For years I wasn’t clear what had happened to me during the time after my son’s birth and beyond. My pregnancy had gone well. Yes, I was a slightly older mother, but I was fit and healthy. I didn’t put too much weight on, but enough. I attended anti-natal fitness classes at our local pool. I didn’t work for much of my pregnancy. I wouldn’t say I enjoyed being pregnant, but I didn’t hate it either.
The birth was a lenghty one. I went into labour at bedtime one evening when my waters broke. Then I was awake all night, all the next day and my baby was eventually born at 2am the following morning. I’d pushed for some time before being transferred to theatre. A forceps delivery was tried and failed before the c-section.
So I started motherhood exhausted. We in hospital for 5 nights and it felt like I didn’t sleep that whole time. I don’t think that was quite true. I was lucky enough to have my own room, but it was close to the nurse’s station and it felt like the alarms were buzzing all night.
Back home I had a heavy feeder (I was breastfeeding) and I didn’t get much of a break between feeds. He fed almost every hour for the first year and it felt like the second too. I did my best to cope. We co-slept as I don’t think I’d have survived otherwise.
After the first couple of years things got better in terms of the demands made on me. I was a stay at home mum and we had a cleaner. Sadly my son was still a very early riser, but gradually he learnt not to wake me before 6am. I don’t know that things improved in terms of how tired I felt, but I think they sort of plateaued.
Once school started I think things got worse. I never got a lie in. My son was an early riser and my husband, who was working full-time, never really took a turn. At the same time we moved house. It was more expensive and apparently we couldn’t now afford a cleaner. I felt under pressure to earn more (I was working a little from home at this point). At weekends I was still doing the bulk of the child care. I felt I was on a treadmill.
Eventually, something had to give and it ended up being my marriage. After the split things got better. My ex had my child about a third of the time. I got lie ins. I didn’t have to do the things I was doing for my ex-husband – I hadn’t thought it would make much difference, but it really seemed to free me up. About a year afterwards, I suddenly woke up as if after a long sleep. My body and mind felt so much better. I think I’m still recovering now, but it’s getting there. Lockdown has helped too as we were able to start later in the morning when my son was doing his school work from home.
For years I’d googled sleep deprivation, but that didn’t seem to completely cover the symptoms I was feeling for the duration I was having them. Eventually I stumbled across post natal depletion and it was like a light bulb had been turned on. I now knew what had happened to me.
What is post natal depletion?
Postnatal depletion is a physical and mental deterioration caused not just by the process of giving birth and breastfeeding, but by the stresses and strains of modern parenthood.
It’s worth reading The Postnatal Depletion Cure: A Complete Guide to Rebuilding Your Health and Reclaiming Your Energy for Mothers of Newborns, Toddlers, and Young Children by Oscar Serrallach. This details what postnatal depletion is and what you can do about it, but it does tend to concentrate on the first year post birth and like many, I have felt the symptoms long beyond that.
There’s lots of advice in the book about getting help and support, eating well, supplementing if necessary and taking exercise. A lot of that is common sense stuff about healthy living, but it is good to have it all laid out in one place.
I’m still struggling with post natal depletion, but at least I now know what I am dealing with and I have some idea about how to cope with it. Post natal depletion needs to be better understood and I think we need to be more aware of it.
Depleted Mother Syndrome
If some of this sounds familiar, but it doesn’t quite fit, you may need to look into depleted mother syndrome which has a lot of the same symptoms and causes.
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