Having lost her twins previously Amanda1 found it hard to tell where grief ended and where depression began.

Transcript

But uh she needed it and um and the first night um because of the hypoglycemia they wanted to watch her a little bit closer. So um so I’m in my room in the hospital in this um a private room and they had her they just put her out at the nurses’ station so they could watch her. They said, you know, “We’ll bring her in to breastfeed you don’t need to worry, you know, we’ll watch her.” Um and uh I was okay at first and then I kept waking up with a nightmare that she’d died.

And so the nurses had to keep coming in with her [laugh] and saying “No she’s here, she’s really here.” [laugh] But I wasn’t ready to believe it. I think I’d spent because I’d spent the whole pregnancy refusing to believe that she would be born alive that when she was born alive it didn’t quite, quite believe her. Um so she ended up getting jaundice um the first few days. Um so we had to bring her back to hospital and uh because um, you know, she’d been out of the hospital they put her in the regular paeds ward you can’t go back to the NICU. So um, so that was also really challenging. I slept there in the, the paeds ward with, you know, all these other moms. And here I am just my baby was a few days old and I’m feeling really I have no confidence in myself as a mom. Because, you know, I still in the back of my mind had this “Well I killed my first two babies I can’t be trusted with a baby now.” Um and that was really hard to be in that situation [emotional] and having to deal with that. Um so uh I don’t think I really got the best start with her at all.

Right yes. Well it’s one of those things where um it’s hard to pinpoint exactly sort of where grief ends and depression starts, you know, like is there ever a clear line? But exactly it was really with my daughter um being born and not, uh not feeling normal. Not feeling like I fit in. Not feeling um connected with anything is sort of how I describe it. I felt like I was my own little world and nobody including my own daughter was part of it. It was just this external thing that happened outside. Um and exactly like I don’t know whether maybe when I was trying to get pregnant and when I was pregnant I kept sort of pushing all these feelings aside. Saying sort of to myself “Oh well it’s not normal right now but everything will be okay once my daughter’s here.”

Um and I think other people kind of that fit too. Um but really exactly it was those first um gosh it was barely more than a week after my daughter was born that I started to say “Okay this is a little odd but it’ll come up I’ll, I’ll feel better soon.” And with every passing week the depression just stayed and didn’t get better. And didn’t, I still didn’t feel like I was supposed to feel. I still felt that I didn’t belong, you know. Um yes um I still I mean at the time when I sort of mentioned when I was walking to the health unit and so on. To me all that still seemed normal like this is what you do. But it was not normal and it was not okay for me to be that disconnected from her. And to not even, you know, once she was born still not really see her as a person. She was just this thing that I had to look after and feed and change her bum and give her a bath. But she wasn’t a person yet in my head and that’s definitely not normal. [laugh]

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