22 | Gemma
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“As soon as I was pregnant, all I kept thinking was, ‘Oh my God, this is it! Now I’m giving my life away!’ That felt like one of those things that you feel like you shouldn’t think, because I ‘should’ feel really excited...”
In this episode, I’m joined by Gemma - a recovering perfectionist, accredited social worker, perinatal counsellor, podcast host of @postpartumlikeaboss, and mum-of-two. From the moment she fell pregnant, Gemma experienced an immediate sense of identity loss and anxiety that lasted until postpartum.
While the anxiety and unknowns disappeared after birth, the relentlessness and challenges of early motherhood left Gemma at her lowest. Despite experiencing mental ill health in the past, Gemma found the transition to motherhood to be harder and riddled with more guilt because of the expectations to feel joy and fulfilment.
Finding and accessing support was also hard for Gemma, but thanks to the help of the PANDA hotline, her somatic therapist, and the sense of identity she reclaimed by returning to work and exercising, Gemma slowly found her groove in motherhood. Even more than this, she decided to retrain as a perinatal counsellor to be able to provide the same support for others knowing how life changing it had been for her.
Join me in this episode as Gemma and I discuss mum guilt, the barriers to support, the shame that comes from not loving every moment of motherhood, and the importance of finding the right fit when it comes to therapy. This isn’t an episode to miss.
Falling pregnant for Gemma came very easily and fast, although this came with its own overwhelm. “I was very lucky to have that happen very quickly, but by the same token, there was therefore zero run up. So we were going to try, and then I was happy like, ‘Okay, well, I'll be pregnant sometime in the next year.’ And then it was like sometime in the next week… One, obviously extremely happy that that happened! But two, it hit me straight away like, ‘Wow, okay. I was ready for this within a year, not necessarily ready straight away.’ So yeah, it hit me quite hard.”
“I think interestingly, and for lots of other people, perhaps there's a little bit of general anxiety or other things that have always been somewhat present for us. But I think the difference for me in pregnancy and the difference I know for lots of people is that it's one of the times where we feel as if we should feel really happy and as if we definitely shouldn't feel like, ‘Oh, have I made the right choice here?’ Or like, ‘What does this mean for my life?’”
“My mum had always really thoroughly reiterated to me to do everything that you want to do before you have a kid because your life is going to change forever. I can see obviously now, having been a mum, how much she was, one, trying to protect me from having kids when I was much younger than I was when I had them. But two, being somewhat realistic about the fact that things really do change a lot.”
“But because I had that in my mind, as soon as I was pregnant, all I kept thinking was like, ‘Oh, my God, this is it. Now I'm giving my life away.’ That felt like one of those things that you feel like you shouldn't think because you're like, well, I should feel really excited. But I also feel like I'm losing a lot at the same time.”
“I had already made choices in my career that were based on needing maternity leave. I felt I'd already lost a bit of autonomy when it came to my choices there. Then I was definitely losing a lot of choices around what I would do in the future with my career.”
“I got really sick in my pregnancy, so I just lost my ability to do exercise, which was my number one mental health strategy at the time.”
“Before being pregnant, I had done a triathlon and I had just been in South Africa for a couple of months doing volunteering and CrossFit and hiking and all the things! So yeah, to come back and it immediately become pretty sick and just not being able to do any of the stuff that I'd been doing for several years before. I worked at gyms as well prior to that, so that's always been a big part of my life.”
“It was like losing the career component because I just finished my Master's as well. So I was really looking forward to working in social work, but that was going to be put on hold. Then I couldn't do my exercise either... I just felt like in a bit of a downward spiral thinking ‘This is just, this feels like a lot to lose,’ even though I do fully intellectually understand that I'm gaining a lot and that this is going to be a wonderful thing too.”
It took almost 20 weeks for Gemma’s sickness to subside, although her mental health symptoms did not subside with the sickness.
“It was like, ‘Oh,’ I feel better but I still feel like I don't know what is going on and I still just feel really uneasy.”
“Something that I do really value, obviously, is seeing mental health professionals… all I want to do is just have a debrief, just a chat. I just really wanted to debrief about, ‘Is it normal to feel like this?’ I just wanted to openly talk about all these things!”
”I have been somewhat proactive about that forever. Even as a teenager, I would see the youth workers at my school and then had seen counsellors at various points. I feel like I have a pretty good idea of when I'm hitting that point.”
“I think for me at that time, it was just like, I can't keep doing this mental load of thinking about all of these things and feeling so concerned about it on my own. Like, I cannot do that. I have to get this out of me. That's how I knew. And I always know I get to that capacity of like, I just need to get this out of my body… that was my ‘why now?’”
“I called the PANDA helpline. They were really great and they put me in touch with some options of people that I could go and see in Brisbane.”
“But trying to get access to people, there was like a four-month waitlist for heaps of the services and in perinatal mental health, it takes nine months for the baby to come out, so if I'm waiting four months, that's not good! It's not great anyway, but it's really not good in this period where so much changes week to week.”
“When you have a baby coming, they are going to be here at some point! So yeah, like we were talking about, you can't wait as long as sometimes you can wait in other periods of your life.”
“I did, though, end up waiting for one of those and I did go and see her, but then I did not like her… She was very much of a tick-the-box person. There were lots of forms and some things that could help, but it didn't really feel personalised. It didn't feel like a lot of real listening, all that stuff that I really value.”
“It was one of those times I was like, I have knowledge about all this stuff. I have access to a whole lot of stuff. I'm super privileged in terms of being able to afford to do this and even deal with this. Even still, it just felt like barrier after barrier after barrier.”
“Because once I'd seen her and I didn't like her, I did see her again a couple of times just because I couldn't withstand trying to get into somebody else!”
“I knew that it wasn't a good fit, but it was just the nature of the whole circumstance that I was like, ‘Damn it, now I really don't really have time to sort this out.’ But it was helpful enough to get me through to postpartum.”
“I know this is a lot of the reason why you find people don't try because it is such a tricky thing, one, in pregnancy to do because there is an element of shame to going somewhere and being like, ‘This feels like a lot, and I know you're not really allowed to say this, but I don't feel okay at this time.’ Just from that societal view of what we should feel becoming a mother. But then equally in early postpartum and for so many people, including myself, you don't have time to wee by yourself, let alone do the research it takes to get to the right person, all those things.”
“I think the best thing to come out of that, though, was being like, this is what we need! We need more people working in perinatal mental health that are easily accessible, somebody who you feel like you can just have an actual chat and a bit of a download rather than it needing to be something so alarmingly formal as well. I was lucky because I was somewhat okay with the fact that I've interacted a lot with the mental health system by that stage. But lots of people in the perinatal period are feeling these things for the first time or feeling them most overwhelmingly for the first time and then trying to get access to help for the first time. What a time to be trying to do that!”
”I feel like the moment that you conceive and you start your motherhood journey, you're really already into the idealised motherhood thing or the perfect mother situation. You're thinking of everything that you know about motherhood, which for most people is not actually a lot. It's just what we see on the TV, which is hardly anything.”
“A lot of us don't have big, broad families anymore in this day and age. Many people haven't even spent a whole lot of time around babies. Then there's that whole thing of people want to be really open and honest, but people also don't want to scare people. There's this really fine that everybody's treading and trying to prepare people for it, but also not scare people. I think that in some ways, that does a massive disservice to people who become pregnant and then start feeling like, ‘Oh, this feels really overwhelming already, but I'm not sure I'm allowed to talk about it.’”
“But then the destination is also a shit show...”
Postpartum for Gemma brought its own challenges. “In weird ways, I think things got better and they got worse, if that makes sense. The whole like ‘what's it going to be like?’ and all the unknowns, that goes away! Thank goodness. I have my baby and I now know who they are and I now know what this is. I'm on the other side. So there's some relief for me being there at the destination.”
“But then the destination is also a shit show!”
“So I'm really glad that I'm here, but also this is really freaking hard.”
“When it's your first baby, you never know what's normal. My baby just didn't really love to sleep. He just was hard to settle. He cried a lot in the night. Probably for the first four months, I didn't really sleep for longer than two hours at a time. I think it was an average of just under 5 hours in 24 hours for the first four months.”
“Then all the other things of a birth that at the time felt a little bit traumatic, but then looking back now was quite traumatic.”
“Breastfeeding, another thing that you're like, ‘Yeah, that would be fine’. Then it just was so hard!”
“My mum was a breastfeeding counsellor for 12 years and worked for what was then ABA [Australian Breastfeeding Association]. I don't know what they're called now. It felt like there was extra pressure for me to get that right. Not necessarily by her, but just the whole setup. She used to use me as a breastfeeding baby to show others how to do it. Here I am, my nipples are just bleeding and I'm like, ‘This can't be right!’”
“I've just never been like that depleted. My body is recovering from an episiotomy and a few other things. Then I am so sleep deprived that I'm almost dizzy. My mind was just completely ruined from that.”
“I'd never changed a nappy before. It's like learning just how to do everything! As well, I didn't know what to do with a baby. I didn't know how long they would sleep or what I need to look out for or what anything would really look like. The demand of having to feed a baby what felt like every hour and a half for months and months and months on end… This is just not what I expected!”
“That just felt really hard because I was like, here I was prepping myself in pregnancy: ‘It can't be… I mean, maybe it will be bad, but hopefully it'll be all right’. Then getting on the other side like, ‘Oh, my God! This really is just next level.’
“I think the problem with a lot of people is just that you can, for lack of a better term, hold that level of distress for a really long time. Because I do have mental health background, I can watch it happen almost. I'm there being like, yes, I fully understand that I'm not okay, but also it's so much more complex, I think, when you're in it.”
“I think this is something that's so interesting because people often come to me now and are like, I just don't want to be so angry. But the anger is all of that stuff, all of the resentment, all of the red flags of you need more support from people. You need to be understood. There are needs there. So I was definitely super, super angry, very frustrated at the time. To me, it's just like I just knew that I wasn't okay. I just kept thinking like I just… The times where you just think, I could just run away for a little while.”
“I know that that is a typical thought of lots of new parents. I also know that that and other thoughts about ‘I just need a break’ is not like a ‘never want to come back to this’. I think it's just the relentlessness of early parenthood. But I definitely knew, and it was that constant thing of like, ‘I just need to get away from this. I have to be away from this.’”
“I did see that person [the counsellor] again early postpartum, but that's when I called it off.”
“But what did happen is I joined a mother's group, the community one, and that just shifted and changed everything for me. It was awesome… They're the best bunch of humans ever, and we're still in contact all the time.”
”I was lucky that I also had my own mum who could be around a bit to give me some reprieve.”
Gemma also rang the PANDA helpline again to prepare to return to work. “I called them around the time that I was going to be going back to work because whilst I did adjust to the craziness of new parenthood, it became overwhelmingly obvious to me that I was not going to do well as a full-time primary carer. It just wasn't viable for me for my mental health. I need interaction with other adults. I need my own space.”
“I actually applied for a new job early, so I had 15 months of leave, and then I went back to work when my son was 11 months old. It was around the time of that transition that I'd called [PANDA] again just because it was like, how do I make something that is already so hard, work, adding work into it?… I think it was probably around how to explain how difficult all of that was to my partner to help him understand. Just like, that's not as easy as like, cool I start work and everything just flows along. How do we make this work?”
“I really strongly identified that with like, I need to set myself up for success here, which is going back to work way earlier than I wanted to, and that totally did the trick! Right then, I wasn't doing okay mentally, but with a shift in what I was doing in my life, then I was very much doing 50 million times better with that shift. So yes, it was a mental health thing, but it was also a fully environmental and structural thing. But I did know that I had to make a change. I had to do something. I cannot continue with this level of constant-ness in parenthood.”
“For me, work felt like an absolute reprieve, it was the absolute best thing. I got to go back. I got to be around people. I went to the gym at lunchtime at work. It just felt like freedom. It felt like an international holiday at that point! How excited I used to be to go to the international airport - I was that excited every day when I got to the train station! Yes! A whole day to just achieve tasks, other people will notice, and I’ll go to the toilet by myself and eat and exercise and not have to ask anybody to hold anybody else. It just felt amazing.”
“It's like the first time I felt good in such a long time. It's the first time that I felt like me again and that I had a balance between being a mum and being a human. It felt so amazing.”
“But I think honestly, it was mainly the mother's group that got me through that time because it was like, nobody else knows at that exact time what that feels like… At that point, we were still meeting weekly or fortnightly. We have a group chat still goes off all the time now, but it was just such a good support system. So I think without that, it would have been a very different year, I think.”
“It was like being on a runaway train...”
The shift in Gemma’s mental health after returning to work was so positive, she was afraid to lose it. “When I went back to work, I would always joke with everybody like, ‘Oh, my God, I can't imagine trying to do that again!’ But then it was probably only a few weeks of living that life, I just had this thought in my mind: ‘I cannot feel this good for too much longer.’”
“This was my rationale, and this is not everybody, but for me, I was like, I don't think I can withstand losing this. So I need to have another baby right away so that I just continue the shit show and get this really hard bit out of the way! Because in my head, what I wanted was to be in that place after my second baby, which we always were just going to have two children. Then I was like, ‘Oh, my God, imagine how good I'll feel when I'm doing this, knowing I don't have to do it again!’”
“So a few weeks after that, then I was pregnant again because the same thing happened as the first time, which again was good because that's what we'd wanted. But also, well, I only just decided to make that decision and now we're in it.”
“Interestingly, the second time I got pregnant was in November of 2019. So then COVID happened and not only had I made the choice to have a second baby and have all the hard things happen twice when I'd only just gotten into a mentally good place after a really long time of feeling bad, but then the entire world changes and I am stuck at home with a toddler trying to work, really sick in my second pregnancy, and not knowing at all what the entire world is going to do.”
“It was like being on a runaway train because everyone else is cancelling their holidays, cancelling their weddings, cancelling their things. I'm just here, and if the world goes to shit, then I'm still having this baby. It was super weird having just had a baby, having my partner there for everything and then getting into COVID. Now I'm on my own at all of the appointments.”
”The whole pregnancy, I was really unsure whether my partner would be there for the birth. It was just so stressful. Not to mention I had just got back to work, had some space from having to parent, and then it was like, ‘Jokes on you!’”
“I think now that we downplay just what that meant for people in this time period of their lives. Unlike everything else, this moves forward.”
“I did call PANDA again during the time where we couldn't really do much. I think I called them twice, and that was actually mainly when I was really sick because the combination of being nauseous 24 hours a day and parenting a toddler and the whole COVID situation was just too much for me. They were really good, with just a few calls to just get it all out.”
“Then I think it was much further after that, it was again, closer to the end of my pregnancy that I sought my own counsellor who was just local, but she was a good fit for the time. That worked out really nicely.”
“I think people don't often realise that a lot of mental health things too, are just bouncing ideas off other people. Like, How do I have this conversation with my partner about this? Or, How do I make sure that I'm setting myself up for success this second time around and those types of things. So she was really good for that.”
“I felt more afraid in terms of birth because I knew what that was going to potentially be like. Nothing that I couldn't get through, obviously, but I was just like, ‘oh, man, that does not, that doesn't seem like a fun time for me.’”
“But I had changed care providers, so I was doing completely different things. So many people I feel really find their groove in a second or third or subsequent baby because you learn so much. So I felt like I was way better informed. I felt like I knew the things that I really wanted, and I did feel definitely better prepared mentally, mainly because a lot of my issues around parenthood was just my identity. Now at that point, I was coming up to two years into mumming. I'm like, You know what? I feel like I know who I am in this role now. That felt a lot easier.”
“Then I had my baby and it was so freaking easy! Oh My God! It was so different. Literally, in the hospital he slept and I was like, ‘what is this witchery?’ This is magical. I'm not complaining, but also, holy shit!”
“The first time in retrospect, that was so hard. That was so, so hard. So then it was that weird thing of like, ‘Oh, I feel bad that I love this so much and I could actually really soak it up and enjoy it.’”
“I had a completely different postpartum experience. It was fine and pretty great for the most part. I'd also learned a whole heap of stuff about my body. One of the only real challenges that I found mentally was I had quite a big abdominal separation. So just the physio required to do that was like fortnightly for a year. It was such a slow return to exercise, which had been, at this point it feels like, I don't know, three years into having not been able to do what was otherwise my main mental health strategy. So I feel like that was the harder thing. But in terms of who I am as a mum and how this is going to impact my life, it was all gone because I had got to that moment with my first where I was back at work and I felt good… I was like, All I need to do now is withstand this until I can have the balance that I know feels really good for me.”
Gemma even enrolled her second son into daycare one day a week at eight months old which is earlier than she’d planned, but she took the opportunity when the day was available. “From quite an earlier time even, I had a day a week to me… This is the first bit of my own time and I know that I never have to be pregnant and do that whole hard thing ever again. To me, that felt really good!”
“We have a baby, so we assume we’re not alone, but actually we are in a lot of ways...”
Gemma’s experience prompted her current work as a pregnancy support counsellor which she could do as a social worker. “I had done a little bit of looking when I was pregnant because I did know there's a possibility that when I go back to work this time, I may not go back to work, work. I might try and do something different.”
“So first I was doing some study that was like postpartum doula type work. I'd used a birth doula in my first pregnancy, but having had a baby, it's like, mate, you really need the people there after! That felt like a really good thing to do. I spent a lot of early postpartum second time around doing some study there. Then I also found the short course that social workers can do to provide the pregnancy counselling, perinatal counselling that I do. So in that time, I was already coming up in my mind with what my business might do and how that could work. I was playing with the ideas, and it wasn't until much closer to my return to work that I made the call to actually just give it a go. I feel like I want this shot at doing my own thing and also supporting other people who are going through this really intense time.”
“I take a lot of satisfaction in being able to do that. I really love the fact that there is something available for people who can get that support when they actually need it and in not such a formal way. I'm a fan of the slightly informal and not everything has to be big and scary and also not everything has to be boring or somber or even really hard things can be super funny! We have to be able to make light of stuff because that's what often gets us through those times. I do really love being able to do that. It just felt like the next right step.”
“I was really lucky that we were in a position that I had been able to do that. It was one of the reasons too, that I created the podcast as part of it because something that I felt like, and obviously you're the same because you're doing this, but something that I felt like was just missing was like any form of context for parents. It's such an isolating time in the perinatal period, which is weird because we have a baby. So we assume we're not alone, but actually we are in a lot of ways.”
“So just having something like this to listen to, to be like, what are other people's experience like? What is normal? Or when did other people know when they weren't okay and what did they do? I think it's just giving people options. If all we know about Parenthood before we do it is some little snippets of what we see on the TV or what our parents have said about it or what they haven't said about it, then we're just not set up for success. We don't know. We don't have context for our experience.”
“It was absolutely another reason why my second postpartum was just night and day from the first one. I'm not saying there wasn't hard times, but I didn't have the sleep deprivation that I had. I still was super tired, but it just wasn't anything like the first time. I did have breastfeeding troubles, but again, I knew what to do and I knew how that would pan out. I worked through that and then did all the things that I needed to do and I knew that I could get to a good place.”
Gemma also found a somatic [literal translation: into the body] therapist at this time who she continues to see. “I feel like everybody is going to be different in what works for them. I have traditionally had a fairly body-based life experience. I've always been a dancer, I've been doing exercise. I'm a yoga instructor. I just am a body person. So finding a somatic counsellor for me was really great. The whole approach is basically just your usual talk therapy-based style, but also goes into your body's experience of emotions as well.”
“It's really just melding traditional talk therapy a little bit more into your body, which can be a really helpful thing because there's a lot of evidence now about the fact that we store energy and emotion in our bodies. So it's really good to be able to go a little bit deeper as well.”
Gemma also reflects on the reality of motherhood and mental health, and the inherent social and structural challenges we face. ”We also need society to value us. We also need our families and our communities to give us space and time and support so that we can go and look after ourselves. It's not to say that we have no agency in it, but to say that it is on mothers to figure that out is the problem, right? That is the crux of the issue. It isn't an individual issue. This is a structural, cultural thing, and the pace that it's moving at to make things easier for parents is so slow. But the pace that we've taken in trying to get everyone to take accountability for their self-care and all this has been so fast that we are in a bind.”
“I think we understate as a culture just how much the experience is actually so challenging and that maybe people's response to it, if it is feeling challenged by it, could be somewhat normal. We're really not acknowledging the concept of matrescence, which is the adolescence of becoming a mother. We go through so many changes with our body, with our hormones, with our identity, all of these things. Then you add on top, the changes in our relationships - our romantic relationships, our relationships with friends because we're not as available and things are different, people having babies at different times and all the things, our relationships with our own body and sexuality and all of these things, and then our own traumas that have come up that are really triggered by the experiences of parenting even.”
“I just think there is so much that will naturally occur in this perinatal period that can be triggers for that to be really challenging from a mental health perspective. That’s definitely to say we need more people, we need more mental health support during this time, but it's also to say we just, in general, this is just for so many reasons, a really tricky time.”
”It was just the fact that watching myself on several occasions, really having gone to my breaking point and then well past it, it was almost like the anger and the resentment and all the things just turned into like, ‘No, that's it. I can't function as a person who mentally orientates myself in that way anymore!’ I'm just going to start doing shit… It was like a mental breaking point... I think it was just getting so fed up with feeling shitty about putting myself second or third or fourth or fifth or whatever. I'm just going to do it. Then if anyone has a problem, at least I will have got what I needed.”
“So much of what we're concerned about or what we're thinking about or why we don't have boundaries or enforce them is because there is some thought about what could happen if we actually do it. It's usually like we don't want to upset people. But when you get to a point that you're going to start to just literally not give a shit anymore because you can't, energetically and emotionally cannot live with the way that you have been operating, there's something liberating about that because you start enforcing the boundaries and you realise people can actually respect them. Actually, even if they don't, that's not on you. But in lots of things, I think there's a lot about like it's more about whether we feel we can cope with somebody else's comments. It's not actually about them. It's like, can we cope? I guess I got to the point where I was like, no, I can actually cope with anything that's going to be said because I will still feel better about making choices that are really good for me so that I can continue to do this mothering job.”
”I think the process of the last, coming up to six years since I got pregnant the first time, there's been so much growth on so many levels. The fact that you're forced to slow down. Before I had kids in my work, I was really afraid of not doing the best. Now I'm like, yeah, I'll obviously be doing my best, but there comes a point where I can't do more than that and I'm not going to push myself to the point of pure exhaustion for that anymore. I can just pass the test. I don't have to get 100%. I think I don't feel the same at all about everything. I don't feel as angry as I used to before when I couldn't do things perfectly.”
Gemma’s advice? Follow the gingerbread crumbs…
“If you can, definitely talk to somebody about it. Whether that is PANDA helpline, whether that's Gidget Foundation, whether that's going on to COPE or any of these other national resources we have, whether it's going into online groups, whether it's going to your mother's group,.”
“If you have somebody who you can be honest to, that's a great start. If you have somebody who's trained to help you reflect on it, that's wonderful too!”
“My main thing that I would say to anybody in any part of this that is feeling really hard is this thing, for some reason, this is what always comes to me and it's so weird. But for me, it's always been like following the gingerbread crumbs to wherever the next best place is. So okay, if today, today you're not going to build the 10-level high, awesome, epic, gingerbread house. But what is the next best thing for you to do?”
“We don’t have to solve every little thing, but what does the next best thing feel like?”
“We don't have to solve every single thing, but what does the next best thing feel like? If that's one little choice, if that's one little thing you can do, finding someone who you can talk through what your values are to find what are the things that you can do even when you feel the most trapped? What are the glimmers that we have?”
“What are those next little steps that feel really true to who you are? Because that's going to get us somewhere, not trying to get to goals of what everybody else wants us to do. It's like, let's do what we can to feel all of what feels true to us and then take the next best step from there.”
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