By the time Poppy is five months old, I have begun to dread the night. I’m just so tired, so incredibly tired, but I know I won’t be able to sleep. I can’t face the idea of getting up to feed all through the night; I’m starting to feel delirious, and I’ve been falling asleep on the couch while breastfeeding, which, as every mother is warned, can be incredibly dangerous. Several nights in a row I start to cry after dinner. Luke is alarmed, but he doesn’t understand. How can it possibly be worse when the sun goes down? I’m with Poppy all day too. ‘I just don’t want night to come,’ I weep. At night it’s dark, it’s quiet, I’m all alone. The only thing I can think to do is to google ‘Why won’t my baby sleep?’
I start co-sleeping with Poppy to try to cope, in the second bedroom so that we don’t disturb Luke, but very quickly after I move she regresses from windows of an hour and a half to blocks of just 45 minutes. Something has gone very wrong with my baby and I have no idea how to fix it. Even though I am next to her in the bed and I don’t have to get up, my sleep is always broken, fitful, always filtered with the sound of Poppy crying and the anxiety that I will never catch up. I feed her every 45 minutes, but I know she’s not hungry; she just can’t settle herself without being attached. She falls asleep on my breast, then the nipple falls out of her mouth, and as her natural 45-minute sleep cycle passes, she realises that something has changed, comes out of her sleep and starts wailing. It’s not a gentle whimper—she cries with rage until I wake up and settle her.
Some nights I fall straight back to sleep as soon as she’s attached, but sometimes I am just so fucking angry and frustrated and exhausted that I am flooded with adrenaline and I just can’t get to sleep again. My nerves are like rubber bands, stretched to breaking point. And while I’m not sleeping properly, neither is poor Poppy. Every day she is more tired, more aggravated, more distressed and therefore more difficult to soothe. We’re locked together in a slow downward spiral.
During the day, I’m a zombie, and decision fatigue begins to set in. All the micro questions I have to answer are completely overwhelming. Is she tired? Is she wet? Does she have wind? Does she need to feed? Has she had enough? I can barely think my way through Poppy’s needs, let alone my own. Have I had a shower? Do I need to eat? Have I brushed my teeth? Have I had any water today? What should I make for dinner? What do we need from the supermarket? I know I have to make these decisions but I physically can’t get there. My mind is blank, blocked—I can’t focus. Every minor decision feels like climbing a mountain.
I start to go days without showering. Physically, I don’t have the energy. Mentally, I don’t have the energy. Poppy’s awake all the time, so it would have to happen when she’s awake, and she will wail and scream the whole time, which feels like more trouble than it’s worth.
Luke doesn’t understand the co-sleeping. He can see that I’m doing badly but he thinks I’m making things harder than they need to be. ‘What are you doing?’ he keeps asking me. ‘You’re not coping, Lib.’ He is frustrated that I won’t consider a different approach, but for some reason I believe in attachment parenting, or at least I think I do. I just can’t let my baby cry—everybody tells you that it releases chemicals in their brain that can cause permanent harm. Controlled crying is out, sleep training is out, anything that means Poppy would be left alone to scream. In my heart and soul, I just don’t feel it’s right. But by the time she is six months old, I am coming apart at the edges.
If I could somehow do better, I know she would be fine. She would settle, and she would sleep. If I could be better, she’d be fine, but I’m failing her. I know I’m failing her. I can’t say it out loud, or even consciously acknowledge it to myself, but I am failing as a mother. I am so ashamed.
As a swimmer, I had control. I got the feedback, I saw the analysis, I knew where I could improve and I did it, and I saw results. Now I spend many late nights on the internet, looking for answers. I keep hoping something will change, but this situation is completely out of my control. And I can’t bring myself to ask for help. Mum knows that I’m struggling, my sisters know, but they don’t know how bad it is, really. We aren’t seeing a paediatrician. I’m not seeing a doctor. I keep persevering, alone, always optimistic that tonight things will change and Poppy will sleep. My optimism is brutal, in its own way, because it is always foolish, and every single night it fails over and over, and that only makes me feel worse.
Luke and I are fighting, and he’s approaching his own breaking point, so we agree that we’ll try something different at some point. I tell him ten months—if we get to ten months and nothing has changed, maybe we can try something else. I don’t want to think about it yet, and anyway I’m struggling to think clearly about anything. I wish he could understand how important it is to me to do the best thing for my baby.
For five months, I don’t sleep. We don’t get a breast pump and collect milk so that Luke can feed her during the night and I can sleep, because he is a new father who doesn’t know to suggest it and I am a bit of a martyr about it all. He’s the one who has to get up and go to work. He has a front-row seat to this unfolding shit-show, and he doesn’t know how to help. ‘She’ll cry if we do sleep training, Lib, but she’s crying anyway—what difference does it make?’ My stubbornness about co-sleeping feels like the only thing I have left to hold on to. It’s the only thing left that I can control.
There are no pure moments anymore. Sometimes Poppy will smile at me or laugh and I will feel a little leap in my heart, but it is always tinged with exhaustion and sadness. She looks so tired, too. There are dark rings around her eyes. I regret doing this to her. I regret having her, too.
I am so often angry with Poppy. I know that there are times when I am too rough when I pick her up. My thoughts have become really dark as well. These grim ideas that just appear out of nowhere. Sometimes, when she cries, I imagine hurting her. I have this clear mental picture of throwing her out of an open window. And I am alone with the avalanche of shame and the horror that follows. No one can ever know.
The only life raft I have to cling to is something Rob said to me when we brought Poppy in for her six-week check-up, after she was born: ‘Have you felt like leaving her on the side of the road yet?’ I knew he was being light-hearted and I laughed weakly, but the conversation keeps replaying in my head, and it gives me some comfort. I am not crazy. I know it is normal to feel stressed, conflicted, even regretful that I ever had a child.
I know, too, that I will never hurt my daughter. There are times when I have to put her in her cot and just walk away, but at least I have the presence of mind to do that. I have an amazing support network and I am mentally healthy enough to have some control over these thoughts, but it is suddenly clear to me how it could happen. I am still relatively reasonable and rational and logical, and yet I have these urges. I understand now how some women can kill their babies. It’s obviously something that is incredibly tragic and devastating for any family, and something that our brains naturally recoil from contemplating, but if I was severely depressed, if I had no emotional support, would I be able to control myself? I don’t know. I am suddenly filled with deep compassion for these women, who had seemed like monsters to me before.
There isn’t a day when I don’t get out of bed. I do what I have to do, but I am bitter and angry, and resistant to what this situation is, and so, so angry with Poppy. My thoughts are morphing from guilt to frustration that I’ve been saddled with such a difficult child. What’s wrong with you? Why can’t you just be easier? I’m struggling to spend time with friends with small babies because it makes me feel even worse to see how effortless their children seem compared to Poppy. I wear a bright smile at our coffee dates and laugh away their friendly enquiries about how we’re both getting along—‘Oh, you know, not too bad, could do with a decent night’s sleep, haha’—but inside I feel resentful and ashamed, always on the verge of tears. It’s a weakness that I can’t admit to even my closest friends, and I know it’s not something people can
really understand unless they’ve been through it.
What are we going to do about Poppy? She’s eight months old and this conversation is happening almost daily between me and Luke, the two of us struggling to connect as we fight over the same ground again and again. I have started to hint at the dark thoughts I’ve had in my conversations with him, but he has no patience for me anymore—he knows that sleep will help, and he wants us to do sleep training. Here is the problem, here is the solution—what is the issue with that? I know he doesn’t understand the emotional side of things, the guilt I am feeling, but I am beginning to weaken. I just don’t have a choice. If I don’t consider some other options, I don’t know what will happen.
My sister-in-law recommends a sleep consultant for babies, Katie Forsythe of the Baby Sleep Company in Brisbane. I start following her on social media, trawling through her website on those long, sleepless nights, just beginning to consider whether this is a path I could ever go down. I’m still holding out hope that Poppy will just change, because the literature on attachment parenting says that all babies start sleeping through eventually. It says we shouldn’t consider it a problem when babies don’t sleep through the night, and we certainly shouldn’t ‘train’ them with brutal traumatic crying episodes that flood them with cortisol until they ‘give up’ and go to sleep.
The Facebook groups and forums that are in favour of attachment parenting are always on my mind, with their seemingly strict views on neonatal health. Naturally, I don’t want to cause psychological damage to my baby. But I’m noticing more and more that those attachment parenting groups rarely talk about the mother’s health, which increasingly seems bizarre to me. How on earth can my baby be safe and stable if I am falling to pieces? Are mothers supposed to sacrifice themselves completely? Is that meant to be noble? I have a deep sense of responsibility to my child, but my sense of needing to measure up to these ill-fitting ideals is starting to fall away.
In her video posts and her advice online, Katie seems genuinely concerned for the health of both mother and baby. There is no one-size-fits-all philosophy—she emphasises that every situation is different, and different approaches could be beneficial. Part of me is ashamed to even be considering this stuff, but Katie’s philosophy is incredibly forgiving, and that feels like kindness to me right now. Everything she posts is non-judgemental. I couldn’t bear talking to someone about what we’ve been through, only to have them tell me everything I’ve done wrong; the negative voices in my head are loud enough. At some point, I decide that if we are going to do sleep training, Katie is the only person I could trust.
In the meantime, I am trying to focus a little bit more on self-care. I’m enrolled in a mums and bubs class at the gym because I know that, for me, not exercising is making everything that much worse. I need so badly to be moving my body and getting some endorphins pumping through my system, but it has been so hard to fit any exercise in, and so hard to push my exhausted body. I need it, though. It’s really important to me. It’s really important to my peace of mind.
One morning when Poppy is eight and a half months old, I put her in her car seat and get ready to drive to the gym across town for our class. Poppy has always hated being in the car and we’ve spun her car seat around to face forward, earlier than recommended, to try to keep her calm. I’m worried about my driving ability because I’m so sleep-deprived and at an emotional breaking point, but the only way I can manage Pops while we’re in the car is if she is facing forward. I’m constantly reaching back to give her a dummy or give her something to play with, while feeling like I have tunnel vision and I can’t focus on anything clearly.
I’m worried about having a car accident. I’m worried Poppy won’t be safe, but I’m also keenly aware that I need to be able to see her face. If I can’t see her face, she becomes less human to me, just a disembodied scream. It’s the same at night: I have to keep a light on at all times so I can see her, because I feel like I’m going to hurt her if I can’t see her face. The sound makes me crazy. I need to see her face to remember that she is my daughter and to block out the dark, impulsive thoughts that sometimes rush into my head whispering, This is how—this is how you make it stop.
I know I’ll feel better if I go to the gym—I always do—but really I am on autopilot. I just need to get out of the house and Poppy will have to come, whether she likes the car or not. She’s crying before the car door is shut beside her, and crying as we back out of the driveway. It builds to a piercing wail as we set off down the street. I start signing ‘The Grand Old Duke of York’, because it sometimes helps, but my voice is thin and wavering. We had a particularly bad night the night before. I sing it over and over again, but it isn’t helping. Poppy’s shrill wailing continues unbroken as we drive through the streets of Seven Hills.
The drive is long, nearly half an hour, and five minutes in, it’s like I have some kind of break. Something deep inside me snaps. I keep driving towards the gym, but some hysterical emotion grips me, and I begin screaming at my daughter. Shut up! Fucking shut up! You’re not taking this away from me—I’m going to the fucking gym, you little shit! I don’t know if I have actually spoken the words aloud or if I’m just making a wordless, shrieking noise. But I am screaming and screaming at her, at the top of my lungs, for the remainder of the drive. Twenty minutes, more, of white-hot rage, creating a feedback loop with Poppy’s screaming, which only gets louder. I am screaming my hatred for Poppy, blind with anger. My daughter hates me, she is punishing me, and I hate her for it. I hate her.
I am unsafe on the road, completely out of control, but I keep driving. A minute before we arrive at the gym, Poppy falls asleep. She literally passes out from exhaustion, from the effort of screaming her lungs out. I pull into a parking bay and immediately begin weeping—deep, harsh, broken sobs. The sound coming out of me is keening, brutal. I am a terrible mother. I am a failure. The world would be better without me in it. Poppy deserves better than me.
I am at rock bottom. I know now that I need to get help, though I don’t even know what that means. I have absolutely nothing left in me. I can’t keep going like this.
2009
‘She stood in the storm and when the wind did not blow her away, she adjusted her sails.’
—Elizabeth Edwards
I took an extended break after Beijing. It wasn’t clear to me whether or not I should keep swimming. And if I did, would I keep training with Stephan? My dream had always been that I would reach the pinnacle of my sport and retire a champion. I had assumed Beijing would be my last Olympics, but I had also assumed that I would leave that competition completely satisfied. Instead, I was almost grieving. For the second time, I had failed to win the gold medal in the 100-metre freestyle in the only arena that truly counted. I felt like I had unfinished business at a time when I had imagined I would be done.
Part of the problem was that I didn’t know what was next. I knew that I had to retire at some point, but there was nothing beyond that; it was like the future was shrouded in some kind of cloud and I couldn’t really think my way through it. I wasn’t nervous about what would come after swimming because I wasn’t thinking about it at all. My thoughts were instead consumed by whether or not I needed something more from the sport.
As I was taking time off to think through all of this—three months in total—there was some movement at the club. I read in the newspaper that Stephan had taken on a new recruit after Beijing. Jess Schipper was moving from the Redcliffe Leagues Lawnton Club, where she had trained under Ken Wood, to join Stephan’s team at the Commercial Swimming Club in Fortitude Valley. She was a major rival of mine, my closest Australian competitor in the butterfly, and it was shocking to me that Stephan would consider training her without talking to me about it first. I didn’t expect him to make a decision based on my feelings, but surely I had warranted a phone call. I couldn’t believe I had to find out about it in the paper.
It felt like Stephan had chosen Jess over me. I was always an emotional p
erson, and he was the closest thing I had to a father figure, with my own father so detached and absent, so I experienced the news as a deep kind of rejection. I was 23 years old and I had been swimming with Stephan since I was seventeen. We’d had a long career together, in swimming terms, and I’d just assumed it would continue. I wondered, like I had with my father, what I had done wrong.
The year prior to Beijing I had started asking Stephan a lot more questions in training. I wanted to be a bit more autonomous and own the process more, which made me less compliant and more combative. He was frustrated by this and we clashed repeatedly, but I still thought we were on the same team. Human relationships are complicated, and they become more complicated the deeper they get, and Stephan and I saw each other between three and seven hours a day, six days a week, 48 weeks a year. We knew how to push each other’s buttons, sure, but I thought we were closer than we had ever been. Maybe I misunderstood our relationship. Maybe he had just lost faith in me. Maybe I would have been okay with it, if he’d just picked up the phone.
I’m sure from his perspective—he was so clinical, so pragmatic—it wasn’t a big deal. And it was obviously a sound business decision to take Jess on, since he didn’t know if I was coming back. He had to think about his own career as a coach, and Jess was an incredibly gifted swimmer—he would have been mad to turn her away when she came to him for training. Part of my brain understood this, of course, but it was drowned out by the hurt. I had to have a conversation with Stephan.
I went down to the pool and sat opposite him and told him how I felt, and of course he was surprised to learn that his decision had cut me so badly. But he was very matter-of-fact in his reply. Jess was committed to the next four years of training, to get to the London Olympics. Stephan still didn’t know where I stood, and he needed to move forward. It felt like a slap in the face, but I couldn’t fault his logic. I still didn’t know what I wanted to do. I only knew that it was the end of the line for Stephan and me, after five years together.
Beneath the Surface Page 14
