The Best of Times, the Worst of Times Page 5
Obsessional thoughts are very common among people suffering post-natal depression, and it is important to recognise them for what they are: thoughts—unpleasant thoughts certainly, but only thoughts. But it is essential to tell someone about them if they become increasingly troublesome and intrusive because, unless you can be helped to put them into perspective and stop the post-natal depression from deepening, they can be transformed into something far more dreadful and final—and we’ve all heard of these tragedies.
I feel so much for the young mothers today who are experiencing loneliness while they try to come to terms with their new responsibilities. Just look around.You’ll recognise them, I’m sure. From my experience, I know that the smallest gesture can be useful—like helping them get the stroller folded and on to the bus, or helping with the pram on the escalator. Don’t hesitate to say ‘Can I help?’ if you see someone in distress. They may be close to breakdown. You never know.
One rainy winter night, the secondhand car my husband drove came to a permanent stop on the Wakehurst Parkway (and for all I know it is still there). It was a blessing in disguise. We realised how impossible it was to continue living where we were. We moved closer to the city once more, and gradually and spontaneously my depression lifted. I had some old friends close by and through them met new ones.
Luckily, I never experienced this frightening type of depression after the births of Harriet and Claudia. On the contrary, just as before I revelled in the pregnancies and was exhilarated by the births, but this time was able to enjoy breastfeeding and mothering without any anxieties.
I was totally besotted with my daughters but, as most mothers will admit, being with tiny children 24 hours a day is hardly mentally stimulating, although I constantly tried to excite the children’s senses and stimulate their interest in the little world around them. As our flat was only tiny and rather dark, I spent as much time out of doors as possible. I often thought it would have been fun to fit a pedometer to Jessica’s foot after she started to walk, because I had no car and the stroller only fitted one child so she had to walk. And walk she did, all the way up Spit Road to the Junction, down to the park near the Spit Bridge, up and down the steep incline to Balmoral Beach. I’m sure she clocked up more kilometres than any other little girl in her first five years. We spent hours in the municipal library exploring the bookshelves and all my daughters are great readers now, sharing opinions and books among themselves. I wanted them to be observant of the natural world around them, and we often crouched on footpaths watching the ants scurrying endlessly about ant business and I showed Jessica how, no matter how busy, they paused for an instant to greet each other. We loitered around public garden beds, examining petals, smelling different scents and learning colours. We collected frangipani and took them home in the stroller, then threaded them on string and wore them around our necks or heads as flower garlands. Later on, when I was newly single and depressed, the children would fill their school cases with the same sweet-smelling blooms and tip them out at my feet when they arrived home from school.
On rainy days I’d spread a sheet over the floor and set out paints and brushes and sheets of butcher’s paper which I’d pin up with drawing pins on to the bookshelves, or I’d make play dough with flour and salt and Dettol and we’d all make a mess. Sometimes we put on music and danced around the flat waving our arms and clapping our hands until we fell in a heap in the beanbags, totally out of puff.
I worked frantically to make life stimulating for the children, but I suppose it was also an attempt to keep what I thought of as boredom at bay. ‘Only the boring are bored,’ someone told me when I hesitantly admitted my feelings. That knocked me badly. I flagellated myself for being a boring person, with the unfortunate result that I started to mind my words, wondering whether they would come out as boring! I think now that we may sometimes misinterpret being bored for what it really is: the start of a depression. The signs of the one closely mimic the signs of the other, including lack of pleasure in day-to-day activities, fatigue and self-doubt.
Unfortunately for me, gradually my feelings went past anything that could be described simply as boredom and moved to spells of inexplicable depression, bad enough to create an invisible barrier between myself and the world. Suddenly all the colours of the world faded and there was only numbness and enervating fatigue. I returned once more to that disassociative state, where I watched the activities around me in a helpless, detached way. I battled hard to crash through the mental barriers and once more make landfall in the land of normality, but it seemed all volition had been taken from me by some ruthless, unremitting force. I sat on the grass one day watching as the children jumped rope with two young Americans who had joined us for a picnic. Their ceaseless energy astounded me. How could they all keep up so much physical activity for so long? Just watching them exhausted me. I didn’t even have the energy to turn the rope, let alone join in the laughter and banter.
I started to wonder whether I was real. I fought every day to exist—for the children. I could only hang on and hope the terrible days? weeks? months? years? would pass. I never, thank goodness, put the children in danger, but I definitely acted on autopilot much of the time. As I cooked their dinner, changed their clothes, brushed their hair, supervised them in the bath, my mind was elsewhere, comforting itself with rhythms that translated themselves into long-forgotten poems from the primary school days when I was happy, poems with a definite beat like ‘The Inchcape Rock’, ‘The Highwayman’ and ‘The Ancient Mariner’.
I remember times when simple decisions would seem impossible to make. I would go to the supermarket and be unable to decide what to buy—even the staples like milk, butter, eggs or bread. At other times I filled the trolley then just left it in the middle of the aisle and walked away. Understandably my husband found this perplexing and annoying. If the phone rang, I ignored it. If friends rang the doorbell, I would not answer it, too eroded by my loss of confidence to face them. Thus self-imposed isolation became almost complete.
One day I had to get myself and the girls out of the flat. The four walls were suffocating me. The landlord had refused to fix a broken window, a rat had sneaked into the open oven overnight where I had a fruitcake cooling and observed me with such insolent bravado when I discovered it that it was all I could do to stop myself screaming, and the old lady upstairs with the prolapsed uterus had banged on the floor for my attention and help once too often.
We walked to the ferry and swept across the harbour to Circular Quay. I remember crying behind my sunglasses because it all looked so beautiful and I was unable to care. When we disembarked and I had answered the calls for immediate and urgent toilet facilities, I was too weary to do anything but take my little band to the grassy plot just under the railway overpass and dole out the lunch. They squabbled, they wanted to go back to the toilet, the sun was too hot, seagulls snatched greedily at crusts. Just as a train clattered and roared overhead, I was filled with terror. The sky is falling in! The sky is falling in! It’s dreamlike, now, trying to describe it. I was then, and am now, an outsider looking in. The person who was me stood up and joined the cacophony of sound. I opened my mouth and joined the screaming world. Then I lay down on my back beside the children and cried. People stared, I suppose. Some kind woman came and crouched beside me. A policeman strolled over and asked whether I was all right. The children simply sat, looking. I fended off offers of help: ‘I’m all right. I’m all right.’ Finally I gathered our belongings, went back to the ferry wharf and took my little ones home.
I wrote about much of this period of my life only a year or two later in my first published novel, Dance for the Ducks. I had no idea I was describing a depressed person. I had no idea that my behaviour was symptomatic of an illness with a name. Did my readers realise? Only one perspicacious American seemed to pick it up. He wrote to me about the book and said he felt that the only way out for the main character was, ultimately, suicide.
Then there was a break in the clo
uds. We were not managing on the one income but I was not prepared to leave the children when they were still so tiny. Even if I had been, childcare would have taken up any money I earned. I had already tried making odds and ends, like hand puppets, printed t-shirts and calico library bags, and offering them to shops on consignment, but making them was too time-consuming for the modest price I could ask and they rarely sold anyhow. I had to find something that paid better but that I could still do at home.
I decided I would try to write some articles. Write what you know, I had read somewhere. Okay, I would write little pieces about motherhood. I didn’t know how to go about getting my work accepted, so I just wrote a piece and sent it off to the editor of what was then called ‘The Women’s Pages’ of the Sunday Telegraph. To my astonishment, she phoned me and asked me to do a weekly column for her— and amazingly, the pay was good. It was a matter of being in the right place at the right time. (Thirty years later Jessica went to do a writing course at university and this editor was her tutor!)
I was to write columns for various papers on a regular basis for about ten years. There was no email in those days, so the opportunity to get on the bus and take my copy into the newspaper office once a week connected me a little more with the world outside my home and my home duties. It was only a tiny step but, for the first time ever, I wasn’t just a daughter, just a wife, just a mother. I had something that was specifically me. That fragile seed, confidence, began to shoot. Depression receded.
I recall the next four or five years as good years. My mother, most generously, advanced us a loan on a small semi. Despite the ongoing sadness of our non-existent relationship, I will always be grateful and thankful to her for this largesse. Her mother, my beloved grandmother, had left her a small inheritance. My mother saw that we would never be able to save for a deposit, so she offered us her money without interest repayments. It changed our lives and because of it, many years down the track, I was in a position to house my children. If only she could accept how much I appreciate her generosity. I paid back her loan the weekend my marriage ended.
My husband found a job that he really enjoyed, we set about painting our new house and I won a $720 Young Writer’s grant from the Literature Board to write a novel. I used the money to employ a woman to care for the children three hours each morning while I wrote, and at the same time found a new and marvellously entertaining friend. She was a magician’s wife and assistant who had travelled the world, been expelled from Ghana during a coup, gone by longboat to Dayak villages in Borneo, considered Beirut the most beautiful city in the world before the civil war, and had numerous theories about the CIA. She brought me her scrapbooks to pore over and took the children to her home so they could choose rats from her growlery (where she went if she needed to have a bit of a growl) and feed them to her snakes. She came to feature in some of my short stories later on, and added sparkle and enjoyment to my life as well as commonsense, friendship and astrological advice.
When the novel, Dance for the Ducks, was ready for publication, I was escorted here and there by the publicist, a young man in a natty three-piece suit who was clearly affronted at having to accompany a housewife like me on the publicity circuit—and who told me so. When my huge breasts leaked milk, as they were wont to do at inconvenient moments, and I snatched up Claudia (who came along on our jaunts) to feed her, he looked as if he was about to vomit and stalked off to smoke in corners.
Freelance work began to pour in, and the most welcome part of the job was the delicious parcels of books arriving monthly to review for, among others, the National Times, the Sydney Morning Herald and The Australian. All memories of depression seemed to have been erased. I felt my life was at last taking the direction I wanted. Above all, I loved being a mother and, for the first time, believed I was a good one. I worked harder at mothering than at anything else. I watched my children and thought: ‘I will always be here to protect you; I will never let anything hurt you, ever; I love you so much that sometimes it aches’. Thank goodness, we can’t see into the future. How could we bear it?
Jessica: As far as I was concerned, I didn’t have to bear anything at that time. As a little girl, I was blissfully unaware of what Mum was going through. I felt safe and protected and loved in my early childhood, though even then I felt in charge of my younger sisters. I wanted to look after them. My first clear memories as a child are around the age of five. The three of us shared a bedroom that was packed with our clothes, books and toys. Because I was the eldest, I got to sleep in the top bunk. Harriet, being the middle sister, got the bottom bunk. Claudia was in the corner in a cot. She used to peer through the railings to see what we were up to. When we eventually moved into the bigger house, I used to sneak into Harriet and Claudia’s bedroom to go to sleep. I missed being in the same room as my sisters.
Mum was always organising activities to keep us busy and happy. We’d make marzipan mice with licorice tails. At other times there would be bright red and yellow play dough, which Mum had made, to play with. I’d have to make sure Claudia didn’t swallow it because it just looked so bright and tasty. Or we would simply sit around and paint and draw together for hours.
On our birthdays, there were delicious green jelly-filled oranges and milk arrowroot biscuits covered with icing and decorated with Humpty-Dumpty faces made out of jelly beans. The cake would be covered with strawberries and cream. All joyous, idyllic memories full of love and laughter.
So much of my early childhood is lost in the mists of time. I find it difficult to remember a perfectly set out time line from when I was a young girl to when our family started to fall apart. But what I can recall, is that I was happy as a small child. Life felt just as it should, because at the time, I had no idea of Mum’s problems. She never let on that she wasn’t coping. Of course, I was too little to fully understand what was going on. But I never, ever got a feeling, or a sense that things weren’t quite right. Already Mum was getting very good at putting on a brave face as she fought her mood swings and depression.
Chapter 4
I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day.
What hours, O what black hours we have spent This night!
—Gerard Manley Hopkins
Penelope: An earthquake measuring ten on the Richter scale suddenly ripped open my marriage. I do not intend to describe the reasons here, out of respect for my daughters and my ex-husband. What I will do is explain the effect it had. It was so sudden and so shocking, coming without warning, that I went into a state of prolonged, suspended disbelief. One morning I had been gaily taking my youngest, my three-year-old, to her first day at pre-school, introducing myself to the other mothers, excited and optimistic for my baby, happy that I would finally have nine hours a week just to myself. I planned to write a new novel without constant distraction. I wanted to be able to sit on the toilet undisturbed, without small people pushing little bits of paper under the door saying,WOT AR YOU DOING? or WE NO YOUR IN THER. Three mornings a week all to myself.
The next morning I was a wreck. I discovered that the marriage that I really felt was mutually supportive and loving had been a sham and I had been deceived for at least three years. I was married to a man with a secret life, whom I didn’t know. I delivered my baby to pre-school, unable to meet anyone’s eye, breathing fast to prevent myself from breaking into tears, my legs trembling in shock. Then I went to a small park down a laneway and sat there waiting for the three hours to pass, not reading, not even thinking. I was numb. I knew that all our lives had changed forever and I didn’t know what to do. I wanted to take back the moment to the ‘before’ and wipe the slate clean, but what is known can never again be unknown.
Monday, 12th. I want to huddle in a corner, in the dark. I stare, disbelieving. Not able to read the papers, eat, not even move much. Whole months have passed in a sort of vacuum as if that is the only way they could have been survived. What is real? What is fantasy? Where is my reality? Who are any of us anyway? Can we ever know another person?
I made a major mistake. Once again I failed to ask for any help—for any number of reasons. I was in shock; I didn’t want any ‘I told you so’ repercussions; I was terribly ashamed and didn’t want anyone else to know what had been going on; and, most importantly, I had always considered that my marriage vows were sacred and I had made a promise for life and had to keep it. If I just hung in there, perhaps everything would eventually be resolved and we could move on in our marriage, stronger and healthier and wiser, without anyone having to know. I turned into a zombie, once more on autopilot as I went about the daily routines. I took up smoking and had the urge to destroy all the photo albums that recorded our lives. I felt they were lies and I didn’t want any more lies. I collected the albums, intending to burn them. Then I decided not to but I hid them away where I wouldn’t have to look at them again. I’m glad now that I didn’t destroy them, but it was to be years before I could look at them with equanimity. I half-lived, depressed and numb, for two years. I tried as hard as I could to keep the girls from feeling the tensions that hung over the house and I hid my tears from them, saving up bucketfuls until bedtime.
Some time before all this happened, I had written a travel story for the Qantas in-flight magazine. Qantas did not pay money for stories: they gave out flying miles instead. Generally this wouldn’t get you very far, as the maximum length was only about 3000 words. However, you filled far more pages if you had photos, and luckily I had lots that Qantas liked. When the story had been published, I found I had accumulated enough miles to get to Europe and back, but had no immediate plans to go any time soon.