Beyond the Bump by Sally Shepherd

Author:Sally Shepherd
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
Published: 2019-07-09T16:00:00+00:00

9

On Postpartum Anxiety: The cold mist

If depression is a black cloud, then anxiety, to me, is a cold mist. It sneaks up on you and it’s pervasive, uncomfortable and chilling. It’s like being Chicken Little, the only one who knows the sky is falling and no one believes you. It is living in a state of five-alarm emergency, when there is no actual danger. Anxiety can present at any stage in life, but it is frequently triggered by pregnancy, childbirth and becoming a mum for the first time.

I’ve always been an anxious person. When I was a child, I couldn’t stand it if my socks didn’t line up perfectly at my knees. As a teenager, I slept with a light on every night, and I wouldn’t order a pizza by myself, because I was so scared of the phone. I worked my way up into a flurry before social events, and I overthought everything. This is part of the reason I chose to study psychology. I improved a lot as an adult, but still tend towards anxiety with certain things.

To be honest, I still don’t swim in the ocean. A few years ago I thought how ridiculous it was that a psychologist living near the beach was scared of the ocean, and so I decided to get serious about conquering this irrational fear. My fears around the ocean were (are) many: sharks—actually, all living creatures—rips, currents, big waves, and showing everyone my bathing suit body. So, I summoned all of my courage, got into my bathers, marched down to the water, and went in.

So far, so good—for about five minutes, when a giant stingray jumped out of a big wave right in front of me. Hightailing it back to shore, I promptly bumped into one of my regular clients—yes, in my bathers. I haven’t been in past my knees since. Luckily for me, my son is still small enough to swim at the depth I am comfortable at, but I’m well aware that this will be a fear I need to conquer as he grows older!

My anxiety was particularly bad in my early postpartum period. I worried about everything when my son was a baby. To a degree, parents tend to worry by nature and design. It’s completely normal for a new mum to worry about her baby’s well-being and safety. It’s a survival instinct—some level of anxiety is adaptive. It is our job to protect our baby, our family, from threats. It starts in pregnancy.

Adaptive anxiety continues once our babies are born—buying baby monitors, following the safe-sleep guidelines to the letter, making sure our kids wear bike helmets. Anxiety can be a good thing: it keeps our babies safe. As new mums we tend to become hypervigilant, on the lookout for every possible threat. It’s our job. It’s normal to be anxious, and to worry about things, because we’ve just been given this hugely important new responsibility—a human life, for goodness sakes! When my son was a baby, I would see danger lurking around every corner.

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