24 | Siobhan
“I packed a bag and my poor husband’s working in the other room, working from home. I packed a bag, said, ‘I’m going to my mum’s’ and left. He had no context. He had no information about any of this because we had no time to talk because we were both just operating on no sleep and pure adrenaline and anxiety. I left the house. His wife and his baby left the house and he didn’t know what was happening. I turned up to my parents’ just desperate...”
With a background in child development psychology and extensive experience working with thousands of babies, Siobhan was, what she thought, going to be off to a running start in motherhood.
That was until she was confronted by a traumatic birth and intense sleep deprivation at the height of the pandemic lockdowns.
Siobhan’s sense of self was challenged and her first postpartum experience was overshadowed by chronic anxiety and depression. With the development of hallucinations and suicidal ideation, Siobhan’s mental health deteriorated until she became unrecognisable to those who knew and loved her.
In this poignant and relatable episode, Siobhan talks about everything that helped her see the light and gave her confidence to expand her family: from occupational therapy, medication, a social worker, a birth debrief, and formal postpartum planning, to her ultimate outlet, running.
I thank Siobhan from the bottom of my heart for sharing her experience so openly, and I welcome everyone to listen to the incredible insights that this inspirational woman has learnt along the way.
This isn’t an episode to miss. Run, don’t walk!
Please note, this episode discusses suicidal ideation. Go gently.
“I'm Siobhan, I run Science Minded on Instagram, which was born out of the desperate need to activate my brain during my postpartum life.”
“My background is academia. I studied psychology and child development through university and did my PhD in the early social experience of newborn infants and the dyadic relationship between them and their parents. So I was, what I thought, very familiar and comfortable around babies.”
“I'd worked with thousands of babies and been in the homes of lots of newly-formed families. So I felt really, really comfortable in that space. And I've always loved children. I come from a big family myself, I'm the middle of five kids, and lots of cousins running around. So that was always something that I wanted for myself.”
“I've got two little boys now, I guess, although one keeps telling me he's a big boy, three-year-old Timo and four-month-old Julian, who's almost asleep in my arms. But yeah, so like Rebecca alluded to, I had a rough beginning to this journey of motherhood.”
“We moved back from New Zealand. I was working in New Zealand at one of the universities there, and we moved back. when I was 20 weeks pregnant. I had a really healthy pregnancy. Everything was very happy and pretty calm.”
“So I was pregnant and gave birth to my eldest in December 2019… as our astute listeners will realise is right before COVID. So I had a pretty intense birth. I now recognise it as traumatic. Before my second pregnancy, I would have said that I had a ‘full-on birth’, but I didn't view it as traumatic. I knew that my husband was traumatised by it, but I didn't think that I was.”
“Basically, I went into labour on Christmas Eve, and I was adamant that I would not have a baby born on Christmas Day if I could avoid it, because I thought of all of the future birthday parties and all of the consequences of that.”
“And so they kept offering to induce me, and I kept saying no, I had my reasons, but there are also unintended consequences of that. And one of them was that my waters broke, and then he was born 52 hours later. So I was in the birth space for a really long time. I wasn't in labour that whole time, but I was hopped up on adrenaline, obviously, because I was excited to meet my baby. And so I had no sleep. By the time I started pushing, I was shattered and I had nothing left to give.”
“And then he came out… So he's three now, and we talk about it a lot because it's informed a big part of our lives together. And he will tell anyone who'll listen that ‘I was born through my mummy's vagina, but I got stuck,’ which is exactly what happened. His shoulders got stuck.”
“I saw the very seasoned midwife - who'd been working delivering babies for 30-plus years - I saw her face absolutely drop. And I remember thinking, Oh, shit, this is bad. She slammed on the red button, 15 people ran into the room, and I dissociated. I remember having the thought, Oh, this is really bad. This is really, really bad. It's okay, there are people here. Then I just, like I left my body. And then I don't really know when I came back, but it was a lot. That's what we started on.”
“And then I had my little boy who had gastroesophageal reflux disease. So he was in a lot of pain for a really long time. And we were new parents trying to figure out why this baby screamed all damn day and all night. We have a family history of reflux, so we did have a lot of support and resources and a wonderful GP. So we got him on some medication that helped. But it was just a really, really rough start.”
“And then when he was 12 weeks old, COVID hit. So let's add some gasoline to that fire. Everyone was terrified. And we’re obviously not immune, but we are used to the idea of COVID now. But we forget that in the early days, you're just watching TV all day and the death counts. And we were all just petrified and no one had any idea what was happening. And it's not good for a mum to be sitting on a couch holding a newborn, watching the world crumble.”
“Because of my previous mental ill health experiences, my family and my support network, we were very much on the lookout for postnatal depression. We weren’t aware of postnatal anxiety in the same way, and mine manifested more that way. The intense control, the lashing out, that really is how things showed up. And we didn’t realise it was a problem until it was much more deeply seated...”
“So when Timo was about four months old, I started to struggle a bit more. I've had mental health issues my whole life, and I was on medication throughout my pregnancy, both pregnancies. And around four months, we went to the GP and talked about how I was struggling a bit. So we upped my dose, which was good.”
“One big thing is that because of my previous mental ill health experiences, my family and my support network, we were very much on the lookout for postnatal depression. We weren't aware of postnatal anxiety in the same way, and mine manifested more that way. The intense control, the lashing out, that really is how things showed up. And we didn't realise it was a problem until it was much more deeply seated.”
“I had lots of black-and-white thinking, lots of trying to control things. To be honest, I recognised it as problematic, but I truly didn't... A lot of this understanding is through hindsight and through later processing, which is how a lot of these things go, right?”
“But I think about the fact I was so fixated on composting. We had to compost! We couldn't possibly throw anything that could be composted in the bin. I was really, really fixated on recycling correctly. And the thing is, I'm pro-composting and recycling, but when you're in the midst of a really difficult entry to parenthood, you can let some of these things go. But I was not in the brain space to do that at the time. I had a lot of things like that. We had to use cloth nappies, and I would not use disposables under any circumstances because you're exactly right, it's what I could control. I had to control something because everything else felt so uncontrollable.”
“I can still imagine and remember the pain of leaving him behind...”
“I should also say, because Timo was in so much pain, he had this cry. I describe it as the ‘screwdriver-to-the-brain-cry’. It's the cry that just causes your brain to short circuit, and that while that cry is happening, your brain can't process thoughts.”
“And even as a toddler, he still has that. That's just a part of who he is. But it's really challenging when you hear this blood-curling scream, and it's because he stubbed his toe. It's real for him, not to minimise his experience, but I come running up thinking I'm going to come to a scene of blood and gore, and it's, ‘Oh, I really hurt my toe, mummy.’”
“So my amygdala was just constantly on fire, and that's not healthy or sustainable. And because he was in pain, he didn't sleep. And I also tend to make wakeful babies. So it was just really rough.”
“I think I was so exhausted. Night-time sleep was a little bit better. Day sleep was impossible.”
“And then, when Timo was about eight months old, I remember I was bouncing him on the yoga ball because that's where we lived. And I remember I was listening to a podcast. I don't remember which one. And it was talking about your village and how you have to activate your village. I remember screaming inside my head thinking, I don't have a village! I have a village, but I can't get to them because of COVID. And that was hugely painful for me because we moved home from overseas to be close to family, and then we couldn't use our supports.”
“I was screaming this thought in my head, and then I thought, Fuck this. I do have one. I'm going to them. I need help! So I packed a bag and my poor husband’s working in the other room, working from home. I packed a bag, said, ‘I'm going to my mum's’, and left. He had no context. He had no information about any of this because we had no time to talk because we were both just operating on no sleep and pure adrenaline and anxiety. I left the house. His wife and his baby left the house and he didn't know what was happening.”
“I turned up to my parents’ just desperate, and they were wonderful. They held me and the baby, and they made me go to sleep. But at this stage, I couldn't... I mean, I couldn't sleep. Any time that there was the opportunity to sleep, my brain was vibrating and my body. I couldn't rest, even when it was technically available. And so by the time I turned up to my parents' house, he'd been waking every half hour to every hour for two months. So I'm severely sleep deprived. I'm on months long, intense anxiety.”
“Anyway, so my parents took him, they said, ‘Go home, sleep. We'll keep him for a day. Just we'll keep him tonight.’ I was breastfeeding, and I said, ‘What are you going to do?’ And Mum was like, ‘He's big enough. He will manage. We'll feed him water if we need to’, because she was terrified for me, obviously.”
“I remember leaving and feeling like my arms had been cut off. I can still imagine and remember the pain of leaving him behind. I picked him up the next morning and he was so happy. I've got a photo of him. He’s got this huge smile on his face. He had a wonderful time, so that's good. It was torture for me.”
“She has since said to me, she said, ‘I’ve never seen you like that. You couldn’t form sentences.’ And it’s funny, in hindsight, I remember thinking that I was making perfect sense. I remember trying really hard to keep it together to explain what was going on. But she said, ‘You were a shell. There was nothing going on.’”
“I've always had intrusive thoughts my whole life. I'm very familiar with them. Previously, before my postpartum experience, I wasn't distressed by them. That's just how my brain works… And then during postpartum, they started to become aggressive and very visual, which was really confronting for me because I'm not a very visual person. So to be flashed these intense visuals, I found really disconcerting.”
“And then I was thinking about my psychosis the other day, and I was remembering like I would just hear voices. They weren't saying anything and they weren't malicious, but I would just start to notice. And I'd forgotten about this entirely. At this stage with this sleep deprivation and this acute and chronic mental health and mental illness, I just was very aware that I was experiencing things that didn't exist. I was seeing things that didn't exist. I was hearing things that didn't exist. I knew that they didn't, but they felt just as real. So it wasn't my imagination. It wasn't like I knew that my perceptions were severely distorted.”
“I was experiencing psychotic symptoms, and that wasn't the key feature of my illness. It was an extra fun flavour that was added along. But yeah, it was for me, anyway, in my experience of it, it was more an, what's the word? —like an example that this is getting dialled up a notch rather than the key or the focus of my concerns.”
“But the thing that really tipped the scales where my husband, my family, and me all decided that, ‘okay, we need to do something’, was that I was starting - not starting - I was suicidal. I have had suicidal ideation, and I've been in that headspace before. This time was the scariest for me.”
“With previous suicidal ideation and thoughts of suicide, I was quite confident that I was just experiencing quite severe mental illness and that I wouldn't act on it. This time, I didn't think I would. I really hoped I wouldn't, but I was scared. I was so scared, and I'd never been in that space before.”
“And I felt that way, being properly scared, I felt that way for a few days before I even had the courage to tell my husband, which was really telling because we have a very open, transparent relationship. We've been together for almost 20 years, so we know each other really, really well. And we've seen each other both through mental illness and depressive episodes. We've both experienced that before. But this time, it was terrifying to bring it to him.”
“And I remember very clearly we were on the balcony, and I said to him, I said, ‘You need to hide the knives’. And he said, ‘What? Why?’ And I said, ‘I just can't stop thinking about them, and I'm scared I'm going to use them’. And I think that was the first time I'd told him about it, and he's like, ‘We need to do something. We need to call your Mum.’ So we did that, and we saw my doctor the very next day.”
“Again, I knew it was serious, but seeing my GP, who's been a family friend for 20 years, the look on her face of pure terror. And she's a very calm, together woman. Yeah, that was really confronting for me. And she's still my GP, and we've talked about it a lot. And she has since said to me, she said, ‘I've never seen you like that. You couldn't form sentences.’ And it's funny, in hindsight, I remember thinking that I was making perfect sense. I remember trying really hard to keep it together to explain what was going on. But she said, ‘You were a shell. There was nothing going on.’”
“So at that stage, she activated my support system. I should say my mum and mother-in-law were both really worried and had been trying to intervene for weeks. And I'd just been saying, ‘It's fine, it's fine, it's fine’. So basically, I was put on suicide watch. So I wasn't to be left alone either by myself or with the baby for three weeks. I was put on bedrest. I wasn't allowed to do night duty, and we had family take over for three weeks, every night for three weeks, and then I think another few months of someone there most nights.”
“And my doctor has since said that if she hadn't known the family so well, I would have been admitted straight to the hospital. It's just that she knew that the support was there and that this was a better option. But yeah, that's the crux of my experience.”
“One thing that I am eternally grateful for is that after I went to the appointment with my Mum - because my husband was in a really intense work period, and he could have come, but he knew that my Mum was there - Anyway, but as soon as we left the appointment, my doctor called him to check that he was okay and to see how he was going, which is just perfect and beautiful and exactly what should be done.”
“Mental illness is a real mind meld because it’s your brain you can’t trust. It’s very tricky to be able to go through life experiencing things and have to constantly check in with others because you don’t know what’s you and what’s not you and what can be trusted and what can’t be...”
“I've talked about it a lot. It's still very painful, of course. But I think I'm removed enough from it now that I just have so much compassion and sadness and grief that that was my experience. Sitting here holding another baby, it's actually really wonderful and joyful because I was afraid that this would never happen.”
“Like I said, I come from a big family. I've always wanted multiple children. After our first experience, I was too scared to hope for it, even though it's what I wanted. My husband was very adamant that he would never, ever have another child because, why would we do that? And the intervening two years was a lot of therapy, a lot of crying, a lot of exercise, really, actually, exercise has been hugely healing for me. Meditation movement, my therapist calls it. But yeah, it's a lot. And it's also, I think, strange to think that this is my story and will always be a part of me, I think, and it shapes everything in my life in lots of ways.”
”I think one thing that I struggled with, and it took a long time to get back, was being able to trust myself. I've talked with a few people about this, but mental illness is a real mind meld because it's your brain you can't trust. It's very tricky to be able to go through life experiencing things and have to constantly check in with others because you don't know what's you and what's not you and what can be trusted and what can't be.”
”It's tricky because I'm a strong, capable, independent, bloody woman! To have those identities, they didn't crumble, but it felt like they did. It felt like it was really, really hard. It's something that I think we're doing a lot better, but something my husband really, really struggled with because that's the woman he knew and loved, and he struggled so hard with me needing to, what he saw as, defer to him because that's not what he signed up for, and that's not the relationship dynamic he wanted. He felt a lot of pressure to be in that situation, and we had to do a lot of work to come back to our new normal. I had to do a lot of work to trust myself and trust myself in the context of that relationship.”
“I remember one of our biggest fights after this period… Timo must have been about 15 months old. So I started to see the light. I remember the point exactly. I was on a run. I was listening to a podcast, Honest as a Mother by Amanda Gurman, who is wonderful. And there was something, I can't remember the guest, but I can hear her voice in my head. And she was saying something, I think she was talking about her recovery of this and her healing. And I remember having this little thought of, I think I'm getting better. And I burst into tears! And I'm running around this oval with all these dogs and pet owners, and I'm just crying because I was starting to feel better, and it was like this little pinprick of hope that it might not always be like this.”
“And then as I started to get a little bit better, I brought to my husband, ‘Maybe we can have another kid’. My logic was I can get better, and therefore in the future, there's an option. So this hope and this dream that I thought had died, I now felt hadn't died. So I brought it to him because I share everything with him. He was furious. He was so angry because in his mind, he said, ‘You're just getting better. How and why would you do this to us again? Why aren't you thinking about me?’”
“And I think as well, he just started, as I was slowly starting to get better, he finally felt safe enough to crumble… He was holding the weight of our family and what felt the weight of the world. And as I was slowly starting to take back those responsibilities and share some of that load, he started to have his own postpartum depression experience. So he was really, really struggling. And it was like this grenade that I said, ‘Okay, let's do it again.’”
“That marked a period where we really struggled because I didn't have, at the time, I didn't have the bigger picture of what was happening. I was just focused on what I wanted, what I thought I wanted. And I didn't know what he was going through because he didn't know what he was going through. We were all just in it. And that's when we started to really struggle in our relationship.”
“Like I said, we've been together for almost 20 years, and that was the first time that we had some serious conversations about ‘maybe this isn't going to work’. We're just both crying, talking about how the hell did we come to this? We're unbreakable! So to come to that realisation that maybe we're not as, and it's not about the fact that we're not strong. It's just that this stuff- You're human. How could we be? It's outrageous, right? I'm a human and to experience such stress and such trauma is not sustainable.”
“We had to have some really serious conversations about the fact that he didn't think he could do it again and that it was really important to me. We were just really honest about what it might mean to have only one child, what it might mean to have more. What's the dynamic? Because you can't do it half-half, like you have to come to a decision. He said to me one day, ‘I'm worried that if we are done, then you will resent me forever.’ I had to be really honest and say, ‘I really hope that's not the case. I'd like to think we would come to that decision together, but I can't say it's not true because that's not my story. That's not the story I saw for myself.’”
“I remember saying to him and meaning it that ‘if I knew we were only ever going to have one child, I think I would prefer to have none’. That's nothing to do with my child. That's nothing to do with Timo. That's got everything to do with the life I had envisioned. I would never, ever send Timo back. I couldn't if I tried. I wanted to during when I was in the depths of my illness. We were both so struggling so much. We both were Googling, What do you do? How do you get out of this?”
“We figured that we weren't bad enough for child protection services to take the baby away. We knew that even if that happened, they would give the baby to one of our parents, and that doesn't solve our problem. It's just these places that your mind goes to, right? And it's indicative of how trapped we felt! But things did start to get easier and better.”
“The massive increase meant that I was a zombie. I was so fluffy in the head with this increase of medication. That was not my GP’s intention... But I was actually just in a real haze, which I liked because it was relief from the intense anxiety that I was feeling...”
“At that GP appointment, she upped my med dose massively. I think I went from 50 milligrams to 250 or something. It was the kind where she has to make the call to the federal department and release the amount, yeah, it was one of those ones. Actually, I was really grateful for it. The massive increase meant that I was a zombie. I was so fluffy in the head with this increase of medication. That was not my GP's intention. She had her own pharmacological reasons. I don't know what they are because I am not trained in such a way. But I was actually just in a real haze, which I liked because it was relief from the intense anxiety that I was feeling.”
“And then I tried to start therapy straight away, but it was COVID and there were no spaces. It took about three or four months before I could get in to see anyone. I was seeing my GP weekly, and also my husband was on the phone with her every other day.”
Regarding talk therapy, Siobhan says “Yeah, so I had maybe three sessions, and they were helpful, but they weren't nearly as helpful as I wanted them to be. And I've come to, I don't know if it's the right conclusion, but the conclusion that works for me is I think that a lot of my trauma is really body-based. And I don't know if you read the book by Bessel Van der Kut, ‘The Body Keeps the Score’, but that resonated so powerfully with me. This idea that in the West, we're very attached to these top-down processes, and we really prioritise thoughts over feelings, and we really emphasise the fact that thoughts inform feelings, and they do, that's not to minimise the fact that that does exist, but that it works the other way, too. That how our bodies experience safety or the lack of it really helps to inform our responses.”
“And I think that's part of why running was so beneficial for me, is because it was like a somatic, physiological response to what feels like, for me, very sensory-based difficulties.”
“Starting trail running and having a really regular exercise routine was, for me, what I felt like got me out of it. And I didn't start that straight away. I probably started that when Timo was about 18 months old. In earnest, I would do it every now and then, but I started to be really serious about it.”
“It was at my husband's suggestion because that's what he did. And it's tricky because I remember when he started to really experience his own mental ill health, he would go for runs. And I was so angry because he would leave and I was at home with a baby. And I remember thinking, You don't get to run. We don't get to do things. And he was doing it out of necessity, which I did not realise at the time. For him, it was his only outlet, which I later came to appreciate and felt terribly guilty for being so angry about. But that was true to my experience at the time.”
“And then we started running together as a way to reconnect as a couple. While Timo was in daycare, we'd go for runs during the day, and then I started to really enjoy it and find a lot of those benefits, both physical and largely mental. And then I'd start going by myself. And I continued that until I got pregnant, because running when you feel like you need to throw up every two seconds is not fun.”
“And I have had, slash, have, PTSD from Timo's experience, because we lived on a really busy road when he was a baby, and the cars and motorbikes and emergency vehicles would go past. And because he was in pain all the time, he'd sleep so lightly, the little sleep he did get. And then a motorbike would go past and it would wake him up and he would scream, and then it would be this intense feedback loop.”
“But yeah, really, the things that helped: really identifying my experiences as traumatic, recognising the body-based experience, the sensory element of it. And then the psychologist was helpful. And it feels disingenuous because my background is in psychology. So I'm still coming to terms with this idea that I'm not finding conventional psychology as helpful as I expected to, because I've just finished up my fourth session with my new therapist, and I'm not getting what I had hoped out of it either. So I'm on the search for another one.”
“Having said that, some of the therapy that I found the most beneficial was with an OT mental health therapist. So occupational therapist who specialises in mental health. So it really ties in that sensory aspect, actually. And that's the only therapist I got for free through the hospital, which is a bit ironic.”
“So my hospital, when I was referred to them, being pregnant with my now four-month-old, I told them I had birth trauma, and then they allocated me to a special unit and asked me if I wanted to see an OT.”
“I didn’t think I had birth trauma. And then I was pregnant, and I was confronted with the idea that I had to give birth again. And I just had weeks of panic attacks...”
The decision to have another baby was not easy for Siobhan and her husband. “We had a lot of those conversations about what it would look like, how it might influence Timo, because he is a more sensitive soul, and he's a sensitive kid with a lot of the same sensory issues that I've got. So that's beautifully complicated for me as well. And yeah, after months and months and months of all these kinds of conversations, my husband just went, ‘Yeah, let's do it.’”
“So then we got pregnant pretty quickly, which was lucky, of course. This is where the piece of the birth trauma comes back in, is that I didn't think I had birth trauma. And then I was pregnant, and I was confronted with the idea that I had to give birth again. And I just had weeks of panic attacks. And I was thinking to myself, Oh, turns out there's something there.”
“Previously, well before we had decided to have another child on one of our runs together, which is where we did a lot of our talking and a lot of our healing together, my husband said to me, ‘Would you consider a Caesarean?’”
“In hindsight, I was quite dogmatic during my first pregnancy about how I would and wouldn't do things - very black and white. It should probably help set the stage for some of that thinking as well during my first postpartum. But I said, ‘Yeah, I think I would’. And he said that actually, that was one of the key pieces for him to even consider it, seeing that I was more flexible than I had been.”
“A few people have asked, ‘why and how has your second postpartum been more healing?’ And I think it's the idea that I chose to have an elective Caesarean with my second son. And I think that was really a very needed piece in order for both of us, both my husband and I, to feel safe enough to even enter that space again.”
“I found out that I was pregnant quite early, and I think we found out when I was about four weeks, and by the time I was eight weeks along, we had decided that if we were going to give birth to this baby, it was going to be via Caesarean. That's the only way we could envisage feeling safe enough to do it.”
“As soon as I'd made that decision, [the panic attacks] went away. And obviously, I had some nervousness and anxiety around what would be a different experience. But yeah, it really shifted things for me.”
“And then I had a birth debrief with B from Core and Floor Restore, and it was really wonderful. Lots and lots of tears, but really healthy and helpful tears. And she really helped reframe a lot of things for me.”
“From that point, choosing to have the Caesarean, that's when I started activating a whole bunch of my supports. So well before I got pregnant, I decided that if and when we did that, I would employ the services of my very good friend, Kathryn from MotherUp. We met by Instagram, and we realised that we live close to each other, so we met up and clicked instantly. And now she's one of my very best friends. So yeah, I hired her, and we had several planning sessions, which involved getting me as mentally healthy and strong as I could be.”
“So I had monthly OT appointments through the hospital. I had psychology appointments. I had social worker appointments. I had exercise. I did everything.”
“A lot of those services I found through Kathryn. So my social worker was via the White Cloud Foundation which is a free service that offers mental health support and dietitian support and something else - Lots of practical and mental support stuff to mums and dads. You can self-refer… And I found them very easy to work with. Actually, since deciding that my current psychologist is maybe not the best fit for me, and while I try to find another one, I'm going to reach out to them as my interim.”
“The first time around, our plan was, ‘We're capable people. We'll figure it out’. Which, if you have a really easy transition and a happy baby and things work well, that's a great plan. If you have any of those things not line up, it's a lot harder. And we have none of the things line up, so we really struggled. And the beauty of the plan is that it can change and adapt at any stage.”
“Instead of making a plan per se, my plan was just pages and pages of resources of, if I feel this way, this is what I can do. If this happens, do this. Just lots of ideas. All of the ideas, all of the ideas, all of the resources.”
“Having that plan and having Kathryn as a sounding board to talk through the plan and hold me accountable - she just had so many wonderful ideas that I hadn't even thought of, just really practical, useful things as those who have listened to her episode would know - but that's what gave me a lot of confidence that this was possible.”
”I think as well, having the plan really allowed me to talk through and sit down with all of my key support people like my mum, my mother-in-law, my dad, and be like, ‘This is the plan. If you think something can be added, if you think we can or should do things differently, this is how we can talk about it.’ And it just created a framework to talk through a lot of these things that can otherwise feel awkward.”
“He got a little bit upset, and the first time I held him, I sang him the songs that I would sing to his brother to go to sleep, and he instantly calmed down because he recognised them from when he was on the inside.”
”And so I was so excited for an elective Caesarean because I'd had friends who've had one and they talk about how it's so calm, like you just go into the hospital. But of course, that's not how things happened for us. My waters broke exactly the same way with my eldest. It was basically exactly the same, except that we intervened at hour eight and had the Caesarean. And then the birth was quite lovely.”
“So apparently technically, it counts as an emergency, but it's like a non-emergency emergency. So we were just hanging out in the room and we kept getting pushed back because we were a non-emergency emergency. So the emergencies went ahead of us as they should, and that's why it took the eight hours. And I just kept leaking water everywhere, which was not glamorous, but that's the name of the game.”
“We finally wheeled into theatre. And then as I got my spinal, I had a terrible flashback, and I burst into tears. Thankfully, my husband was there. He knew exactly what was happening. Despite it being in my notes that I have birth trauma, all of the staff just freaked out and were like, ‘Is she okay? Is she okay?’ And he's like, ‘It's okay. She's just having flashbacks. It's not good, but you don't need to worry.’ I should note, I went through the public system, so I didn't have a pre-existing relationship with any of the obstetricians or surgeons or anything. They were all wonderful, but my husband was my real wonderful person.”
“The main downside was that when he was born, he had, I can't remember what it's called, there's a medical term, but his lungs weren't happy. And so he was put on oxygen, and I really wanted skin-to-skin, which is what I was able to get with my eldest, but his breathing was not up to it, so he was whisked away.”
Siobhan didn’t get to see Julian for at least 12 hours.
“When I did go in to visit him, he had the oxygen tubes in and the little cannula in his tiny little hands. But it was actually really sweet. I was able to breastfeed him, which I wasn't sure I was going to be able to. And I was able to sing. He got a little bit upset, and the first time I held him, I sang him the songs that I would sing to his brother to go to sleep, and he instantly calmed down because he recognised them from when he was on the inside. So that was really lovely.”
“Lots of people have asked me about my experience of him being in NICU, how I managed it, but it was really actually fine for me emotionally. And I think a big part of that was that he was so strong and healthy. It's just that his breathing wasn't great. And when we'd walk in to the NICU, all the other babies looked so tiny and they didn't look well, and their parents looked so crestfallen and sad. And then he was this giant hunk of a thing that was literally hulking out and ripping his tubes off. And the nurses going, ‘No, no, no’. And taping them back on. I think they put socks on his hands at one stage to try and stop him taking his tubes out. But he was perfectly happy and fine.”
“I remember actively doing lots of cognitive reframing... I was really sad that I was up on the ward without a baby in my room, and that felt really weird. But it did give me opportunity to rest. I just slept a lot and I watched Bridgerton. So I just really enjoyed that.”
“And he was down there for about, I think it was about 26 hours or something. And the nurses down there were wonderful. They kept saying, ‘Come down as often as you like’. They would call me and let me know. And they were really supportive. I felt really supported, because I'd expressed a bunch of antenatally, and they were really good about that. But they also didn't put any pressure on me, so they gave him formula as well.”
“In my planning with Kathryn, I decided that I wanted to do combination feeding… I kept pushing back against it because my little black and white thinking about, No, you have to exclusively breastfeeding, kept coming back. But him needing formula in the hospital was actually a real blessing in disguise because someone else gave it to him. I didn't do it, and we started off that way, so it was easier for me to continue it.”
“So what could have been very traumatic was actually quite fine and actually really helpful in many ways.”
“I’ve had to force myself and practise asking for help. Even when I don’t want it or I think I don’t need it, I ask for help before I think I need it, which I hate. Every fibre of my being hates. But I think it’s not about me anymore.”
“But, yeah, Julian is a happy little baby. He has reflux, too. In the hospital, we noticed it, and we could smell it, it's a very distinctive sour smell, and we smelled it on his breath, and we both were quite traumatised. And I remember seeing the look on my husband's face. And I remember feeling the dread wash over me going, ‘No, no, no, no, no, no. We can't do this again.’”
“But we left the hospital and he was on the over-the-counter stuff that we could give him. And then at three weeks, our GP agreed to give him the medication. I was a bit worried that we were being hypervigilant, but then it's a weight-based medication. And so as he puts on weight, his reflux gets worse. That has been validating in that he needs it. We just make babies with dodgy guts!”
Siobhan’s two postpartum experiences were very different, although as she realised, this comes with many conflicting emotions.
“Absolutely worlds apart. It's really weird and confronting and confusing. I'm at the stage, so he's four months old. I'm at the stage now where I'm starting to enjoy how different it is. For the first couple of months, I was just confused. Now I'm starting to enjoy it a bit more, but there's a lot of grief for just how hard my first experience was. Because I think as well, when that's all you know, the idea that it could be different doesn't really hold water. As well, there's been a bit of anger of like, Are you kidding me? It's this easy for other people? Why? Why do they get that? And of course, it's not that easy. And there's no answer to that question. It just happens how it happens. But yeah, lots of conflicting and complicated feelings.”
“I think a shared experience with anyone who has several children who are different from one another, as most children are, that the tool belt that you came to it with, lots of the things that you did the first time don't apply. And whether or not that's because you had an easier baby the first time and more difficult the second or vice versa, it's just quite confronting for it to be so different.”
“I know that one of my key challenges is I'm very easily overwhelmed by auditory stimuli. So the crying, and I think specifically the pain cry is really challenging for me. So we hadn't dealt with this before because he is a happier baby, because he's not in pain. Except two weeks ago, he had a cough, a bad cough, and he had a sore throat, and he had that cry.”
“I knew that I would struggle with that, but experiencing it, both me and my husband were quite shocked at how quickly I devolved into a puddle. And it was truly like PTSD flashbacks. So he was probably sick for about four days. And I was a shell of a person. I couldn't make decisions. I couldn't function. I was vibrating. I felt like my body was humming with anxiety. It was terrible. And then he was better, and then I was fine. The light switch element of it was really intense.”
“And so I have now learned, I mean, I knew already, but that I have to be very, very vigilant about managing that. And I think what I have been doing since is I've got those loop earplugs, those noise-dampening that, and I've got noise-cancelling headphones, which I had before with Timo, but I couldn't bring myself to use them because I had in my head that it's almost like this masochistic, like I'm his mother, I need to be here to experience this. Whereas this time, it's like, ‘Hell no! I don't need to be present for this. I will comfort you through. I will hold you. I will be there for you. But I do not need to put myself through additional pain. And it's just the real shift in thinking has been huge, which is good, obviously.”
“I think I've just got so much more compassion for myself. I'm not holding myself up to my own exacting standards.”
“He was two weeks old and he wasn't gaining weight. The GP suggested we do formula top-ups. And I think because I'd prepared the idea that we would do combination feeding, and I planned to do it later, a bit later on, that wasn't confronting for me. I was like, ‘Okay, we've planned for this. Let's put that plan into motion.’”
”It's just practical things, like the formula feeding, means that other people can help. And so when I'm feeling really touched out and I just need lunch, I can pass the baby in a bottle, and I don't feel bad about it because I need to eat. And so I'm not at that touched out, hungry, tired stage. And I'm really prioritising my needs on a sensory level because I know that when I'm hungry, when I'm tired, when I'm overwhelmed, that that's when I'm not the best version of myself, and that's when I struggle more.”
“We've had other practical support, like having people over at least once a week, I have someone to be here in the afternoon so that I can have a guaranteed nap. Most days I get a nap. And the fact that I can sleep is huge and obviously testament to that things are going well.”
“You just learn to realise that you can't do it all and be it all and to give yourself a lot more grace. And I've spoken to my mum about this a lot because she's like, ‘Why didn't you just let me, et cetera, et cetera?’ And it's like I couldn't. I was holding on so tightly that if I let go, everything else would fall apart. And I didn't have the mental space to even entertain an alternative reality. White-knuckling it was all I could do because I had to hold on. And that's what it felt like. That's exactly what it felt like.”
“I think when you ask what has been helpful, and that's the thing. I've had to force myself and practise asking for help. Even when I don't want it or I think I don't need it, I ask for help before I think I need it, which I hate. Every fibre of my being hates. But I think it's not about me anymore. And that's helpful for me to think that I'm not doing this for me. It's got nothing to do with me. It's not about my ego. That if I don't make sure to ask for help before I need it, if I don't look after me, then my children suffer, which is like its own weird, broken selflessness. But that I'm part of something bigger now, and that I have to look out for them. And in doing that, that means that I have to put myself first because the ship goes down if the captain is not steering.”
“I feel like this is the interim step for me, that I can do it at this stage, and then hopefully, I can do it just for me.”
“It’s easier said than done to be open with the darkest, most vulnerable parts of ourself. But it’s really the only way through.”
“I've got so much compassion and sadness for what I went through. I was in so much pain. I'm lucky. I was very lucky I had people holding me. But I think the version of me that experienced and remembers that pain and knows what she was going through, I think I would just, I'd just hold her and hug her and tell her it's going to be okay. I think that's all I could do.”
“I think it's just so important to speak to the truth of our experiences and not be ashamed or try to hide for fear of judgment because everyone's having a hard time in some capacity or another.”
“I've read, I think it's a Robert Frost poem, but it's something about like, ‘The only way out is through’. Apparently, there's more to that quote, and it's, ‘The only way out is through, and the best way through is together’ which I really love and speaks to the idea that connection is what makes humans so special, our social connections and our social bonds. And that's almost always the answer that when we feel lost and alone and we're the only one and we're broken, there's always someone else who feels that way. And obviously, it's easier said than done to be open with the darkest, most vulnerable parts of ourself. But it's really the only way through.”
