07 | Lisa
“By that point in my life I had a PhD, I’d gone overseas by myself… I’d moved house a bunch of times. I felt like a very competent person. So I didn’t understand why I couldn’t be at home alone with a baby... I’ve got a really supportive husband. I get good sleep at night. We’re breastfeeding now and everything’s ok. I have good maternity leave. But I still don’t enjoy being a mother.”
As a public health researcher and implementation scientist who thought highly of her “ability to get shit done” Lisa assumed motherhood would be easy - especially compared to her prior achievements with study, work, and life.
To her surprise though, Lisa struggled with the transition to motherhood. From a gestational diabetes diagnosis, birthing a small baby, a NICU admission, and breastfeeding pain, to having a colic baby who had to be constantly held and who would not stop crying, Lisa was consumed by a feeling of failure.
At five months postpartum, she was diagnosed with depression and was forced to confront the reality that she had past experiences to unpack and behaviours to unlearn - the biggest being her reluctance to ask for help.
Through therapy, postpartum planning (with Kathryn from episode 04), a strong support-system, and a ‘good enough mothering’ attitude, Lisa approached her second pregnancy in a completely different way.
She is now finally enjoying motherhood, without mental ill health or the unrelenting pressure to be a perfect mother.
Find Lisa on Instagram @drlisa.researcher where she disseminates research-backed information to dispel perfect parenting myths and to promote parental wellbeing.
“I had two very different experiences becoming a mother, two matrescence journeys, and a lot of that was circumstance and luck, I think.”
“I have two children who are completely different kids… that’s quite validating even in itself because I realise that my only job is to really love them and to look after myself, and everything else will work out because you just have so little control over who these little humans are.”
“My first journey - I thought that I would be fine and that I wouldn’t need a lot of help, but having a new baby is more than a two-person job, it’s more like a fifteen-person job, and we didn’t have any support systems in place to help us go through that.”
“In my first trimester, I started to get a little bit anxious and a little bit low, and even in one of the first appointments with my doctor I mentioned it… but I have a lot of toxic positivity, in the past I used to bury things down and think just look at the bright side, everything will be fine, and I did that in that first trimester, once the baby is here everything will be good, once you get over the first trimester hump everything will be good.”
“And in some respects it was, by the time I was in the second trimester I was feeling really good, even mentally.”
So although she thought she should go talk to someone about it, Lisa pushed that low mood and anxiety aside because she felt she was too busy at work. “If I had a girlfriend come to me and say the same thing, I would have been pushing her in the door of a psych’s office.”
Her third trimester of pregnancy was met with a gestational diabetes diagnosis, which Lisa says resulted in “a grieving period”.
Despite the diagnosis, Lisa’s daughter was born early and was small for gestational age. “I had this positive birth, it was beautiful, and then all of a sudden people started to get really worried about my daughter. So she was 2.45kg - she was just at the cut off - had she been 50 more grams she wouldn’t have been considered small for gestational age, but that was enough for every medical professional and every nurse and every person that we saw in the next couple days to make comments about the fact that she’s small.”
Within 24 hours, Lisa’s daughter was admitted to the NICU due to pathological jaundice (jaundice within the first 24 hrs jaundice). “I was going from mat ward to NICU, from mat ward to NICU, every few hours giving her my colostrum, and I became very obsessed with breastfeeding her - it was like my form of connection to her.”
“So she was only in NICU for 12 hours, but I feel like she was in NICU for weeks… even just 12 hours was enough, it just felt like forever, and it changed the trajectory of my motherhood journey.”
Following her discharge from the NICU, Lisa’s daughter was returned to the mat ward with her. “This is where two and a bit years later I’ve become much better with having conflicting feelings, but at the time I was like I should be really happy that she’s here, those ‘shoulds’ come up.”
“I was happy that she was well, but that night was one of the most traumatic nights of my life. Because she was so tiny and every medical professional we’d come into contact with primed me for the fact she was small and not very well, so me sitting in the mat ward, again my husband wasn’t there… yeah so I’m sitting in the hospital bed trying desperately to hold my baby up and trying desperately to stay awake so I wouldn’t drop her.”
“I couldn’t ask for help, there was no way, I had to do this on my own.”
“This is my behaviour - I have to do everything myself… I should be able to take care of my daughter on my own, like every other mum seems to be able to. So that’s the kind of personality I was at the time, I just couldn’t ask for help.”
Leaving the hospital was a relief for Lisa, because she could be reunited with her husband. But, her now toddler was a colic baby “she couldn’t be put down because she was screaming all the time and she would cry for hours every day… So I felt like I was constantly failing all the time because I just couldn’t get my baby to stop crying! If I picked her up and sung to her it didn’t matter!”
“I think highly of my ability to get shit done. But when I became a mother, I realised that nothing I’ve ever done at work or study or professionally or whatever really set me up well. If anything, it set me up the other way because I was somebody who had to be productive and had to tick boxes and get degrees and that kind of stuff, but when you’re a mother nobody comes to your house and gives you an award for being the best mother in the world, and you don’t really have that feedback that you do at work - and that was such a challenging transition for me.”
“I would go online and see people like enjoy the baby snuggles, and all that kind of stuff, but all I wanted to do was get this kid off me. Because I was holding her for twelve hours a day and then my husband was holding her for twelve hours a day, so there wasn’t that much respite.”
“Now it hurt to breastfeed my daughter for the first 8 weeks of life, but that was my one thing I could do for her when I felt like I was failing in so many different ways.”
“Things got a little better” - after 8 weeks, the breastfeeding pain subsided and her daughter started sleeping solo - “but I still wasn’t happy.”
“I was so afraid to be at home with my daughter all day, the daughter that I very much wanted and loved… I was afraid of being alone with her.”
“Which was so strange to me! By that point in my life I had a PhD, I’d gone overseas by myself, I’d left abusive partners, I’d moved house a bunch of times. I felt like a very competent person, and I didn’t understand why I couldn’t be at home alone with a baby, because I didn’t understand that being home alone with a baby is really fucking hard work. And after what we’d gone through in the hospital and everything, I wasn’t very well. But I didn’t really realise that - I’ve got a really supportive husband, I get good sleep at night, we’re breastfeeding now and everything’s ok, I have good maternity leave, but I still don’t enjoy being a mother.”
“I had intrusive thoughts every ten minutes of the day. I would walk to her bassinet and think she was probably dead… then I’d think at least now I can get some sleep.”
“I obviously didn’t want her to be dead… so I clearly wasn’t very well.”
It was at this point that Lisa called the PANDA National Helpline and said “I don’t like being a mum” and was thankfully met with the response “you’ve called the right place.”
At five months postpartum, Lisa finally went to her GP where she was diagnosed with postpartum depression.
“I had started experiencing issues in my first trimester of being pregnant, and then within the first couple of days of her being born, but I didn’t go and see the doctor until about five months postpartum, and that’s a huge amount of time.”
Unfortunately, that huge amount of time only got longer - it took another three months for Lisa to get off the waitlist to see a psychologist, but she still sees that psychologist monthly to this day.
“It was a long wait… but things started to get better from there.”
“So around eight months postpartum I was seeing the psychologist and my husband and I introduced a bottle of formula a day - and that was a huge weight off my shoulders… I went into motherhood going if they’re formula fed, that’s great, and if they’re breastfed, that’s great, but then those early moments in the hospital when I was disconnected from her really pushed me into that breastfeeding-at-all-costs perspective… But as soon as we gave her that bottle of formula, I felt amazing”
“I actually breastfed my daughter up until two weeks ago, so I’m a big proponent of mixed feeding and formula feeding because having that one bottle of formula actually helped me to continue to breastfeed her to over two years old.”
“So a few things were working out, I was seeing a psychologist, we introduced a bottle of formula, and I started what was called Play Nourish Thrive, at that point, my Instagram page, which is now Dr Lisa Researcher where I was summarising what research has said to hopefully take pressure off other parents… and that gave me something for my brain to do that was kind of related to my daughter but more related to me, and that started to make me feel really quite good - that was my form of self-care.”
While waiting to come off the wait list to see her psychologist, Lisa got into a mother’s group and would also go into work with her husband who owns his own business so she wasn’t alone at home all day. “Around that time I used to go into work with him, and that was the time I was able to start working on my website. So I would sit in his office with him, I still wasn’t very well, I was very unhappy, but at least I was next to my favourite person in the world.”
“So those 3 months were spent feeling like a dogshit mother, like why wasn’t I enjoying myself? Why is this so hard for me when it’s so easy for everyone else? And then just trying to keep my head above water by going into work with my husband.”
Lisa also had a friend who “would come once a week and bring me lunch and cook it and then clean up and hold my baby for a little bit, and she helped me get out of the house as well, so she would go to the shops with me. So I didn’t leave the house with my first child by myself with her, just us two, for seven months, because I was just so afraid.”
“So that’s how I got through that period - not very well, but well enough, that my head was just above water.”
“You never forget the people who looked after you.”
Therapy with her psychologist also helped Lisa process a past financial, emotional, and physical abusive relationship. “I think becoming a mother really puts a mirror up to yourself. Your capacity is so low and you’re so emotionally drained, that things just come out, things that you haven’t thought of for years and years and years.”
“I left that relationship when I had the strength to, I had some money burrowed aside, it wasn’t very much at all, and I left and I pushed that down. I felt strong that I had done that but I didn’t address the underlining feelings.”
“I learnt from a young age… that I couldn’t rely on anyone else, that I needed to be completely independent because relying on other people involves strings and could make them do horrible things to you.”
“So when I became a mother holding a screaming baby, the idea of asking a nurse to hold her while I went to the toilet was excruciating to me, because it went against everything that I had learnt as a young girl.”
“Through my talk therapy with my psych, we break down those experiences, and reflect back on them and actually address them, which is something that I hadn’t done in the ten years before. And that’s been such a valuable experience, because as a mother you need community, you need help, you need a village, you need support, you can’t do it completely alone… an inability to ask for help can really get in a way of thriving as a new mother.”
“So even though I have a beautiful husband now and beautiful support systems around me, I needed to learn that it was safe to ask for help and to reach out to people… so that’s been a huge turning point.”
Between eleven to twelve months postpartum, Lisa became pregnant with her son. “My second pregnancy was awesome, because I was in talk therapy with my psych and I was really starting to look after myself a lot more than I had in the past.”
“I did postpartum planning with Kathryn from MotherUp who’s another guest that you’ve had on the podcast [episode 04]… and so she helped me figure out resources and things I could do that would help my second journey be a lot more smoother and a lot more supported.”
“With my second baby, I went on maternity leave at 29 weeks pregnant, so I approached pregnancy and postpartum completely differently the second time and I do not regret that for an absolute second.”
This planning and change of approach meant Lisa did not experience the low moods or anxiety that she did with her first pregnancy and postpartum.
Following a positive home birth with her son, Lisa was taken by surprise at the fact she didn’t experience breastfeeding pain and that he could sleep calmly in his bassinet.
“I legitimately thought there’s be something wrong with him because all I’d experienced before was a baby that cried for hours every day. This was a completely different experience, and it was incredibly validating, that it wasn’t that I was failing my daughter or that I was doing everything wrong, sometimes it’s just the baby! It’s not their fault, obviously, but you don’t have as much control over who they are than you think you do.”
“At no point with my son have I ever thought that I’m a bad mother or anything because that thought never goes through my head because I feel very confident with him and empowered to be able to support him”
“I reflect back on my first postpartum with my daughter, because she cried so much my amygdala was just firing constantly stop this baby crying, stop this baby crying, so I wouldn’t go to the toilet, or I wouldn’t grab myself a snack or I wouldn’t have a drink of water before I went to her. When really, what she needed was a mother who went to the toilet, who grabbed a snack, who had some water, who had cared for her basic needs, and then supported her…and over time that consistent putting myself last and my needs last meant that I was afraid to be left alone with her.”
“You’re a human being with these basic needs so it makes sense that your brain starts to problem-solve and go what’s getting in the way of getting my basic needs met? Oh, my child!”
“I thought I had to tick a lot of boxes in order to be a good mother, but those weren’t the things that were important, what was important was my relationship with her.”
“It’s just an unbelievable experience having these two completely different babies, and it’s so humbling, and that’s where I come back to what I said before, all you gotta do is just love them and look after yourself - that’s the magic sauce!”
“I feel like I’m finally getting to experience a positive maternity leave, and it feels amazing! I’m like, is this what other people experience when you’re not depressed every day and hating life?”
“And I feel empowered to be able to do things, like I can leave the house with him, no problem. Whereas it took seven months before I left the house with my daughter.”
“I don’t know if you’re every really cured of postpartum depression… I still talk to my psych regularly and still try and stay on top of, because I definitely still have my shit days.”
“Even a couple of days ago, I had this overwhelming feeling of just leaving the house, I just need to get out of this! And that’s just my brain problem-solving - my brain going, you’re in a situation that’s a bit shit, what can you do to stop it? Walk out the house! - and I didn’t and I’m never going to walk out the house, but I still definitely have my moments even without the postpartum depression and that’s totally normal and to be expected. And it doesn’t mean that I’m a bad mother for feeling that way every so often.”
Lisa’s final piece of advice? “You’re doing a lot better than you think you are, and I think that that’s something us mums need to remember sometimes or even be told.”
