My son was born between an anxious pregnancy and a postpartum psychotic break. Holding him in my arms for the first time, I felt numb. Emptied.
It was as though I was observing myself from my previous life looking on as an outsider. Unsettling, yes, but so much of birth is. There were stitches and visitors and midwives and scales.
And a perfect tiny stranger who fed and cried and didn’t sleep. Beeston with her son Henry. She began to experience symptoms of post-natal psychosis a few days after his birth.
I’d been his mother, bewildered, leaking, reeling (as new mothers so often are) for just four days when the psychotic symptoms began to appear. I became paranoid. Alert.
Awake. I was sure that child protective services (where I had previously worked as a frontline caseworker and psychologist) were coming to remove him from my care. I was under surveillance.
I knew this. I knew it in my bones and in my fatigue-battered brain because I had once taken babies into care myself. I began to hallucinate.
I believed I was dead. I wondered if my baby was mine. Postpartum psychosis is rare – affecting one to two in every 1000 mothers.
How I felt post-birth, though, in those seconds after my baby was born is far more common and also taboo. But it shouldn’t be. So let me take you back there, to that space.
My newborn is placed on my chest, his little heart is beating against mine. He is bigger, heavier than I expected. For months, I have been told he was “measuring small”.
But.