Inadequate

My baby turned one and I had a breakdown

North Devon - a moment of peace, in the chaos of my brain, when I got to enjoy this beautiful view

I’ve made coffee and the temperature has finally dropped below 25 degrees, cool enough to enjoy it in the garden. The baby is napping, the dishwasher is on, I have lunch plans. I feel, in this moment, good.

I’ve been struggling to know how to write about last week. Yet write about it I must. I can’t find closure on a thing, or work out what I really think or feel about it, until I’ve put some words on a page. It is easier to comprehend a challenging life event when on the other side of it, and I do feel on the other side. But it is still fresh, and I’m now in the midst of working through its implications. It feels complicated and, I suppose, a bit embarrassing.

That shame is counter to what I fundamentally believe though — that talking about mental health shouldn’t be about platitudes or Pinterest quotes, it should be about the actual hard reality that doesn’t look pretty or sorted.

I’m hesitant to call it a breakdown, because the word sounds grand, dramatic — it suggests weeks in bed, rocking back and forth. But I can’t find any other way — mine lasted a week, and it was terrifying. When I was seven weeks pregnant I experienced something similar. Triggered by an onset of pregnancy symptoms, I felt buried in sadness. I was living in a state of fear and unreality. I couldn’t quite believe that what I was going through was real. And if it were, as everyone was telling me it was, I was absolutely certain I wouldn’t be able to cope. My mum would come over and sit with me while I nibbled on marmite toast, reassuring me that I would feel better, and — contrary to my main fear — I would be able to cope with having a child. I did start to feel better. I carried on taking my SSRIs through the pregnancy due to a doctor’s ‘weighing up of risk’ (essentially: it would be more risky not to take them), and I had some CBT on the NHS. They take your mental health quite seriously, while pregnant, it turns out.

I developed OCD and a severe generalised anxiety disorder when I was 16. It was triggered by catching glandular fever and viral hepatitis on a summer camp. For a couple of years I could barely leave the house or eat, so terrified was I of germs, contamination and getting sick.

For the past 15 years I’ve been a functioning anxious person. I’ve had jobs, though they have been affected. I’ve had relationships, moved to Scotland and back, eaten a lot of delicious food and enjoyed the hell out of it. I’ve had a load of therapy and believe I will be on medication forever. I have emetophobia and it affects a surprising proportion of my life, though I am mostly so used to it now it hums in the background like the soundtrack of a Christopher Nolan movie.

Three things coincided, two weeks ago: we went on holiday, we caught a stomach bug, and it was my baby’s 1st birthday. How those three things intersected, intermingled and created a week-long panic attack and deep sense of sadness, is what I’ve been reflecting on. Though I love going away — finding new restaurants, beaches to laze on, hotel pools — I am finding it a lot harder in my mum-era. It’s like I’m having to start re-building my resources from scratch, for going away, after 15 years of slowly finding a vaguely adventurous spirit post-OCD/anxiety diagnosis. It makes sense: it’s really different going on holiday with a baby. The things that I most looked forward to, that offer a little bit of calm and clarity, are really no longer available. I also have this other person I am responsible for — if I cannot function, I cannot parent. And that is unacceptable. There is, somehow, even more parenting to do on holiday. This is more chaos, and chaos breeds anxiety in me. If I don’t know where my shampoo is, or if we have the stuff we need for the beach in three separate bags strewn all over the car, I can feel the panic rising in my chest. Conversely, give me half an hour to sort everything out in peace and I will return a nicer, happier person.

So we were on holiday, we were ill, I was deeply anxious and in a state of constant panic. I barely ate or drank for five days and wondered why I felt insane. It was like I couldn’t remember who I was, or what it was like to feel happy.

M turned one while we were away, and despite wanting to be happy about her reaching this momentous milestone, I cried sad, rather than glad, tears. Time is cruel, the way it keeps passing. When things don’t happen perfectly — see: your one year old projectile vomiting on the morning of her 1st birthday — you don’t get a do-over.

Because of my anxiety, I was frozen for most of the week. T had to pick up a lot of the slack. I found it so hard to hold her, to feed her, to change her nappy. I felt paralysed. Completely inadequate as a mother. Like when I was first pregnant, that worry about my own inadequacy — that because my mental health could sometimes turn me into a useless husk, I should not be allowed to be a parent — was back.

This year has, as the cliches warned, passed in a blur. I look back at videos of her and barely recognise the way she moved, the sounds she made. The baby I know is the one she is now. There is some beauty in that, but there is also grief. I think there was a part of me that wanted her birthday to be perfect — and in fact I was dubbing the entirety of July her birthday festival for, now, obvious reasons — because it felt like a way to cling onto her. If I could only celebrate her enough, it would be okay that she was no longer tiny and wobbly and new. It feels like I need to caveat this by saying that she is more wonderful now than ever, but why should I have to do that? Why can’t the grief of watching your child leave yet another phase, a phase in which you got to know a brand new bit of who they are for the very first time, just be looked at fully for a moment? To let the dizzying, gutting nostalgia wash over you. Because grief is what I feel. Gladly, and unlike the grief you feel at the loss of a person through death, you also get a new version of that person to enjoy. But it is loss, and I’ve realised I need to stop pretending that I am not sad.

I’m obsessed with photos at the moment. I am overwhelmed by my camera roll, and I need to get the digital camera photos from our Croatia holiday printed and in an album. I still feel bad that I never created that Instagram reel to post on her birthday. What kind of mother am I? Not finding the time to memorialise her in this way. (I am only a little bit joking). I need to get a whole year’s worth of photos off my phone and into a physical scrapbook but every time I try to upload them onto Snapfish the whole thing freezes. Too many memories. Cannot compute.

I sit now from a vantage point of, if not clarity, then resolution. I have spent the past week getting our house in order, ticking jobs off the to-do list and furiously working in my favourite coffee shops so that my job, at least, can feel like something I’m good at. I feel so much calmer, back in my own space and routine, and I’m coming to terms with the fact that, perhaps at least for this stage of life, I will be happier and a better mother if I’m honest about who I am and what I need, and, fundamentally, take care of my mental health first — if I am deliberate about my time: clean the kitchen, do the washing, boundary my work, go for walks, sit on the floor with M and a million toys.

It’s okay. Things are okay. They weren’t for a little bit there, but they will be.