Welcome to our new series, The Motherhood Diaries – a safe space for you to share your experiences, advice, hopes and heartbreaks. We’ll be hearing from industry experts giving practical advice alongside Capsule readers (You!) sharing your firsthand experiences. We’re looking at everything from fertility, trying to conceive, pregnancy, the fourth trimester, newborns, toddlers, raising children and teenagers and everything in between!
If you have a topic you’d like to discuss, share your thoughts, experience or advice about, drop a line to [email protected].
This week we’re talking about mental health in the fourth trimester and beyond. We hear from a Capsule reader who is in the trenches right now, as well as from therapist Jo Robertson about the pressures of motherhood and how we can help one another out!
Rachel took a Zoom call last night with two of her friends, who were also her workmates before she went on maternity leave in January this year.
She listened to them as they agreed that Lockdown was definitely the right decision but bemoaned the reality of living through it.
“God, I miss proper coffee,” one of them had said. “All I want is sushi. Or a pizza. Or anything I haven’t cooked myself. Or to just be in a café with strangers. To be able to talk to other people.”
It all struck a strange chord with Rachel, because it was precisely something she’d been feeling for, oh, about seven months now.
“My maternity leave has felt like mandatory isolation all year!” says Rachel, who gave birth to her first child in late January.
As a solo mum, she’s found it’s had more than its fair share of challenges.
“I knew going into this that I was going to be a solo mum and I thought about the impact of that,” she tells. “I was in a really lucky position, as a lawyer, to have solid savings under my belt and own my own home, so I don’t have those financial pressures some mothers have, but the emotional toll is huge.”
Rachel has taken a year’s maternity leave but is now considering going back to work earlier. “It’s the little things of being isolated,” she tells. “My daughter has had bad colic, so I haven’t been able to leave the house a lot and I don’t have parents living in the same city as me to help. My mother came up to stay for a fortnight, which was fantastic and meant I could go to café’s, get my haircut and feel like a human, but otherwise I’ve been very housebound.”
She says she’s ended up spending a fortune on UberEats (which she’s sorely missing right now) but besides restaurant meals and flat whites, she also misses the ‘Old Rachel’ – the one who was free, independent, and hugely productive.
“I did some killer hours at my job, so I thought I’d be pretty well set up for this one,” she tells. “I’m used to having to function on a few hours’ sleep and knock out my work, but there’s something very different to working under pressure and fatigue like that, to motherhood. I don’t have the same sense of accomplishment as I used to. I don’t come out of a sleepless night with a report finished, I have a baby who is back to square one by the morning.”
In fact, Rachel says her life now feels so different to her former one, she sometimes doesn’t recognize herself.
“I believe that going back to work would be best for my mental health, but at the same time it’s laced with this fear that I won’t remember how to do it, as well as this tremendous feeling of guilt that I’m failing at being a stay home mother,” she says. “I knew it was going to be hard, I just didn’t envisage it being this hard.”
It’s a sentiment that Auckland therapist Jo Robertson has heard repeated many times over now in her practice, as new mothers adjust to their new role and often struggle with their identity, appearance, and mental health in the process.
There have been few studies into mental health among new mothers, although a 2015 NZ-based study, the New Mothers’ Mental Health Survey, found that 14% of the respondents met the criteria for Post Natal Depression. However, the number of women who experience some degree of anxiety, loss of identity, feelings of loneliness and isolation are far, far higher. And it makes sense after going through such a huge change – both physically and emotionally, as well as the huge lifestyle change!
It’s certainly something Jo Robertson sees new mother’s struggling with and she says the reason behind its high prevelance in NZ is multi-layered and complex.
“One part of it is we don’t do a lot of intergenerational preparation in New Zealand,” she says. “We live pretty much in silos – most of us anyway – so we haven’t observed children being raised by aunties, or cousins, or other members of society. So we haven’t seen close up what those changes are like – those body changes, those relationship changes. I just don’t think we really see a lot of it.”
Worse than that, says Jo, is that what we do see of motherhood – of our friends and peers having children – is now often a very manicured, highlights reel of what it’s all really like.
“What we do often see is either a really groomed version from our friends, or online, thanks to Instagram, or we see the really horrendous side with women wanting to share their absolute horror stories. So I don’t think we’re set up really well for motherhood because we don’t have realistic expectations going into it.”
Historically, she says, we would have come from larger families and watched our mothers have babies and we would have been part of the process of looking after those children younger than us. “Then we would have seen our older sisters give birth – we’d likely have been at their births, so we used to be very emersed in that whole process. It also means we don’t have the support we used to have in those groups – now, if we do have older sisters, they’re likely to be living all over the world, rather than just next door and available to take the baby when we’re at our limits. What do women do now in that situation?”
Another observation that Jo has seen in the parenting world that will be impacting on our mental health, is the fact we’ve swung in two different directions in recent times.
“Number one, we’ve swung in the ‘perfect’ direction,” she says. “We have to do everything right, and be precise and be awesome, and have no screen time, make all our food from scratch, only eat organic and breast feed until they’re two… it’s like everything has to be ‘right’. I actually talked about this phenomenon with my mum, and she was like, ‘Why are you doing all this stuff?? Just give him some bought food from the supermarket! What are you doing?’ She said that in her peer group, in her demographic when they became mothers it was very much ‘just be good enough’. You don’t have to be exceptional, and you definitely don’t have to be exceptional at everything, just be a good enough parent!”
Jo says it’s a pressure that doesn’t really extend to men, but seems to be very prevalent for women – this pressure to be the perfect mother. But at what cost does it come at? It’s completely unachievable to be perfect at every aspect of motherhood and this drive for perfection is only causing harm and distress to new mothers.
The other way in which we’ve swung that Jo sees as doing harm is an enormous focus onto the baby. “There is a completely disproportionate focus on the baby and its welfare, as opposed to the wellbeing of the mother and father,” she says. It’s obvious even from the first days after a woman has given birth, where she’s rarely asked about how she is doing. “Everything is, ‘how is the baby doing?’ not ‘how is mum doing?’ And if Mum is asked if she’s okay, it’s normally just related to pain management, rather than her actual welfare. I think we’ve just got a few things wrong there – in our attempt to do parenting well, we’ve lost our focus.”
Jo says it’s important to check in on your friends who have recently had a baby and to ask quite specific questions to allow a deeper conversation. “At the end of the day, someone is not going to reach out for help if they don’t want it for themselves, but the biggest and best thing we can do is ask questions,” she says. “Ask, ‘do you think your mental health has been impacted by having a baby?’ ‘Have you cried since you had your baby?’ ‘How did you feel about the birth?’ ‘Do you need to talk it out/process it?’ So, ask more specific questions than just, ‘how are you doing?’”
Getting involved and asking questions can help alleviate that isolation and loneliness. Jo’s also seen women coming together physically to help each other during those first few months – or years! “One thing I’ve seen work really well is for mum’s who are on their own during that 5.30pm grind, actually going to the same house and cooking dinner together and feeding the kids and getting through it together! We don’t have to all sit in our own homes and do the exact same thing, alone. Get together!”
And Jo recommends that if you are feeling overwhelmed, to talk it out with someone – let your partner, or mum, or close friend know, as well as your LMC or doctor. “Maybe your situation isn’t severe enough, but also, maybe it could be made a hell of a lot easier by going on medication,” she says. “Often people are hesitant about going onto medication, but most people who do, only go on it for a short amount of time. So, it just gets them through a tough season, then they come off it and they’re more resilient as a result. Sometimes it’s so difficult to even talk about what you’re dealing with, without the help of medication. Sometimes it can get you to the point where you’re actually just able to process it with someone. So, think of it as a short-term solution!”
The other thing she would suggest to new mums who are finding it all a bit hard, is a piece of advice she got, that she hated hearing at the time. “It’s so cliched, and so annoying to hear, but getting outside and going for a walk around the block, really does make a huge difference. Also, get off social media, it’s not only wasting your time and making you go to bed later, but it’s full of those over curated lives that are not doing your self esteem any good!”
