Friday 25 May 2018

2011

2011.

I want to say that 2011 sucked harder than any year since 1988, but in actual fact it sucked even harder than 1988 because it brought the shit of 1988 back, in all of its majestical un-dealt-withness. On the other hand, 2011 is the year Lenny was born so I have some guilt about saying it was a bad year. That's not very motherly! But what the heck, I'm going to say it regardless. 2011 sucked the worst of any year of my life. Beyond noting this fact at the outset, I don't quite know where to start.

I don't think you're going to enjoy this post. Don't feel that you must read it. It's about an awful time in my life - the worst. It's also, as I've been saying, about events that happened a long time ago, and since then I've talked about them at length with my doctor; the work has been done and there's nothing upsetting any more for me in this sort of contemplation. From my perspective, the only distress that's associated with telling you about this stuff is the fact that it's very possibly going to be distressing for you to be told about it, and I don't want to upset you, especially when I can't see you and how you're taking it, or do what I can to help you absorb it okay. And you need to keep in mind that I'm writing this down at the fag end of a week that has been complicated and challenging, but it's definitely had its good points too, and it's not all gloom and doom. A lot of absolute shit is happening and I don't know how much longer I can stand it, but a couple of private things have happened that have made me feel pretty good, too. Also I've accomplished a significant piece of work I’m very proud of in my job, I’m having a lot of fun with a small project in another social media bubble, and oh my gosh, the greatest thing happened at work today: the head curator accidentally threw away my lunch, and he freaked out when he realised what he'd done, tried to give me money, the whole bit - it was awesome and I am so going to enjoy figuring out how to make the most of the moral high ground I’ve so decisively attained via this interaction.

But 2011. It's fair to wonder why I'm writing about it at all. I did think about that fairly carefully yesterday and today. It's sometimes said that narratives of trauma can be cathartic for readers to receive - to know they're not alone in having gone through tough experiences - things like that. I see words to that effect written as comments under lots of lifewriting published online. I don't feel that way about other people's work myself, though - never. So I'm not doing this to help anybody. (I guess I'm happy for anyone to take what comfort they might find, I just don't understand how that works, that's all.) The motive I have is just exactly the same one I put forward in a January 2017 post which touched on all these matters and the writing of them: I want to write and it serves a purpose.  

When I had a look at what The Searcher got from the query '2011', the posts top and bottom of the list do quite a bit of the talking, especially that picture of me right at the bottom of the page, sitting on the couch, my dear friend Basil on my lap, on the first evening home from the maternity hospital. Check out the fucking look on my face. Most likely it was a semi-permanent expression in that year. What baffles me now is why other people didn't see it and do something about it. I know that I do present as immensely competent, as immensely capable, as entirely self-sufficient and as having already thought of, and dismissed in advance, every single thing that you're about to say. I've known this about myself and how I seem (and I put effort, usually unconsciously, into to maintaining this illusion) for a long time, but even so, it took many hours on the analytic couch to grasp that this pattern was laid down very early in my life, in response to an environment where it appeared that the people I was dependent on might not really be all that dependable. And in the way that these things work, the appearance of a little baby in my life called up the coping mechanisms with doubled intensity, because the little baby that I had once been was feeling vulnerable on his behalf as well as on mine.

So, adapting to new motherhood for me meant adapting to winter days spent sitting alone with a baby in my living room, struggling with being so isolated, (I initially wrote ‘sitting alone in my living room’) nursing a baby or playing with him, or trying to make him shut his eyes, always fighting off the urge to sleep myself, or spent in multiple-hour walks pushing the pram up and down the hills of Montmorency and Eltham and Greensborough. Lenny was never one of these infants you sometimes hear about who take two-hour naps morning and afternoon and go down easily for lengthy nighttime sleeps.

The best it got in the first year was the time from about two months to five months of age, when he would sleep from about 6pm to about 11pm. After that he would wake every couple of hours. So I took to going to bed when he did, so as to get maybe three or four hours of continuous sleep in twenty-four. I never fed him in bed, I always got up. He had that colicky inclination to spew if he wasn’t held upright. The house had two rooms with extensive glazing and in this year I became mildly obsessed with following the progress of the moon across the night sky and through its monthly phases.

This was alright for a while, but as he grew, Lenny fed more – he didn’t take to solids with much enthusiasm – and slept shorter and shorter periods of time. And I slept less and less too. As evenings approached I felt anxious about whether I would have enough sleep that night to get through the next day.

Around October, at about the time I surfaced briefly to say what looks with hindsight like a rather desperate hello to my blog, we took Leonard to a sleep school, where we were shown how to implement controlled crying and told that he was old enough to go to have his cot put into his own bedroom. I was very ill at this point, deeply sleep-deprived, with food issues, high anxiety, nightmares and daily panic attacks.

In the middle of December we drove to Bermagui to spend a week in the house facing Beares Beach that had belonged to my grandparents. My grandmother had died that July in an aged care home.

We had Lenny in a portable cot in the room where we slept. He was sleeping for an hour, waking to feed for twenty minutes, sleeping for an hour again, then chirpy and bright all day.

One night, near sunrise, I put him back in his cot and went to lie on the bed in the room next door. I knew this was the bed my grandfather had died in, fifteen years previously. In my head, a Crowded House song was playing over and over. We’d had it on in the car during the long drive up the coast.


There’s a hole in the river 
Where her memory lies 
From the land of the living 
To the air and sky 
She was coming to see him 
Something changed her mind 
Drove her down to the river 
There is no return

When the sun rose I got up, dressed, went outside and got in the car and took the beach road south out of town. I wanted to be at home, in my own bed, sleeping, but there was no rest for me anywhere. I drove over a long, low bridge across a wide sandy estuary and I pulled over by the dunes. I immediately fell asleep. When I woke up I sat in the car for a long time, then I got out and walked down the beach and into the waves.

I heard a man shouting, Get out here now or I will come in and get you.

I turned and saw a man and a woman and two dogs standing on the beach. I walked out of the water. She said nothing. He said to me, almost crying, I had a friend who jumped off the Gap and I’ve never forgiven her.
I told him I had a baby at home and I was tired. He told me I had postnatal depression, and he said, pointing to the woman standing beside him, she had had it too and the kid had gone straight into the creche. That’s what you have to do now, he said. I looked at her face, which I could not really see because of her sunglasses. Where do you live? he said. I said I live in Melbourne. Where are you staying? he asked. I said Bermagui. He said, we will take you home. And I went into 'I can handle this' mode. Thank you, I said, but it's not far. I will drive myself home now. They didn't want to let me go, but they did and I went back to the house.

By this time my husband had called my parents, who lived a couple of hours away, and they were all sitting in the living room when I walked in. Someone said Where have you been? and I said, I tried to drown myself. I went into the bedroom and lay on the bed in my wet clothes. A little while later my mother came in carrying a cup of tea which she put on a table near the window. Neither of us said anything. She left the room. The next people to come in were two paramedics who told me they were going to take me to the hospital in Bega and I needed to put on some dry clothes. They went out and I got changed. Then I went out to the ambulance and they made me lie down in the back and we went to Bega. 

In the hospital there I was interviewed by a psychiatrist of some description, who committed me, and the next day I was sent in another ambulance to the mental hospital at Goulburn, where I remained on suicide watch for several days. I was not allowed to have Lenny in the hospital with me and it would not have been a safe place for him. It was not safe for me. I was propositioned, if you could call it that, by male patients several times a day, and one of them assaulted me. I could not lock my room at night and I was terrified I was going to be raped. I was eventually released into my family's care by the registrar there, on condition that they drove me straight to the private hospital in Melbourne's outer northern suburbs which has a mother and baby unit. I stayed there for two weeks. It was there that I met my doctor. I went home the day before Christmas. Two days after Christmas I ran away again.


I wrote above somewhere that I don't feel sad to contemplate any of this now and that is true, but I so deeply regret that I didn't ask the people on the beach for their names.

2 comments:

ernmalleyscat said...

I keep looking at your instruction for if I got this far, and hesitating to comply, but oh god, good on you and them.

tracy said...

I don't know what to say that won't sound trite or patronising or whatever else I don't want it to sound. But I send you my deepest love xx