Recently I saw a photo of my TinyHuman when he was only a couple of weeks old… and I didn’t recognise him.
Postpartum depression hit me like a train after I gave birth, those first few months of TinyHuman’s life were a blur. I remember struggling every day to keep my head above the water, to keep us afloat. I remember the feelings that I had holding him close and breathing in his presence. I remember the feelings that came with my struggles, but I can’t picture anything.
I can’t picture his face and I can’t picture myself. I look back at the photos of him, the photos of us together, but I don’t recognise any of them. Not the pictures. Not the moments. Not the faces.
That makes me a shit Mum, right?
What kind of mother doesn’t recognise her own son’s baby photos!?
My mind tells me- only a shit one. But I know that’s not true. I know that if someone else told me the same, that I would tell them not to look so down upon themselves. I’d remind them that actually, post-partum is an evil thing. It takes those precious moments, those beautiful times with your baby and twists them into something different.
Having post-partum feels different for everyone, but for me I was just drowning in a sea of self-doubt, guilt and self hatred. Now that I feel more secure about my parenting, my brain does this thing where it blocks those post-partum memories- it shields me and protects me from those feelings.
Now I feel a new guilt.
The sacrifice that my brain made for me is that to shield me from the overwhelming struggles that I felt in his early days, it’s erased most of those memories entirely.
Now my TinyHuman is a year old, photos of him come up in the memories of all my social media every day. I look at those photos of that beautiful baby.
He’s smiling and playing, he looks so happy and innocent. I recognise it all. I see the house we lived in, the toys and clothes that I bought him. But I don’t always recognise the face in those pictures.
Sometimes those evil feelings creep back up on me, I have a bad day and I get in my head that I’m this horrible parent who’s poor child deserves so much better. Then I look at these photos that I don’t recognise and I realise that it doesn’t matter. The baby in those photos is happy and healthy, he’s wearing clean clothes and playing with nice, well kept toys.
My TinyHuman is 15 months old now, and only recently did I start to feel like myself again. Even then, I’m not sure I feel like myself, that’s not the right phrase for this. I only now feel like I’ve found my place as a mother. I think that’s the right way to describe what I mean.
I didn’t know how to be a Mum.
I didn’t ever want to be a Mum, I didn’t know how to be a Mum. Even once I became one, I still felt like I had absolutely no idea how to do it. Every step of the way post-partum confirmed these doubts for me, it beat me down and told me again and again how clueless I was. Every time TinyHuman got poorly or did something new or “unexpected”, I’d freak out. What am I doing!?
The audacity of me thinking that I could do it.
That’s different now. I still struggle and I still have my bad days, but I feel like I’m floating more days than I’m sinking. It blows my mind. I found my way, I know what he wants and what he’s thinking before he even realises it. I watch him and learn from him every day, he’s changed my world. Turned the whole thing upside down.
Now I look at my TinyHuman… in person, in photos and videos. What I see when I do, is my son. The TinyHuman that I created, the boy who holds my heart in his hands every day without even knowing it. I see a beautiful, happy child. I see the way he loves and is loved. I see him curious and eager to learn, I see a little boy with a life of love and happiness ahead of him.
So it doesn’t matter…
In my heart of hearts I know that it wont matter to my TinyHuman that I don’t recognise those baby photos, because I did my best for him. Everyday I got up and I tried my best, for him. He was, is and always will be the most important thing. He wont care that I struggled and/or that I continue to struggle because all he will know is that I pushed through and I did what I could for him, even when all I wanted to do was curl up into a ball and cease to exist.
