Baby Blues
Jodie asks her husband's grandmother, Marlys, about moving to Australia, pregnant, and becoming a new mother. At the time, her husband had started a new job and was extremely busy. Where they lived, they had no family support. It may have been decades ago, but it's a familiar story for so many women: Morning sickness. Isolation. Loneliness. Feeling "totally abandoned." The overwhelming changes – to your body, to yourself, to your relationship with the baby's father. That sense that you just don't know what you're doing. That you're struggling. That doubt in the life you have chosen. "A time of great crisis." "Everything around me had crashed." "Looking back, I wonder how I managed. Somehow you got through it." Then there's learning to breastfeed, learning to bathe the baby. There's feeling helpless, feeling "like a cow." There's the feeling that being a mother should come naturally, and a sense of failure to feeling like you don't know what you're doing. "I've got one job right now, and I can't do it." Amidst all that baby sweetness, learning to parent can be really really tough. Especially if, like Marlys, you have what we now know to be post-natal depression.
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