By Sinéad Redmond It was #WorldMentalHealth day last week and I wasn't well enough to engage with it and post about it. Irony much. As someone who's been very vocal about my postnatal mental illness after my first child I've been really quiet about my recent struggles this time. In part because I wanted my narrative to have been one of being the person who was fixed and better so much that I wasn't able to ask for help this time long past the point of needing it. So a fortnight ago I finally saw my GP after I got what was, in hindsight, really very far beyond breaking point, and because she is lovely and kind and understanding and heard me, she signed me off work for a few weeks, gave me an anti-anxiety script, and generally made me feel much better about life. My postnatal mental health or lack thereof is for me directly tied to the amount of labour I, as a mother who also works outside the home, need to do. Of late that workload, because my children aren't children who are easy sleepers (I consider my one-year-old to be an easy sleeper even though she wakes 3+ times a night, which will give you some idea of what my three-year-old sleep-hater is like), has been to and beyond what I can handle. When I get overloaded and worn out and exhausted like this, my brain defaults to anxiety mode. For me, anxiety feels like a permanent case of The Fear; I feel like I am in trouble with everyone, ALL THE TIME. It is hideous. I avoid the things I normally need to keep going, like social media and most other personal interactions, and I spend my time hiding out panicking about how angry everyone is with me and how much everyone hates me. It is GRIM. I hate it. I also hate the fact that I live in a world and a society where the labour of raising children, the very future of our world and society, is so ignored, devalued and underappreciated that those who do it are expected to do it freely and without allowing it to impact on your 'Real Job', and that the strain of that is so much sometimes (after almost four years of it) that I actually break under it and need medicine to fix me; medicine I am deeply grateful for but nonetheless deeply resent needing. Mental health and "please talk" have become slogans in recent years for the HSE; I've ranted before about how hideous a campaign that is given the gross underfunding of talk therapy for those who need it, even those in crisis. I've seen suicidal friends turned away from our A&Es when they finally and bravely turn there in desperation. The society we live in is making many of us sick, failing us deeply in its lack of help for us when we become so, and if that were not enough, then lecturing us about our lack of willingness to talk about it as though our illnesses were of our own making. I believe that one day I will be better, but I think that it will be because my children will eventually, one day, SURELY, sleep, and my postnatal and breastfeeding hormones will have balanced out. Not because I have talked about it enough to a world that doesn't listen.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Author LIST
Sinéad Redmond Archives |