12 | Nikolina
“I remember a lot of people around me saying ‘everything changes at the six-week mark, they sleep better, and they’re more awake, and things get easier and you’ll settle into breastfeeding!’ I think people painted a picture in my mind of this turning point and I really put a lot of faith in that turning point. I was literally counting down the days... And while it may have changed things for Noah… for me, nothing changed.”
As someone who had never experienced mental ill health, the bubbly and outgoing Nikolina was confronted by the sudden onset of perinatal depression and anxiety within her first few weeks of motherhood. From crying for no reason to not being able to sleep, her PNDA symptoms hit very hard and very fast.
Nikolina pushed through these symptoms for weeks, even using her son’s milestone photo cards as a countdown to the idealised six-week mark. But when nothing changed at six weeks as she had hoped, it was her husband who helped Nikolina realise that she wasn’t herself and that she may need some help to get her spark back.
In this episode, Nikolina takes us on her journey from the career high in her first pregnancy to the excitement of dressing up for therapy, and now to the recent publication of her children’s book - filled with lots of tears, insomnia, therapy, stepping on Lego pieces, and of course, laughter, in between!
You can follow Nikolina on Instagram @heynikolinak where she shares the ridiculousness and realities of motherhood and order her new book My Mummy Loves Fudge! from her website heynikolinak.com
“I guess now I can say that I’m in a very good place, I’m in a very happy place, but it wasn’t always that case when I had my kids.”
As Nikolina reflects on, the reality of motherhood hit her hard. “I feel like we don’t say the truth enough as mothers. You would see it online as well but there’s a lot of happy photos, there’s a lot of happy conversations that go around even at the dining table with relatives and friends, and I think we get this warped view of what motherhood is.”
“I thought I could just see clearly what motherhood was like. You know, I heard about things like sleepless nights and having to figure out breastfeeding and that sort of stuff, but you just never, ever, ever heard anything to do with the mental health side of motherhood. I never heard a thing!”
“I just always say to myself, I wish somebody just told me the truth! Not to say it would have avoided anything I went through, but it would have made me feel like it was ok because other people did go through the same thing.”
It was during the covid-19 crisis that Nikolina and her husband decided to start a family. “I had little Noah two years ago… and I also, very quickly, after Noah, had my little boy Leo who is eight months old now.”
“I think it’s important I explain where I was at during my pregnancy because I think that had a really big impact on my postnatal experience.”
“I was at this bit of a peak in my career.” Nikolina was working in breakfast radio, which she describes as a lot of fun involving lots of events, socialising, and mingling. “I guess I was going out a lot. I also had just hit a bit of a career high: I had one of my stories that I had reported a year before just published on an episode of Getaway.”
“I also had a really easy pregnancy so I wasn’t really hit with any crazy symptoms, I wasn’t really tired.”
“I was very much breezing through.”
“So going into my birth, I was just on a real big high.”
“So you can imagine when I had Noah, everything changed.”
“There was no going out anymore. There was me trying to figure out a baby 24/7 when I was so used to working on my own projects, working on my own achievements. As someone who places a lot of value in seeing friends and family very often, I felt really isolated - I was at home all the time with this baby who I couldn’t even figure out. I was starting to feel very different, personality-wise.”
“It took me a very, very long time to admit that that first three to four months of Noah’s life, I know it’s a strong word, but I hated it! I hated breastfeeding. I hated being so isolated, being at home all the time, being tired, being anxious - which was a very foreign feeling to me!”
“Something was very wrong.”
“I had never, ever even had the slightest hint of anxiety, and all of a sudden I was up all night, not because Noah wanted to feed, but because I literally could not sleep just being anxious about the next day. So just all of it - the emotion, the physical difficulty of it - I really didn’t enjoy!”
“I felt like I was tackling it but I was not. Because at the end of the day, I was worse than at the start of the day.”
“I would wake up and say to myself ‘it’s gonna be a great day’ - you know, you try and motivate yourself with these positive affirmations into have a fantastic day! - and as much as I tried not to think negative thoughts, not to get anxious, not to cry, just physically cry which I was doing a lot, I was just crying, the end of the day would always end the same and that was in a pit of sadness.”
Nikolina’s husband was the one to point this out. “He recognised that I was a completely different person. Usually, I was bubbly, I was talkative, I would always have a laugh at the end of the day, I’d always seen the fun in every situation - but none of that was coming through.”
“He was the one to really recognise that ‘I don’t really think that you’re you’”.
Nikolina distinctly remembers when her husband brought this up with her - after Noah’s six-week check up.
“I remember a lot of people around me saying ‘everything changes at the six-week mark, they sleep better, and they’re more awake, and things get easier and you’ll settle into breastfeeding!’”
“I think people painted a picture in my mind of this turning point and I really put a lot of faith in that turning point. I was literally counting down the days.” Nikolina even used Noah’s milestone photo cards as a countdown. “I had just so much hope and faith in that that would change things.”
“And while it maybe changed things for Noah… for me, nothing changed.”
After the six-week check up, Nikolina was overwhelmed driving home with Noah screaming the whole car ride. “I just couldn’t get home.”
“It was actually closer for me to drop by my sister’s house to take a break and feed him than it was to go home. So I did that. And I went to her house and she’s a mum so she very much was a big support during this time.”
“And I was just crying to her, I didn’t even know why I was crying. I just was crying. That’s the other thing, there’s no specific trigger, you’re just crying all the time!”
When Nikolina arrived home much later, her husband was concerned. “That’s when we had a more deeper conversation.”
“The turning point for me was when I sought out professional help. Because conversations with family and friends can be encouraging and can feel like a great source of comfort for me… but really where I started to get results in turning my emotions around and turning my depression, blues, and anxiety around was when I reached out to PANDA.”
“That was my first step - I just called them! I remember speaking to this amazing guy on the phone who just listened to everything!”
Nikolina struggled to find an available therapist so she continued to call PANDA until she could see someone. “I think this is where we’re lacking in our particular system in Australia: the waitlist to see a professional therapist is just really disheartening and I was really struggling to find help immediately!”
“Luckily for me, it wasn’t a long journey with therapy. I really started to bounce back at the point at which Noah was probably about four months old and getting out of that fourth trimester, and I felt like I was getting a bit of a hold on things. But I will say that professional help is what got me through.”
“I remember just driving to my therapy session and I was so excited because I just was excited to speak to somebody about what I was going through. And also I put a nice dress on, because I literally had nothing else going on at the time - that was my coming out of motherhood!”
Nikolina proactively resumed therapy when she was pregnant with her second son, Leo as a way to prepare for life as a mother with two under two. “With Noah, my feelings were very much spontaneous and I was very confused and I was really in the pit of blues and depression and anxiety before I put my hand up and made that call to PANDA. But with Leo I very much had a different experience and I actually pre-empted the changes that were coming.”
“I very much wanted to get a hold of it before anything arose, and that’s why I did therapy during my pregnancy.”
Unlike her pregnancy with Noah, Nikolina was confronted by physical pain and birth anxiety during her pregnancy with Leo. “With Noah, I think I just didn’t know what birth felt like, I didn’t know what it would be like and I’m very much an ignorance-is-bliss kind of person, so I just didn’t want to know what could go wrong. I would be less anxious if I didn’t know! But with Leo I had already given birth so I knew how painful it could be and I knew how scary contractions were.”
“I felt really anxious about Leo’s birth.”
“I think you’re expected as a woman you should be able to be pregnant and give birth with no issues, and that’s your role in nature, but it’s bloody scary!”
“I had a lot of anxiety around that and I felt really weird about it because I felt like nobody was really talking about that.”
Thankfully, therapy and support from her midwife helped Nikolina get through this birth anxiety - “It helped me surrender myself to everything that would happen.”
Therapy was such an eye-opening experience for Nikolina that she actually hosted her own podcast to take listeners through her therapy journey, titled Come to therapy With Me (produced by 9Podcasts). “It’s literally a recording of my therapy sessions.”
While the therapy sessions were obviously helpful for Nikolina to prepare for life with two under two, the podcast was also driven by her desire to break any stigmas or stereotypes around mental health and therapy. “I felt like it was very necessary because much like many people out there, I honestly thought therapy was just something I saw in the movies.”
As someone who had never experienced mental ill health, therapy was something very foreign to her. “I honestly was just shocked, I realised it was just a conversation! It was just a chat with somebody - somebody who is obviously qualified to help you in the situation that you are in and give you the proper tools to deal with situations that you might be confronted by… but it was just a nice chat!”
“It felt like I could speak all of my truths, whether they were scary to admit or embarrassing to admit or I was terrified to say - like, ‘I hated the new born phase, and I don’t know what I’m doing and I sometimes regret having a child’ - those are really confronting things to say and things to come out of your mouth but that’s just how you feel and you’re trying to work through those.”
“It takes a lot of guts and courage to face those thoughts.”
“That’s why I did the podcast - because I wanted people to listen in and realise it’s just a form of communicating with somebody!”
Therapy equipped Nikolina with many tools to ease her anxiety and to prepare for change. She was encouraged to take 10-minute walks, to remove herself physically from a situation, to do a social media cleanse, and to keep a journal to write things down before bed - even now the journal still sits on her bedside table!
Once Nikolina started to feel a lot more like herself again, she turned to social media to laugh at the ridiculousness of motherhood that has previously overwhelmed her.
“For me, once I went through my therapy with Noah and started to feel a lot better and feel less anxious about motherhood, I went back to being myself a little bit more - a big part of me is finding the funny in everything, I’m a bit of a goofball and I’m happy to have a laugh at things - and I really started to see the funny side of motherhood.”
“It was honestly a way for me to just laugh through the chaos of it all!”
“I’ve connected to a lot of people that way - just finding the humour in those situations.”
To continue connecting and inspiring laughter, Nikolina published a “cheeky” children’s book My Mummy Loves Fudge! as a tribute to Noah and her motherhood experience.
“As I mentioned, I started sharing little funny clips about motherhood once I started to become pretty comfortable and started to get the hang of things and just thought this is so chaotic, this is so wild, that all I can do is laugh about it. And that’s where the idea was born.”
Nikolina shares her experience openly because she wants every mum to know that mental ill health doesn’t mean change your worth.
“I’ve always been a confident person, when I say ‘confident’ I mean I’ve never second guessed myself, I’m very talkative, bubbly, social, fun, that’s how my friends and family would introduce me to people - but even I can go through a struggle during that postnatal period and can very much admit to it.”
“I had every reason to pretend like everything was ok. I could have just rode the rollercoaster and stayed quite to myself and made things worse to be honest and not gotten any help, or gotten help and just pretended like I didn’t - but I just thought that that was just an absolute waste!”
“I want mums, even the most confident of mums, or even the most outgoing of mums, to know that just because postnatal blues got you, they caught you and they unfortunately took over some of that time, that precious time for you, it doesn’t mean that you’re less of a mum or less of a person at all. It can happen to anybody.”
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