This story is part of The Wall of Wombs, our 2024 exhibition sharing honest, deeply personal journeys of motherhood.
What you’re reading is a direct transcription of a spoken story — shared bravely, in the speaker’s own words.
Listen to this story and explore others at wallofwombs.com.
Being my first baby, I didn’t have a frame of reference for what was expected and what was not okay. You hear about the baby blues and think, “Well, maybe it’s just that.” Then you start Googling, “How long do baby blues last?” I feel like that should have been a clear sign.
I let myself reach a peak. I felt crazy. I was always crying. It was an emotional roller coaster over little things that shouldn’t have triggered me as much as they did. I was so sleep deprived for so long. My daughter had silent reflux and was medicated for it after three months, but for the first three months, we lost a lot of sleep, logic, and patience because we had a really sick baby that we didn’t realise was sick.
As time went on, that newborn phase didn’t stop for me because I was so depleted. I was 10 months postpartum and always upset. You can’t think logically or react the way you ordinarily would because you haven’t replenished your resources for 10 months straight. That was 10 months of sleep torture.
Eventually, I had to go to my doctor. I booked an appointment with the GP and didn’t even get half of my sentence out before I started crying. She said, “Honestly, you are the third appointment today for something to do with postpartum depression, anxiety, sleep deprivation, mums not coping. You are not alone, but nobody talks about it.” That was such a relief—not that everybody was suffering with me, but that it wasn’t just me.
At the end of that appointment, she diagnosed me with situational depression, purely due to sleep deprivation. She wasn’t convinced it was postpartum depression and therefore didn’t diagnose me with that. She put me on antidepressants and advised that I speak to a psychologist to help work through the trauma of motherhood.
I started speaking to a psychologist, but I didn’t find it helpful because I didn’t have anything particularly traumatic about my birth. I didn’t need to talk through anything other than the fact that I needed to sleep. Perhaps the mum guilt of not seeking help earlier and being miserable for the first 10 months rather than fully enjoying the experience of motherhood, which I felt like if I had sought help earlier, I would have been more able to do so. For some people, medication doesn’t work, but for me, honestly, it was like instant relief.
Society expects mums to always be happy and not say anything negative about motherhood. When we complain or are negative about sleep deprivation and everything we have to do, it’s taxing on our mental health. It’s taxing on everyone around us. So, as mums, we tend to keep quiet if things aren’t going right and only speak up if things are going right. You get your mum friends who only say the good things, and you think they’re only experiencing good things, so you get quieter and quieter.
It’s not for someone else to say, “This is right” or “This is wrong,” or “What you’re feeling is what you should be feeling.” It’s up to you. But I was waiting for someone else to tell me, “No, this isn’t right. This isn’t okay.” I should have just said, “No, this isn’t right. This isn’t okay.”