In her new memoir, Bloody Minded, RNZ broadcaster Susie Ferguson takes the reader with her to cover the two war zones where she was a war reporter, but she also takes us inside a different battle ground – her own body. She speaks to Capsule about living with endometriosis, postpartum mental distress and baby loss, and ‘the glorious calm’ that has descended following perimenopause, after years of hormonal chaos.
When Susie Ferguson was putting together her notes for her new memoir, Bloody Minded, she wondered about the expectations someone might have when they pick up a book where the tagline reads: ‘war, womanhood and finding my voice.’
War memoirs written by female journalists are relatively few and far between, because women on the frontline are still drastically outnumbered. “I thought, ‘I wonder if people will pick this up because it says ‘war’ on the front cover,” she tells Capsule. “Maybe they’ll think that the war will be the scary part? But I actually think the centerpiece of the book is my son’s birth and the immediate aftermath. That’s the scary part.”
There is a lot of body horror in Bloody Minded, a book that spans Susie’s life from childhood through to resigning from her high-profile role as co-presenter on RNZ’s Morning Report. And yes, war comes into it a lot – Susie was on the ground in both Afghanistan and Iraq, and her descriptions of both the high-pressure moments and then mundanity, the ‘hurry up and wait’ of war coverage, are riveting to read.
But for so much of the book, the war zone is her own body; through Susie’s unflinching descriptions of living with endometriosis, mental distress, baby loss and the physical and mental trauma that followed the birth of her first child. So much of motherhood, like so much of going into battle, requires a strong stomach. But only one of those roles is ever portrayed as heroic.
The Pain and Gaslighting of Endometriosis
For well over a decade, Susie battled terrible periods – when she headed off to Afghanistan, she needed a combination of medication that totalled 15 pills a day. And then there was the blood – and the logistics that come with bleeding for so much of the month.
But pain is such a nebulous thing to describe – as so many people with endometriosis will experience, it was a battle to be taken seriously. It was only after she gave birth to her son that Susie was able to describe the level of pain she had been dealing with every month since she was a teenager: the pain of being six centimetres dilated while in childbirth, because that was the stage where she had to reach for the gas.
To live with that level of pain for so long is one thing; to be told it’s ‘just a bad period’ is another. Eventually, Susie would undergo a hysterectomy, which would finally allow her to live without pain. But endometriosis comes with other challenges, including an increased risk of miscarriage, and, in the book, Susie writes honestly about the two experiences of baby loss she and her husband, Lee, experienced while they were trying to start a family.
“It’s an echo in our lives – the little ghost in our lives,” she tells Capsule, about the miscarriages she went through before giving birth to her two children. Susie’s first pregnancy was found to have ended at 11 weeks, after she started bleeding and a scan confirmed no heartbeat.
Susie speaks poignantly about how quickly the language of pregnancy changes when you experience a miscarriage. “Immediately [when you’re pregnant] it’s referred to as a baby,” she says. “And it’s a baby until suddenly it’s not a baby. And then it gets downgraded to a cluster of cells, or a blighted ovum, or a fetus.”
“We prepare people for the baby – and then when the baby doesn’t happen, that’s a very hard landing.”
The second miscarriage arrived faster than the first, at the stage where it’s often referred to as a late period. But because Susie and Lee had told friends and family about their first pregnancy early on – when gathered at a New Year’s Eve party – it meant that they had a community around them when the pregnancies ended.
“Coming back from the miscarriages felt like being eaten from the inside out, but telling the story gave me a safety net, a web of women who understood, who sat and cried with me, or held me gently, a salve to quiet the cacophony of my body,” Susie writes in Bloody Minded.
Her third pregnancy went to full term, with her eldest son. However, the birth was a horror story of its own, partly because Susie had such a high pain tolerance due to years of endometriosis, meaning that she was nine centimetres dilated by the time she was examined by a midwife.
The baby boy was healthy, but Susie had a retained placenta – which meant passing fist-sized clots, before bleeding in her bathroom so violently when she was nine days postpartum that the floor looked like “a horror movie.” It also prevented her milk from coming in properly, so her baby lost weight – putting an exhausted, depleted Susie at the mercy of some particularly vicious NHS midwives and their ‘breast is best’ philosophy.
The combination pushed Susie into a period of mental distress, where she was terrified of failing her baby and that he would be taken from her. “It was hard to mentally go back to that time of my life,” Susie says of writing the book. “My son is a lovely young man and our relationship has grown, and… we got there. But there were times when it was very precarious and I didn’t know that we would get there.”
“Women are in an absolute bind with this stuff – because you are meant to go out and get a job and be successful, but also your clock is ticking. And then you have to throw yourself into this completely other world, which you don’t know if you’re going to be any good at, or if you’re going to enjoy it. And you have a one-way ticket – and society judges you very harshly.”
Susie can remember how the importance placed on ‘the first 1000 days’ of a child’s life felt like a relentless amount of pressure to live under. “I just had a sensation of drowning, and not being able to grab onto anything that could help me,” she says. “At the same time, I was thinking, ‘I’m condemning my child to this terrible life… my body’s not capable of feeding him. Every part of me felt like I was letting him down.”
In the same way that Susie’s visceral description of ‘six centimetres dilated’ could feel vindicating to someone who has endured years of painful periods, having someone who has literally been to a war zone write so honestly about the overwhelmingly stressful nature of new motherhood is something of a gift to the reader. But in the same way that Susie walks us through the trenches of having a uterus, Bloody Minded concludes with the surprisingly happy ending after perimenopause.
The Surprising Peace Following Perimenopause
As it is for so many women, the first inkling that Susie was going through perimenopause came from a sudden dive in her mental health – although, she concedes, it was while working on Morning Report when she was getting up at 4am for years on end, which would impact anyone’s sense of wellbeing. But after eventually getting her GP to take her symptoms seriously, Susie started HRT – which she calls “life changing”.
After decades of hormonal chaos, she has finally found an unexpected pot of gold: a hard-won sense of peace.
“Having been pulled around by crazy hormones and crazy periods and pain for so many years, it’s all stopped – and now I have the capacity to do other things. You’re in that world for so long, and you don’t realise you’re in it until the music stops and you come out the other side.” She jokes that she hasn’t yet entered a Zen-like state, but that life now feels more achievable. “I don’t want to jinx it, but it’s almost like a glorious calm has descended.”
Susie Ferguson is the presenter of RNZ’s Saturday Morning. Bloody Minded is out on sale now. Photo credit: Ebony Lamb
