears.
The phone call, who to see, when.
The journey.
The unreality of practicality.
The wait.
The running late.
The certainly, deep down, it won’t happen to me,
The certainty, deep down, that it will.
The bargain – if I worry, if I wind tight, if I torment, if I promise, if I pray, it will be ok, it will be ok.
The mantra. Please be there. Please stay, please stay, please stay.
The tick and bustle and comings and goings and ebb and flow in slow, slow, slow motion.
The scan.
The game – searching faces, searching inside – trying to feel you, find you, will you, hold you, fold you into me.
The hope.
The news.
The distress, of getting dressed – familiar, foreign: final.
The truth, that no one is looking for you now. No one but me. Nothing to see, here.
The paperwork.
The excruciating kindness.
The walk back, holding back, tears.
The tears.
The jagged edges of raw, rasping, rattling despair.
The emptiness – emptier than if you’d never been there, at all.
The clawing, raging beast of injustice.
The howl that should have been your first cry in MY chest, pressed against my breast – a cyclone in hibernation,
The desperation, the wildness –
The wilderness.
The loneliness – because hardly there you were most real to me, most mine.
The lie, when I say I’m fine.
The savage fist, the shift, the listlessness, wistfulness, repeated again and again
The impotent love, with nowhere to go –
The need to know.
The need to keep you.
The need to get you out.
The bleeding,
The pain.
The blame.
The weight of your betrayal –
The weight of mine.
The hollow core, the cold tile floor as you left me, bereft me, unblessed me.
The analysis – why you went, what I did wrong,
The song – of sorrow.
The heaviness of sympathy.
The assumption that I will get over you, you. You – like you’re flu – done, gone, move on.
The unfair inevitability of the next day, and the day after, and the day after that.
The sunshine, blue sky and careless, endless, turning, churning, indifferent cycle of life, always
The same.
The shame – of my failure, my unruly feelings.
The depletion, gnawing, grinding incompletion that doesn’t have language or permission.
The space, the echoing, roaring, soaring space, in head, in womb, in heart.
The drift apart.
The new dark.
The fear.

 

Mumonthenetheredge

#babyloss
#waveoflight
www.babyloss-awareness.org

At least you’ve already got one

At least you’ve already got one was the thing I heard most after my miscarriage, and in the months of treatment, infertility and more treatment that followed. At least you’ve already got one became the refrain to the very worst time of my life.

It’s surprising for just how many people misery comes in the form of a single blue line in an oval window. Hope and despair neatly packaged up in a little white stick. Not pregnant. Again.

The official figures are that one in six couples in the UK experience infertility.  It’s the numbers underneath that though – the ones not collected in any survey or census – that are rather more telling. The number of those sticks weed on each month, the number of excruciating, heart-pumping seconds waiting for those lines to appear, the number of tears shed as the stick is thrown in the bathroom bin. The number of times it’s been dug back out, just to check. Just to see. Just in case it’s different this time.

People don’t talk about infertility very much because it’s a very personal subject and a very private pain. And even more secret is the heartache of secondary infertility. Secondary infertility is what happens when a couple who has a child (or children) for some reason can’t conceive again – or can’t carry a baby to term. Worldwide, secondary infertility is now estimated to account for 6 out of 10 infertility cases.

And the very worst thing about secondary infertility is this: At least you’ve already got one.

It’s so awful largely because it’s TRUE. You do already have one. And you are so, so lucky and so, so privileged to have that little person in your life. Some people who desperately, desperately want to be in your position don’t ever get that chance.

But at least you’ve already got one is also complicated, as truth often is. Because underneath it really means several different things.

It means, look at everything you DO have.

It means, get some perspective.

It means, stop being so ungrateful.

It means, quit feeling sorry for yourself.

It means, your pain is out of proportion.

It means, you’re not allowed to be sad.

And it means you feel guilty for your ingratitude – and confused as to why you’re not happy with your wonderful life and wonderful family. At least you’ve already got one takes away your right to grieve. It drives it underground. It makes it a sordid, lonely, isolating little secret. It compares your pain with other people’s and finds it wanting.  

The fact is that whether you’ve physically lost a baby or lost your ideal ‘image’ of your 2.4 family – you have still lost something important. Something real to you. Something you desperately wanted. It doesn’t really matter if you’ve already got a kid or not.

Society has an unhealthy obsession with comparing human hurt. Anguish is not a competition – there are no winners here. Only losers. You simply cannot categorise negative experiences on an arbitrary scale and then assign appropriate reactions to them. The death of a loved one does not ‘trump’ a miscarriage. A cancer diagnosis is not ‘better’ than a heart attack. It ALL SUCKS. Pain is pain. Shit is shit. Does it really matter how brown and sticky it is?

Yet for some reason we persist in making those judgements, and in continuing to judge anyone whose responses fall outside of accepted parameters. So you can cry about your Dad dying, but you need to get over your miscarriage? Who the hell is making these rules? And why are the rest of us following them?

At least you’ve already got one is mindfulness gone mad. You can be thankful, but that doesn’t mean you can’t ever be sad. That’s far too simplistic a view.

If you want simple, try thinking of it like this. Person A is drowning in a puddle. Person B is drowning in the Atlantic. There is a great deal more water in the latter, but both are still drowning. Dead is dead – no one is going to be any less dead at the other end.

And as person A takes their last gurgling gasp, I’m pretty fucking sure they’re not feeling grateful that at least it’s muddy rainwater and not giant volumes of sea filling up their collapsing lungs.

Now Person A is thrashing around wildly, and making a mess. Person B is taking it rather more on the chin. Who’s to say which one is having the ‘right’ level of reaction to their situation? Because really, we don’t know how either of them ended up in the water in the first place. Maybe Person B has been swimming for hours and doesn’t have any fight left. Maybe Person A’s head is actually being held under the water. You just don’t know what’s going on in someone’s life because you can’t see under the surface. You can’t judge what they’re going through or how they’re going through it.

For me, secondary infertility was so very raw (not by any means any worse than infertility, NEVER that, just raw) precisely because it was secondary. Because I KNEW.

I knew exactly what it felt like to have that secret flutter in my stomach, the shift of another life, the thump of feet and hands inside me.

I knew what it was like to hold that tiny, tiny body, push my finger into that crinkled palm, hear the first mewls of life and see that sticky sweep of hair and scrunched up, perfect face.

I knew the impossible weight of that small body folded into my neck, the smell of new baby filling my nose, my head, my heart.

I knew that surging crash of LOVE and awe and wonder. I knew the crush of fear and overwhelm. I knew the swell of joy that expands your chest and clogs your throat and chokes you to tears. I knew the tingle and pang of let down as all that emotion came out as milk.

I KNEW, and I wanted it again. I craved it. And I could feel it, a physical ache, a gap –  a ghost.

Because I could feel the outline of another hand in mine as I crossed the road with my daughter.

I could feel the press of another small person in my arms as we cuddled up on the sofa.

I could feel the imprint of another soul on mine that was never really there, but left a gaping, jagged hole none-the-less.

Oh I’m quite sure it doesn’t make any sense. I’m sure half of the people reading this are running to call the little men in white coats. (That’s why this blog is anonymous. They’ll never take me alive!!!)

I’m also sure that the other half – the half that’s been there – will know exactly what I mean.

When the giant pulses of grief and rage would fade, in my more normal moments, there was still the nagging feeling of something missing, something not being quite as it should. The world slightly out of kilter. I would suddenly look up and feel sure that someone had put the wrong filter over the snapshots of my life.

Now I freely admit to being a supremely selfish being, but my sadness wasn’t all reserved for myself. Some of it was also for my husband and my daughter.

I fell in love with my husband all over again when I saw him as a father. His kindness, his gentleness, his patience – his love for the little life we’d made. And I wanted that for him again. For us. Four of us. One-on-one, two by two. It just added up to US.

Perhaps more though, I wanted it for my daughter. I would watch her, playing in the garden or on the beach by herself. I would remember my own childhood, shrieking and chasing my sister, and feel incredibly sad that wasn’t going to be part of her life. That she would be alone. That when we died there’d be no one there for her – no one to help arrange the funeral, to hold her, to reminisce about our family. To know the sayings and the songs and the silliness.

Not everybody has these feelings – nor should they. For some, their vision of the perfect family was only ever one child. For some three isn’t uneven or unfinished – it’s precisely the right balance.  Others can summon some rationality and accept – perhaps with passing sadness – that another child simply wasn’t meant to be. 

The point is only that I SHOULD be allowed to have these feelings. That it’s okay to feel them without feeling guilty. And it’s taken a long time for me to be able to acknowledge that to myself. Because of course in the background I was thinking – and I was repeatedly told – at least you’ve already got one.  

Look, no one likes a wallower. But there is a line to be trodden between letting someone indulge themselves and letting someone grieve. I think we can all agree that there has to be a bit of space before ‘get over it’, ‘buck up’ and ‘at least you’ve already got one’.  And it’s really not up to you to judge how much space someone else needs.

My particular secondary infertility tale had a happy ending, after a lot of heartbreak, strain, and surgery. And I am so very thankful that I finally got my beautiful second baby. The family of my dreams.

Not long after my second daughter was finally born, the Big Small Person fell over, and scraped her knee. And I caught myself saying, quite literally, ‘At least you’ve already got one’. In shock news, it didn’t help. It didn’t take the pain away. It didn’t make her feel better. And that got me thinking about what we should say instead.

As a Queen of social gaucheness, I fully appreciate that it’s not malice or lack of awareness that causes people to say the wrong thing at the wrong time. (God knows I’ve practically made it an art form). Mostly it’s simply a matter of not knowing what to say to someone. I can help you with that.

If you know someone who is drowning (in whatever body or depth of water – this isn’t just about infertility), please do throw them a lifeline if you possibly can.  You don’t need to risk being pulled into the drama-lake if you’re not up for a swim, but you don’t need to make things worse either. Don’t throw them a guilt-trip. Don’t belittle their pain, their experience, or how their feelings manifest themselves.

Instead, just try this. Just say:

I’m so sorry this has happened to you.

Simple. Easy. If you can look in their eye and hold their hand for the briefest of moments, that’ll help too.

Because that acknowledgement, that moment of human connection, that stark truth, is sometimes just enough to keep someone’s head above water.

It certainly helped with the skinned knee, anyway.

 

Mumonthenetheredge

 

 

Support

If you’ve suffered miscarriages or infertility, there’s a lot of support out there. Sometimes it just helps to know you’re not the only person going through it. Sometimes it helps to know there can be happy endings, other options, or just life beyond all the awfulness. Best wishes to you.

The Miscarriage Association

Tommy’s

The Infertility Network

Resolve