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 now he is here, he isn’t small at all, and the weight of him is a shock. Loading I had, as so many new mothers so often do, expected to feel the immediate rush of love at first sight. We are promised this, or if not promised, we expect it.
But where does this idea come from? And why does this prevailing idea of instant love, of instant bonding, differ from the research and what we know of women’s experiences. As many as 40 per cent of first-time and 25 per cent of second-time mothers experience a feeling of “indifference” when holding their baby for the first time, according to a study published back in 1980 and backed up by contemporary research. The same study found that while most mothers developed feelings of affection after a week, others struggled for months after bringing their baby home.
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