Dola Posh has multiple identities: Photographer; woman; Nigerian; mother; Briton. Yet after giving birth, she no longer felt sure who she was. Six days after her daughter was born, she was lying in a bed in an English hospital, in the midst of a covid lockdown.
She worried about how her life had changed and if she would ever again do what she loved - taking pictures. Unable to visit, relatives kept on calling to check up on her and the baby. After a difficult pregnancy, Dola felt under pressure.
Her mother was thousands of miles away in the place she had left two years earlier – Lagos, Nigeria's biggest city. All this put her “brain in a very dark place..
. I thought: ‘I’m me; the baby’s out, I’m still me.’ But no, I wasn’t me any more.
” The loss of identity can be one of the causes of postnatal depression, which disproportionately affects black women. Though she did not recognise it at the time, this was what Dola was suffering from. Once out of hospital, she was almost immediately being bombarded with unsolicited advice.
There was “too much talk, too much control around how I should raise the child. In a way that also affected my mind. It made me feel like I didn’t know what I was doing.
I wasn’t given the chance to be a mother.” There is a matter-of-factness to the way the 33-year-old speaks about the events of 2020. She resists the tears this time, but she has cried – a lot.
One night, worn down from feeling like a zombie, because of a lack of s.
