42 | Kristy
“Aaron went back to work and I couldn’t handle it. I couldn’t handle being alone and I couldn’t handle the quiet and the stillness. So I started a roster of my family driving me up to my sister’s. And I lived at my sister’s 80% of the time for the first six to eight months. Aaron had to commute if he wanted to see Charlie... I just didn’t want to be alone. It was really, really hard. Every single day that Aaron went to work, I cried. Every single day, I just bawled my eyes out and I was like, ‘What is wrong with me? I’ve wanted this child. What’s wrong?’”
Whenever Kristy struggled with anxiety or depression in the past, she coped by keeping herself busy. Even when she endured years and years of IVF and ICSI, she coped by keeping herself busy. But when she experienced birth trauma and a sudden decline in her mental health during postpartum, none of her previous coping mechanisms could be relied on.
Instead of throwing herself into exercising three times a day, working on weekends, starting projects, learning a new skill, doing puzzles, building Lego, or reading, Kristy was confronted by the stillness of motherhood. Then, after nine months of depression, culminating in suicidal ideation, Kristy went to her GP for help, where she was confronted by an unexpected, but enlightening, diagnosis: ADHD.
In this heartfelt and insightful episode, Kristy shares the many ways she is managing her ADHD and mental health in motherhood, while reflecting on the lessons she has learnt along her journey and celebrating all the friends who have helped her every step of the way.
If you’re an older mum, if you’re a mum who has undergone fertility treatments, if you’re a mum with a history of anxiety or depression, if you’re a mum who is navigating ADHD in motherhood, or if you’re just an all-round awesome human being, then this episode is for you.
Kristy’s story begins long before postpartum and pregnancy, even before conception.
“So we had a long journey of deciding to even have a child. That was all me, not my husband. He wanted to have children in our 20s, and I wasn't ready.”
When she did feel ready around her 30th birthday, unfortunately a death by suicide in the family put Kristy’s plans on hold.
“We were going to start trying then for a child, and then I couldn't obviously cope with something so horrendous happening to my family and my mum having to deal with that. So we put it off again, which is probably one of my biggest regrets, not getting checked earlier.”
“And then we tried for a good six months or more to have a child the conventional, natural way. And then when I spoke to my GP, he said, ‘look, if you were in your 20s, I'd say keep trying, but because you're in your 30s, let's get a referral. It's going to take you six months to get on the list, so just keep trying.’”
“So we did that, got on the list and had to wait six months to even see the specialist, which is another thing, which is really difficult. And we had to go private because it would have been a longer wait public. And due to my age, I couldn't hold off any longer.”
“And then I had to go through all the tests for endo, adenomyosis, fibroids, all those sorts of things. I ticked every single box. Lucky me, I had everything! And then I had to have surgery for that. But luckily, they only had to remove the fibroids. The endometriosis was old scarring, so it wasn't impacting fertility because it was too old. It was from when I was a teenager.”
“Then I had to wait three months for that to heal, and then we could start the IVF journey.”
“We did one round, and they realised that it was also my husband, Aaron, and not just my low egg count and the maturity of my eggs - there was issues with those as well.”
“Then we had to do ICSI [Intra-Cytoplasmic Sperm Injection] on top of that.“
“IVF just isn't what we see. There's more to it. There's IVF and there's ICSI, and there's two different steps. They're two different things. So I think people don't talk about ICSI enough because that's from the male infertility side, and then IVF is more from the female side of it.”
“I think we had a total of six rounds of IVF, I think, six or seven, I had to do all of the injections, all of this internal scans, all of the blood tests, another operation, and I had to be awake for mine, to retrieve eggs. Then we had to do the ICSI part, which is putting the one good sperm into the egg. That's what the scientists had to do. Sometimes we didn't have one good sperm, and we didn't have a matching good egg.”
“Then we would wait five days to see if we had an embryo, and we never got a good grade of an embryo. But they would still put it in because we'd have one that made it every time, and they'd put it in, and it would just fail. Then I would have to go again.”
“Then they'd use a different types of needles, different types of medication, internal creams, as well as the injections. Then it was just the same process: internal scans, blood tests, another needle, and then going in again for the operation, waiting the five days, looking at the app constantly, trying to see updates for the embryo, which I knew that it only happened on day one, three, and five, but I still looked every single day, constantly.”
“And then I think we had two rounds that we didn't even finish.”
“So one of them, my levels were too high, and I could have ended up in hospital for hyperstimulation, so fluid in your abdomen and uterus, and it's really dangerous. I think it was like two days before I was supposed to have the operation. We had to just stop and just go through the withdrawal of the drugs and stuff.”
“And then our last and final rounds, we got to day five and had three embryos, which, we just couldn't believe!”
“We just had no expectation by this point because we were years in. And even our specialist was like, “I don't have any answers anymore. He offered for us to go with somebody else. He was really down on himself, I think he was blaming himself because he's like, ‘I don't understand why it's not working.’ Then we got the three!”
“I had hyperstimulation, so they couldn't transfer the embryo. They couldn't transfer Charlie. He [the specialist] was as upset as I was about it, which was really sweet because he said it was the best grade we'd ever gotten, and he was really excited to do it.”
“I had to wait another two months. Then I still had fluid after two months, but it wasn't at a dangerous level. They transferred who we now know as Charlie in. It's quite surreal that we've seen her from an embryo. Not many people… I think that that's probably the positive out of the whole thing. The negative is, Aaron didn't get to be there for her to be transferred because it was COVID, but it was still really exciting to see. Her embryo was up on this big screen. And then you can watch on a little monitor them putting her in, which is so weird when you talk about it. But now that we've got her, now we're two and a half years in, it's quite exciting.”
“It was very taxing.”
“Physically it was really hard for me because I had to give up on the gym. I had to give up running. I had to give up weights. All I could do was go walking and ride on a stationary bike. Then my husband, Aaron, had to give up junk food and all this stuff because we were like, ‘Okay, it's not working. Let's do everything!’ So I gave up intensity workouts, hiking, everything. And then he gave up and limited his coffee and I made him eat asparagus and dark chocolate, all the old wives’ tales, I made him do everything. And then that's when we got the good embryo. So something within that worked.”
“I just kept busy and exhausted myself. So by the time I had time to sit, I was too tired to think.”
“I threw myself into online teaching where I'd spend the weekends recording myself for lessons. Then kids that missed my live session had a recording session, and I did all of this extra stuff for my year 12s and stuff that I would have done anyway, but I just went more into it.”
“I was reading a lot and I had puzzles going and Lego going and just everything, just constantly! I taught myself to bake.”
“I think looking back, I just shut my brain off, which I don't recommend.”
“They offered counsellors and things, and I tried to talk to a counsellor through the specialist, and I just wasn't in the mindset to talk to somebody about it.”
“I think I was just angry. That's what I put it down to. The anger drove me to keep going. If something makes me angry, I'm more determined to prove that person or that event wrong. It's just that oppositional aspect of my personality that's probably saved us, and also Aaron not giving up and always remaining really positive, I think was quite helpful.”
“I think the best thing that we ever did is we didn't tell anyone we were doing it. I didn't need people asking me what stuff I'm up to, when I'm getting an embryo transfer, if I got a positive test.”
“I told a friend that lives in Melbourne, and she was a great support, and she had time to listen, and she had time to be a support person, and she never asked any questions, and I never had to tell her not to ask questions. She's the first person we told when we got a positive test result because there was no expectation from her beyond, ‘Are you okay? What can I do?’ Then her just sending me a ridiculous amount of memes and jokes. It was just things to get me through where she knew I had this dark sense of humour.”
“Aaron picked one person, I picked one person, and they were the only people that we told. I think that if we had told family, my mental health would have suffered more.”
“I don’t remember a time where I wasn’t anxious... I think I just constantly ignored it and constantly kept myself busy and occupied and then just had these bouts of hating the world and being quite angry, quite aggressive, picking fights...”
“I've had it my entire life. I don't remember a time where I wasn't anxious, where I wasn't worried, where I wasn't having these ups and downs - not extremes, but just bouts of depression and lethargy and not wanting to do anything or have no motivation and then being stressed and worried about silly things.”
“When I was a teenager, I had a job and every half hour before my shift, I'd vomit. Then if I was going to parties or concerts or anything like that, sometimes I didn't end up going to them because I would spend the whole day before vomiting. I think that that was my body's way of dealing with anxiety.”
“I got diagnosed with depression when I was 15 or 16 or something. My family just sent me to the school counsellor. Then I just stopped seeing them during the HSC because it was the HSC and I didn't have time. Then I just put everything into my HSC and didn't have time to think or do anything. Then I just went to uni and found friends and stuff and was still anxious, but I didn't know that it was anxiety. I didn't know what it was.”
“I think I just constantly ignored it and constantly kept myself busy and occupied and then just had these bouts of hating the world and being quite angry, quite aggressive, picking fights with my boyfriend, which is now my husband, Aaron. Having a lot of arguments, just stuff like that.”
“I just think, looking back now, it was all interconnected, but I didn't know what it was. I didn't know that people's brains didn't work like that. I didn't know that people didn't feel anxiety when they were watching TV shows. I will get anxiety for a character, and I have to turn the show off, or I have to Google what happens next to be able to keep watching it. If I'm not happy with it, I just stop watching it.”
“I started opening up and talking to Aaron more, and he's like, ‘People don't think like that.’ I was like, ‘No, everyone thinks like that. You're the weird one.’ I was just like, ‘Oh, no, no,’ and just kept writing it off.”
“I was just so focused on my career and keeping busy. I'd achieve a goal in my career and then want to go to the next goal. It was the same with my fitness. I'd achieve a goal, and then I'd move the goal post. I just constantly moved it and moved it and moved it and was like, ‘I'm fine. I'm fine.’”
“Then everything fell apart, very, very quickly, very embarrassingly, when I was 28-29.”
“I got a job as a head teacher in Sydney, and I lasted a day. And I completely fell apart, and I spent, I would say, a good six months on the lounge, and I didn't do anything. I was too afraid to even drive myself anywhere.”
“And then I threw myself into the gym. Again. I went 2-3 times a day to the gym, and I would walk to the gym. Then I would do cardio, and then I would go back in the afternoon, and I'd do weights with my friend, and then she would leave, and then I'd jump on the bike. And then I would go home and go to bed because I'd be so physically exhausted, I couldn't think.”
“And that's when my doctor gave me some medication, my GP.”
“He's been my doctor since I was born. He delivered me. He's still my doctor. He’s Charlie's doctor. And I cannot tell you the amount of times that man saved my life mental health-wise, from 12 to 38-39.”
“He made me come and see him once a week, every week for about 14 months. He made me physically come in, and he would not let me book any other type of appointment. I had to go in, and he wouldn't charge me because I didn't have a job, because I threw my job in. I did not work, and I did not do anything for a year.”
“I had to step down from a head teacher position back to a teacher. And then I had to wait two years to be transferred back to a local school in Wollongong, which is what I did. And that's probably the best thing that ever happened out of it was that I realised I don't want to be supervising people. I just want to teach, and I'm better without having that career progression.”
“I switched from teaching history to English, which was a good clean slate for me to separate those two worlds where I was doing and achieving all these career goals in HSIE. Moving over to English has slowed me down because there's not as much content, but there's more skills. I'm very good at teaching kids how to write and think for themselves and be critical thinkers, and that's made me slow down.”
“I think out of everything that happened with that side of things, that was the best thing for me because I had to slow down. I wasn't going to slow down until I hit a brick wall and fell apart. And that's just something that's happened every 10 years of my life. So I fell apart when I was 15, fell apart in my 20s, and then I fell apart when I had Charlie.”
“It's just this cycle where my brain finally goes, ‘no, you're not doing anymore. You're not physically exhausting yourself.’”
“Every school holidays, I did something every single day. I did not have a home day. I did not stay home. I didn't sit still. And if I was at home, my brain was going, ‘you're unproductive, you're lazy, you need to do something. Get up, get out of the house. It doesn't matter if it's raining. Put a jacket on, go outside, do this, clean the house. Do that. Read this book.’ Just this cycle. ‘Go up to your sister's. Help your sister out with the kids. Drive up there.’ It's like a three and a half hour drive to my sister's, and I would just do it by myself.”
“I think it was just that constant mental health issues where I didn't know any different until I started talking to people and opening up to my friends, and that took a long time.”
“I stopped [medication] when I fell pregnant with Charlie because I felt like I didn't need it. I was like, ‘Oh, I'm sleeping really well. I'm doing great.’ I was sleeping really well because I was exhausted because my iron was so low that I ended up having to go to hospital to get a transfusion, and that's why I was so tired and sleeping so well!”
“Looking back, I shouldn't have gone off it. It wasn't sleeping better. I was just my body was like, ‘No.’ I was swimming every day pregnant, and I wasn't eating much because I was so sick. So my iron just dropped, and I've always had low iron. But that slowed me down after that. But I still didn't take my medication again until postpartum.”
“Because there’s ‘anxiety’ on your chart, people just write you off as it being medical anxiety... I got to hold her, and we got a couple of photos, the typical c-section photos. And then I was like, ‘get her off me, get her off me, get her off me, get her off me,’ and I just screamed, ‘Get her off me.”
At 38 weeks pregnant, Kristy was scheduled to have a c-section “because Charlie is Charlie. It makes sense now!”
“My hips didn't expand at all. My body was just like, ‘No, this is not happening.’ Her feet were all the way up in my ribs. This girl was not moving. We had to go in a full plan c-section at 38 weeks because she was too big. She was running out of space. And I had had an angry uterus since 20 weeks, but it was just constant pain. That's the only way they could explain it. They're like, ‘It's not contractions, it's your uterus. It doesn't like being a uterus. It's just angry. It's causing you pain.’”
“So they were just like, ‘let's just do this now. There's no point waiting any longer.’”
“Obviously, because I have anxiety and depression, my anxiety went through the roof. It's another surgery, right? You think, ‘oh, I'm going to be fine. I'm an ace at surgeries now. I can be awake for another surgery. I've done this many surgeries.’ And then, yeah, I think that I just wasn't prepared, and then I just wasn't listened to.”
“I just thought it was going to be really straightforward, which was quite naive, I think. But then looking back again, if someone had listened to what I said before we went in, I don't think it would have been as traumatic for me and for Aaron.”
“I had been quite vocal about the fact that I get very sick under anaesthesia. I get very unwell very quickly, even waking up from it. My whole life! I said to them ‘when I was five, I didn't wake up. They couldn't wake me up for hours and hours. My grandfather died from anaesthesia. I have this allergy, I have this allergy.’ I told them everything!”
“And the anaesthesiologist was just a bit dismissive. I think he thought that I was just, I don't know, talking shit or just because there's ‘anxiety’ on your chart, people just write you off as it being medical anxiety.”
“They got Charlie out and I saw her. And then I was like, I just don't feel well. I feel really dizzy. Everything's blurry. I don't feel well.”
“And he was like, ‘Oh, it's fine. You're fine. And then he's like, Oh, just put more of this in.’”
“I got to hold her, and we got a couple of photos, the typical c-section photos. And then I was like, ‘get her off me, get her off me, get her off me, get her off me,' and I just screamed, 'Get her off me.”
“So Aaron grabbed her and he didn't know what to do. I had said before we went into surgery, ‘Stay with her. If I get sick, stay with Charlie. Don't leave her alone. Don't leave her with anybody.’”
“And then the vomiting started, and it was horrendous, and it didn't stop.”
“I felt like it went for hours. I don't know how long it went for. I remember my doctor screaming at the guy, screaming at him, ‘What have you done? What did you do?’ And apparently they were friends, and she'd worked with him for years. ‘What have you done? What have you done? I can't close her up. What have you done? I can't put anything back in.’”
“And I couldn't speak. I couldn't advocate for myself. I couldn't do anything. I remember vomiting, and vomiting, and vomiting, and vomiting, and vomiting, and vomiting on the floor, vomiting everywhere, and then being alone, and then hearing the doctor screaming, hearing her assistant screaming. It wasn't a yell, it was a scream.”
“I couldn't open my eyes, but I could hear everything.”
“I couldn't say anything, and I couldn't talk. I think that was It was a scary bit. I couldn't talk, but I could hear everything. I remember her just constantly talking about, ‘What am I supposed to do? Her stomach keeps contracting. I can't close her up. We can't do anything.’”
“Then it just went quiet, and then they must have stitched me up within that point. Then I think it was hours, and then I woke up in recovery by myself.”
“I now know that Aaron was there with Charlie, and she was screaming, and so they kicked him out. They made him go up to our room by himself, and no one gave him a bottle or anything, which is we're in the private system, so there's bottles available, there's formula available. He had to go find it himself with a newborn as a first-time dad and worried by his wife, no one came to speak to him. He didn't know where I was.”
“Then as I'm waking up, a midwife was grabbing my leg and shaking my leg, ‘Wake up, wake up. I've got things to do. I've got things to do,’ and complaining to other midwives that I wouldn't wake up, and she'd been assigned to me, and she had other things to do, and blah, blah, blah.”
“She's like, ‘Just wake up, just wake up.’ I couldn't open my eyes, and I could hear everything she was saying. I could hear the frustration in her voice. Then when I finally opened my eyes, my speech was slurred, and I was trying to say, ‘I couldn't open my eyes.’ Then she's like, ‘Good, now I can take you to your room.’”
“I was not conscious. I should not have been taken up to my room and unsupervised. Then she was cranky because she didn't know what room I was in. She couldn't ask me because I couldn't talk. I managed to get the room number out to her, and then they just put me in my room with Aaron.”
“Yeah, I don't remember much. He just put Charlie next to me and tried to take photos and stuff. I was awake in the photos, but I don't remember anything.”
“I couldn't change her or feed her or help him for 24-30 hours, I suppose. My doctor came in constantly apologising, and I said it was ‘fine’, but I wish the apology came 10 days later where I could comprehend things a bit more.”
“Yeah, so it was quite traumatic for me. I didn't think it was at the time.”
“I'm just angry that no one listened, and I'm angry that my obstetrician wasn't there when that conversation took place before we went in because I think that it would have been a different story because I don't think she would have just allowed him to just choose the drugs, because I had said, ‘You should look at the notes from my IVF, ICSI doctor, because he'll tell you what he used because he's the first doctor and surgeon that I've had in my entire life that hasn't made me vomit after surgery. Obviously, whatever him and all his other doctors did and nurses did, worked,’ but he just didn't look at them, and it's all the one hospital.”
“Aaron went back to work and I couldn’t handle it. I couldn’t handle being alone and I couldn’t handle the quiet and the stillness...”
“I got home and I made my mum move in, but we're not that type of family. So we're not lovey-dovey. We're not close, we're not affectionate. My mum doesn't like to be touched, to be hugged. We don't talk about things that are emotional. All I said to her was, ‘Don't leave me. Don't leave this house. Stay.’”
“She stayed for 10 days, and then Aaron had eight weeks off, and I went back to my obstetrician after four weeks. I had an infection, and I was still bleeding because there was just pockets of blood still in my uterus that just weren't leaving. I had to take medication for that, and that triggered everything.”
“I had an allergic reaction to it, and it really severely affected my mental health to the point where I was pacing up and down my street at three o'clock in the morning.”
“Aaron had to take me in to the public hospital, and they gave me Valium, and I was put on the CAMHS list to have a mental health nurse that helped postpartum mums. Then I went to my GP again and my obstetrician again. And they both said, ‘you need to go back on your medication, your anxiety medication.’”
“So I went back on that and Aaron went back to work and I couldn't handle it.”
“I couldn't handle being alone and I couldn't handle the quiet and the stillness. So I started a roster of my family driving me up to my sister's. And I lived at my sister's 80% of the time for the first six-eight months.”
“Aaron had to commute if he wanted to see Charlie. And he would drive me up there. Sometimes it was his week to drive me up. Sometimes it was my dad's, and they took turns. My mum couldn't because she was working. And they just took turns, driving me up every single week to my sister's. My poor sister. She had her two own kids. She didn't need me there, but I just wanted company during the day, and I didn't ask her to do anything. I just wanted to be around another human that was an adult, and I couldn't explain that to people.”
“Then when I wasn't at my sister's, I was here, and my dad and mum were here, or Aaron was here, or my best friend was here, and I just didn't want to be alone.”
“It was really, really hard. Every single day that Aaron went to work, I cried. Every single day, I just bawled my eyes out and I was like, ‘What the fuck is wrong with me?’ Sorry. I was like, ‘What is wrong with me? I've wanted this child. What's wrong?’”
“Because one of my friends was in the same position as me, we couldn't help each other. We would go for walks and stuff and just wouldn't talk because we couldn't help each other. We both lost so much weight because we just weren't eating, we weren't sleeping.”
“I think what saved my life was that I knew I had to bottle feed. I'm really grateful that my obstetrician agreed when I was pregnant that I should not be breastfeeding. Just the long term history of just these ups and downs and these breakdowns and stuff that I was quite forward with her about. She's like, ‘Look, if you want to do it, I would suggest doing half-half because you need to sleep because otherwise we're going to lose you. You need to sleep. You need to eat.’”
“I became quite suicidal… The only thing that kept me here was me thinking about what my grandma did and how angry I was at her because I had to pick up the pieces for everybody.”
“Most career-driven women that constantly fall apart every 5-10 years find out they have ADHD once they’ve had their first child because the world’s forcing them to stop and to sit still...”
“My GP was on holidays, and Aaron rang the GP office, and there was a new female GP. We booked in and I went to her, and she spent, I reckon, an hour with me and Charlie.”
“She could see that we had a bond, but it wasn't your typical bond. She's like, ‘You want to take care of her, and you will look after her when she screams. But it's different.’ She could see it.”
“The more I started talking, I was ticking all these boxes. She didn't want to push me, but she said, ‘I think you need to see a psychiatrist, and there's only so much we can do here.’”
“She's like, ‘It's not your hormones anymore. Charlie's nine months old. You've done all the right things. You're in swimming lessons. You're going to this baby sensory class. You walk every day, and you still are angry and sad and don't feel good. You're not eating. There's something else.’”
“Then I started talking about my childhood and all this stuff. She's like, ‘Okay, I'm going to float something by you. Don't get offended. I think you have ADHD.’”
“I was like, ‘What? No! I'm not hyperactive.’”
“She's like, ‘How many coffees do you have a day?’ I was like, ‘Four.’”
“She's like, ‘Does your brain shut off when you're lying down and resting?’ I was like, ‘I don't rest. I got too much stuff to do.’”
“Then she's like, ‘How many times a day did you go to the gym and work full-time?’”
“‘Two to three. Two times a day, and I'd work full-time. When I wasn't working full-time, three times.’”
“‘Did you go on the weekend?’”
“‘Yeah, of course I did! Every day.’ I was the top person in the gym for the number of times I went each month, every single month.”
“Then I was talking about my mind being busy and being a busy bee and not being able to focus at school and being quite bored and said that I didn't start focusing at school until halfway through year 11. I thought it was because I went to school early and I wasn't ready for school and I was behind everybody else and that I was academically behind, even though I was coming first in all my subjects, I still thought I was behind.”
“She's like, ‘I think you have ADHD’. Then she talked through what it actually is because I was so naive, even as a teacher, thinking that it was just hyperactivity and that kids didn't pay attention because they were hyperactive, not because they were inattentive. She's like, ‘I think you have both.’”
“Something in my brain clicked.”
“I was like, ‘Oh, my God. I knew that it wasn't just depression and anxiety.’”
“She said, ‘Yes, this is what happens to women. It's an epidemic at the moment.’ She said most career-driven women that constantly fall apart every 5-10 years find out they have ADHD once they've had their first child because the world's forcing them to stop and to sit still and they can't run on the treadmill for hours at the time, and they can't do a different activity every single day of the holidays of their work and speed read books.”
“Things started to be better for quite a while after that. I am very fortunate that a very good friend of mine who I credit for saving me, had a friend whose husband works at the mental health hospital who finished his holidays early and called me at seven o'clock in the morning one day for an appointment when he was still at home and asked me to come in his lunch break to assess me and allowed me to bring my child in.”
“Instead of waiting a year to see him, it was four months or something, I think, between my GP and being diagnosed. Then once I was diagnosed, I got medication and I just felt a bit calmer and felt like I could do things with Charlie and be present and not feel like I was missing this, missing that. Do it and just sit. Not sit still, but just sit and be present and not zone in and out and not be angry.”
“I think the huge thing for me is that anger is just almost gone. I was angry my whole life, all the time. I do have anxiety and depression. I definitely do. But it's a comorbidity of ADHD.”
“I think that not a lot of women know that, and that's a detriment to us when we have our first child, if we haven't been diagnosed.”
“With the birth trauma, it was still going to be a terrible postpartum. But I think if I’d had the years of tools, maybe it wouldn’t have been as bad. Maybe. I don’t know...”
Kristy has since found out that she did actually receive an ADHD diagnosis as a child, which is something she is still processing and grieving.
“I should have known that I had ADHD. I was diagnosed at six. There's public health records of that diagnosis at the child health clinic, and I have constantly asked, when I was in my 20s and teens, why I was always taken to all these tests throughout primary school. I remember the tests, and I remember hating them, and I remember guessing things because I just couldn't be bothered, and I was just annoyed.”
“They were tests for ADHD and autism. I was getting in a lot of trouble at school by this one teacher because I couldn't pay attention because he'd talk for bloody hours on end about the Titanic. I'm like, What eight-year-old is going to listen to that anyway? But apparently, everybody but me!”
“My family did know. My sister found some things when we were in our 20s in my parents' files, but my mum told her it was a wrong diagnosis because they were like, ‘Look how good she is at school. She won all these awards. She's got three degrees, blah, blah, blah.’”
“I didn't know.”
“I think with the birth trauma, it was still going to be a terrible postpartum. But I think if I'd had the years of tools, maybe it wouldn't have been as bad. Maybe. I don't know.”
“I think it would have helped my husband a lot more than me. It really damaged his career. I think if he could have explained things to his boss because we didn't have a diagnosis and stuff like that, it was really hard. He couldn't take the leave, carer's leave. If I'd had that diagnosis, he could have taken an extended carer's leave from his job and it not affect his career. I think that's really hard for me. He's okay now in his career. He's changed departments. Yeah, but he's starting from a lower rank that I think that they would have been more forgiving.”
“I think that he would have had the tools to help me because we've been together since we were 18. He would have learned along the way. He has in his own way, you think about things that he does for me, when I'm baking, and he'll be like, ‘Don't forget your cake,’ and I'll go and open the oven and get my cake out before it burns. Things like that, basic things that people remember to do. Now in our new house, he's installed an oven that has a timer on it, but I won't put the timer on. He's learned to just come and put the timer on and read the box or read the instructions that I have on my phone and you just, bless him.”
“I think he could have had those skills and that might have helped him. He did it in his own way postpartum. He bought a whiteboard and he made a schedule, a daily schedule for me. Because my life was scheduled as a teacher, he did the same thing for my day. And I think that helped. And he'd done all this research and all these things once he found out I had the diagnosis with ADHD. And I think that would have helped both of us, which makes me a bit sad.”
“I just feel like I lost that first year with her, which sucks.”
It’s understandable that Kristy feels this way. ADHD is an independent risk factor for postpartum depression and anxiety and the prevalence of postpartum depression and anxiety is five times higher* for women with ADHD than women with no ADHD diagnosis - a statistic we discuss during our conversation.
“Yeah, I didn't know that.”
“It is helpful because I would like to tell my sister that, too, because she's quite hard on herself about her daughter. It'd be nice to tell her that because I think she could forgive herself because I feel like she's really hard on herself as well about that first year with my niece. And then her first year with my nephew as well was quite hard. But I think, yeah, it would be nice to tell her that, too. I think she would feel a little bit better about it.”
“I think I would have had things in place beforehand. It still would have been hard. Like I said to you, I would have been more prepared, mentally or not even mentally myself, probably preparing other people to rally around me and support and set myself up.”
“Being able to tell myself that the statistics and the evidence is: it's going to affect me, if it does, more than my friends.”
*Reference:
Ruta Nonacs, MD PhD. (2023, Oct 10). “ADHD as a risk factor for postpartum depression and Anxiety.” The Massachusetts General Hospital Center for Women’s Mental Health. https://womensmentalhealth.org/posts/adhd-as-a-risk-factor-for-pmad/
“I cried because it took 37 years for my brain to be quiet...”
Talking about the management of her ADHD and mental health, Kristy says “I have a really good female psychologist that I see once every two months who specialises in ADHD in women. We're quite lucky down in Wollongong, there's a few now. Quite hard to get into, but I did get in!”
“I have a really great psychiatrist. We started with short-acting medication where I had to take three a day. But telling an ADHD person to remember to take a pill three times a day - look, it didn't happen! Some days I'd remember to take it, but three times a day was good at first.”
“I'm taking it in conjunction with depression medication. I didn't know that depression and anxiety medication will only work for about six months for people with ADHD that's undiagnosed and unmedicated, and then it stops working. So the only way for depression and anxiety medication to work for someone with ADHD is for them to be medicated with ADHD medication. Otherwise, it does not work.”
“So for the first time in my life, taking those medications together has made everything easier. I'm not going to say it's easy. Having ADHD and parenting is quite difficult, and mental health problems, and anxiety, and all these sorts of things. And I think that that journey has made it a lot easier being medicated, and I would not have recovered without medication.”
“It's really weird, because the first time I really clicked that the medication was all working together, I was sitting down and I was like, My brain is really quiet. I was by myself. Charlie was at school. I must have been in school holidays because I was back at work. I messaged one of my friends, my cousin, and she was like, ‘That's what people's brains are like all the time. Are you okay?’”
“She had been helping me a lot as well. She already had kids, I leaned on her quite a bit as well. She said, ‘No, Kristy, that's what people's brains are supposed to feel like and sound like. You can switch your brain off and your brain can be quiet and your brain can focus on one thing and you can watch a TV show and put your phone down.’”
“I cried because it took 37 years for my brain to be quiet.”
“I don't think that the despair around that will ever go away. I think that that's the part of it that I can't forgive for my parents. I’m not angry or anything. I don't hold it against them, it was the '90s.”
“Just the grieving process of it in conjunction with the despair has actually helped because the despair has gone away. Not completely. It comes back about a week before my period, and then I do a deep dive of hating the world for two days, and then I'm okay. I think I can cope with that, too, my periods. I'm not suicidal. It's like the ideations are there, but they're humming instead of screaming. I think that that's really good, too.”
“I'm not avoiding eating, and I'm not binge eating anymore. It was either one or the other. I wouldn't eat or I to binge eat. There was no in between. I've got that now because I've never had that. I'm either obsessive or always bingeing. Just everything's a bit more balanced.”
“Some people are anti-medication, and my brain chemistry doesn't allow that. I will just spiral, and I know I will because I have my entire life. I've always eaten healthy. I've always exercised, I've always kept myself busy, I've always had projects going, and none of it filled that despair and busyness. I did everything right with ADHD without actually knowing what I was doing. I had a psychologist before I had Charlie, and nothing worked.”
“So I think I have to have all of these things in place co-existing for it to work. And if I don't, it doesn't work.”
“I wouldn't say the despair is gone. I don't think it will ever will. But I just hope that if Charlie has inherited this from me and from my side of the family, that she doesn't get the anxiety and depression along with it.”
“I think that that's probably the only thing that plays on my mind more than anything now. That despair side of it is worried about her, and if I've cursed her with my brain.”
“[My sister] said that we're fixing our childhood through our kids, and it will become healing for us because we can support them. I think that's something that's really positive that's come out of it all is that her kids are benefiting from what we've gone through, and they're being parented with compassion and care and understanding from within their small family and then our extended family. They don't have people that don't understand them in their extended family as well.”
“I think that that's really going to help them, help my nephew and my niece, and maybe Charlie, and my other niece. There's just that where I think that Charlie probably will have it because all the kids do so far. So we just think, well, the kids are supported. So we have to be a bit easier on ourselves. My sister always says that to me. I think that that's really good. She really, really helped with everything over the last two and a half years and us going through it at a similar time, and then her going through it with her kids. She's just like, ‘we're changing this cycle.’ And these kids are going to come through schooling with different teachers as well. It's not just different family members. It's a different way society seeing neurodivergence.”
“And everyone always talks about the TikTok stuff, but it's educating a lot of people about neurodivergence and learning difficulties and autism and all of these things that no one really spoke about before. And I think that's going to really benefit all the kids.”
“I think it's not fair that we have this generation of women that are still suffering and still have no idea and still think there's something wrong with them and are really struggling postpartum and are looking at their friends and thinking, ‘Why am I not like that?’”
“I'm grateful that my best friends that had kids at the same time are realistic because I think if they weren't, my mental health would have been worse. It's just like, ‘Oh, my God, this is shit. This is so hard. I'm struggling with this. I'm struggling with that. I am not enjoying maternity leave.’ Someone saying that to another mum can make such a huge huge difference. And then you've got mums with ADHD on top of that, that are going through postpartum, and we really need people to speak out and talk about it a lot more.”
“I have this thing where I close things off in my brain and shut the door. But I have some very good friends, I think I’m very lucky, just talking to them has been really good...”
To help process her birth trauma, Kristy credits her friendships for helping her through that and for normalising the challenges of motherhood.
“I don't really talk about it too much with my psychologist. We've done bits and pieces of it. I have this thing where I close things off in my brain and shut the door. But I have some very good friends, I think I'm very lucky, just talking to them has been really good.”
“I have some friends with older kids, and then I have friends with kids the same age or a little older. And I don't have a friend that had a perfect birth. And I don't have anyone that says, ‘It was so beautiful,’ and they've all said parts of it were hard. And I think that is what helped process it more than anything else.”
“And going to this baby sensory class - it sounds so silly. But my friend from school, I have one friend from school, said ‘You get up every day and you go for a walk. You get out of that house before 12 and you get dressed. I don't care what you do, but one day a week, you're taking her to baby sensory, and I'm going to make you enrol.’ Her daughter was older, and she had a lot of trouble with a traumatic birth. Everyone has a different story. She said, ‘Just go. You don't have to interact with any other mums. You don't have to talk to other mums, but go for Charlie.’ That made me go.”
“I think those sorts of things helped me heal because I met a girl that sat next to me whose daughter didn't sleep and whose spine was fused and who was going in and out of hospital. Then the other girl next to me had a really traumatic birth, and we didn't talk about it, she just said the words. But having her say that and then having my obstetrician say, ‘I'm sorry you had a traumatic birth,’ they're the types of things that healed. It was very slow. It wasn't through a psychologist, it was through social things. And validation.”
“I think going through IVF and ICSI and the birth and then ADHD, anxiety, depression, being open with my friends has been really helpful.”
“I have this really great bond with her now that I feel like is unique. Everyone probably says that, but I think it is unique because I’ve had to try a lot harder than other people to be bonded to my child...”
“Charlie and I can sit and play. Not everyone enjoys playing with kids, and they don't have to… But because I've gone through this and been medicated and things, I found ways to play with her. I got all of this climbing equipment and gym equipment, and we make obstacle courses and run around and do that together.”
“She comes down to the gym with me and she's got these little weights. It's really cute. She's like, ‘Oh, my special weight.’ They're just one kilo dumbbells. She gets on my rower and tries to do it. It's really sweet. Then she'll sit on the box, the Plyo box that I've got, and she'll just have a little snack. Then she tells me what to do. She'll be like, ‘Mum, do that one, do that one.’ That's been really good for us.”
“I'm really into Lego, so I got her Duplo and we build. I found things where my body has been busy, so my mind's been able to connect with her. That's really helped.”
“My mind and body and soul are at peace in the water, and Charlie is exactly the same. We have bonded being in the water, and we're a lot more bonded, I feel, in summer than winter. Now we've got this old house and it's got this huge bath. In winter, we use that as our pool and we go in it.”
“I have this really great bond with her now that I feel like is unique. Everyone probably says that, but I think it is unique because I've had to try a lot harder than other people to be bonded to my child.”
“I think that other mums need to know that it doesn't come instantly for everybody, and it can take two years to bond with your child, and there's nothing wrong with that. You have to be open with your friends about that because you never know somebody else feels exactly the same.”
“You don't have to bond with your child straight away as long as you try to look after them and you try your best ask for help.”
“I think my bond with Charlie and my mental health has really taken a hit, but it's really changed my perspective on life as well.”
“I'm a lot happier. It's actually annoying Aaron because things will happen, like family issues and things like that, and he'll get annoyed. I'm like, ‘Oh, I can't.’ I just compartmentalise it and just don't think about it. Usually, I would harp on it with him, I’m not letting things bother me, and I'm not letting things get me down. I'm saying, Well, ‘that's not important to me.’ Whereas before, everything was important and everything was a drama.”
“And I think that's all to do with my mental health as well, the despair side just pushed all the negativity to the front, and it's weird that that's not there. And I'm not negative - well, everyone's negative, but it's not my whole life anymore, which is really nice.”
“Bouncing back is crap. Bounce forward...”
When Charlie turned one, Kristy shared all the lessons she had learnt throughout her first year postpartum: “Being pregnant is hard and sometimes a bit shit. It doesn't matter how much you plan, nothing will go to plan. Every recovery from any type of birth is different. Planned or elective C-sections don't always go to plan. There is nothing, I repeat, nothing wrong with formula feeding. Ask for help. Being an older parent is different and okay. Bouncing back is crap. Bounce forward. You don't have to join a mother's group, but join something. Every journey is different, but that doesn't mean your friends and family won't listen and help. Speak up and get help, recover in your own time, stick with it. It does get better. Not everyone connects with their baby straight away. Be kinder to yourself. You can make your own village. Huggles are the best.” (check out the full post here).
“I wasn't going to post it. Then my friend said that she would have loved to have read that, going through the trenches, especially because she had her first child during COVID. She's like, ‘If that had popped up on my feed, it would have made a difference.’”
“That's why I posted it, because it's so different for everybody. I just wanted to just reflect on how far I’d come, I think, and then how far I'm still travelling as well.”
“I think it just sums everything up for everybody.”
“And I hope that it helps somebody. And even if it doesn't help a mum, it helps their family or the village that they've created themselves to figure out how to help.”
Listen to the full episode:
Episode Sponsor
This episode of Perinatal Stories Australia is proudly sponsored by Mums Matter Psychology—because your mental health matters.
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