The first time my newborn was hefted on to my breast - flailing, almost translucent, his stiffened legs still in the breech position; the first time I felt his tiny, blind mouth latch on to my nipple, I felt something akin to terror, as though someone had taken a choke-hold around my throat and wouldn't let go. Like all new mothers, I was acutely and suddenly aware of the awesome responsibility this angry little creation had heaped upon me. Yet it was what Leo's arrival hadn't triggered that scared me most - the rib-crushing swell of emotion, the mother-baby chemistry that is supposedly wired into our DNA. In all those months of quelling potential birthing calamities in my mind, never once had I mooted a scenario in which I'd feel numb, estranged, gutted; that I wouldn't fall instantly and madly in love with my boy.
It wasn't as though I'd spent my pregnancy in a mawkish funk of excitement. I wasn't one for poring over baby manuals, or cooing over miniature vests. I was nervous about motherhood, uncertain whether it would prove the right choice for me. This stemmed partly from my work as a writer: disposable truisms on women writers and motherhood had had a profound impact on my decision to have - or rather delay having - a baby. In his essay, Novels and Children, Roland Barthes makes the misogynist assertion that women can be mothers or writers, but not both. There is an army of contemporary authors proving otherwise - Monica Ali, Kate Mosse and JK Rowling, to name but a few - but, regardless, I harboured real fears that the freedom to dip quill in ink whenever, wherever would be supplanted by a system of scheduling and timetabling. My output would have to be managed - harnessed and condensed into a few stolen hours.
My anxiety deepened when, during a routine blood test at 13 weeks, a midwife chanced upon the faded wounds of self-harm. The scars were years old, inflicted during a period in my mid-20s that was blighted with episodes of depression and mania. But I had hitherto managed perfectly without mood stabilisers and I expressed concern that conducting a postmortem on my mental health was more likely to trigger a relapse than prevent one. Nonetheless, I was there in the system as "at risk" and I was coerced into seeing a shrink. The hospital psychiatrist stressed time and again that her role was to support me - this was not a litmus test to deem how fit a mother I would be. And yet there was something about her tone, and the implications she made in letters to my GP, that suggested otherwise.
Expectant mothers who fail to float around in a state of feverish anticipation are regarded with suspicion, especially if the pregnancy is planned. It's a case of: well you wanted the baby in the first place. Our misgivings are expected to be confined to the birth itself and the baby's wellbeing - while the wider concerns of our career, relationships and financial independence are magically supposed to pale into insignificance. Maternal feelings are thought to be so deeply rooted in our "nature" that it is almost deemed "unnatural" to experience anything negative - dread, regret or even resentment - toward the unborn life in the womb. Women who feel this way are viewed askance; they must be suffering from ill mental health (prenatal depression) or they're simply Bad Mothers in the making.
Even more entrenched in women's "essence" is a non-negotiable pre-programming that we love our offspring immediately and unconditionally, right from the start. Antenatal classes dangle the carrot of maternal bliss as pay off for prolonged, traumatic labours. The old midwives' tale has it that the agonies of childbirth are swiftly blown away by an instantaneous and overwhelming surge of love. Like most first-time mothers I took this as gospel. I relied upon it as an absolute given that no matter how exacting the birth might be, whatever the child's gender, however it came out, as soon as it came out, I would love it completely, heart and soul.
By the time I went into labour I had been awake for 48 hours. When my midwife finally established that the baby was breech - which the various scans had failed to pick up - I was rushed through to deliver him via emergency caesarean section. For anyone in any doubt whatsoever, the section is no easy opt out; it's major surgery. After an hour's breather I was wheeled on to a ward full of lively newborns. By now I hadn't slept for almost 60 hours. But in spite of being deemed "high risk" and in spite of the previous role that sleep deprivation had played in triggering manic episodes, I was forced to stay awake. There was an empty ward next door into which I repeatedly begged to be moved so that I could sleep when my baby slept - which was little and infrequently. Such requests were denied. By the fourth night I was figuring out how to detach the system of tubes and drips that fetter new mums to their beds so I could do a runner. I was hallucinating. I was suicidal.
I don't know how Aimee, one of the midwives working the night shift, appeared at my bed; perhaps, in my sleep-starved half-life I'd buzzed for her, or one of the neighbouring mothers had alerted her to my behaviour. Whatever the case, I trusted her instinctively and for the first time I was able to open up to another woman about my deep, dark fears, without being judged. I told her that I was terrified I would never bond with my baby, that breast-feeding had so far failed to solder us together in the ways I'd assumed nature intended. I told her that I was fighting the instinct to bolt and because I would never be able to live with the shame of walking away, suicide seemed like the only option.
She told me the fourth night is always the most difficult, soothed me to sleep, then took my baby away and delivered him to my breast four unbroken hours later. It was the first time I'd slept in days. When I woke up, the world looked less bleak, and I was allowed - indeed, compelled - to take baby home. But back at the homestead and in spite of the relentless support from Leo's doting father and our extended families, the absolute lack of sleep continued to play havoc with my moods. My small boy, suffering from undiagnosed reflux, was up eight, nine times a night, on the breast for hours at a time, but unable to draw succour. Often I found myself stumbling around the village in the small hours of the morning fantasising about acceptable escape routes. When I finally got him to sleep I'd sit in my local cafe casually penning suicide notes as though they were thank-you letters for baby gifts. In fact, the ideation of suicide acted as a safety valve during those first six weeks. The promise that soon I might be able to switch off the black noise in my head and stop the vaulting in my guts kept me going.
Amid the flurry of midwives and militant feeding specialists who crossed the threshold in those first weeks - none of whom picked up on my mental decline - one good health visitor came into our lives. She could see I was coping badly and reassured me it was not uncommon. She didn't say it was "natural" not to bond immediately and automatically with your baby, but it certainly wasn't "abnormal" to feel a degree of anger or resentment.
Her words were like a huge shot of serotonin to the spirit - yet the truth was that I was never angry at my baby. It was the sisterhood I had come to resent. After all, wasn't motherhood supposed to be the glue that binds feminists of all persuasion? Isn't the bond you form with women on becoming a mother as inviolable as the bond you form with your baby? That's the spin, yet in spite of the antenatal and postnatal clannishness that is supposed to accompany childbirth there is paltry discursive terrain for mothers like myself to come clean.
Instead there seems to be a collective code of silence governing those first few months of motherhood. Maybe it is born of a time-cherished will to preserve the magical aura of new birth for all expectant mothers. Or maybe it's simply too horrid to acknowledge - the idea that we might not fall head over heels in love with our newborn is plain unthinkable. As a mother, I now know why those women abandon their babies in church yards and hospital toilets. I understand them in a way that I never could before, yet in spite of the hyper-awareness that these days surrounds postnatal depression those women are still viewed as pariahs. Is it because walking out on a child is still seen as a male prerogative? Or is it because there is no worse stick society can beat a woman with than the slur of being a Bad Mother?
It seems illogical that feminism has progressed to a point where many young women no longer see gender as a life determinant or deterrent yet we've wholly failed to twig that the prevailing icon of the unimpeachable mother is in fact a requirement of the patriarchy. It's enough that men assume and expect us to "raise" their progeny without the sisterhood getting in on the act, too.
Sadly, there seems to exist this competitiveness between new mothers based on the precociousness of their newborn. That, in turn, finds its most unrealistic expression in the business of sleep, or rather "sleeping through". The bestselling No Cry and Cry It Out manuals - gospel, if contradictory, texts to all new mothers - suggest that a baby's sleep patterns are within our control. Therefore, in not controlling them we are fallible. We have failed. The one and only time I attended a postnatal group I came away feeling betrayed. Despite the preponderance of hollow eyes, haggard faces and defensive demeanours, most of these women bragged that their babies were sleeping through. Babies that were barely three months old, babies that were breast fed and had yet to even start teething. "F---ing liars!" I wanted to scream. I wondered, if asked directly, how many women would take a deep breath and own up to feelings of isolation, of madness, of sheer despair and naked resentment?
Taking the step to see a different psychiatrist and articulating to her the feelings I'd been harbouring was a step in the right direction. I told her that I fantasised about abandoning my baby. I told her that I thought about suicide a lot, that the biggest dilemma motherhood posed to me was whether or not to take my son with me. Rather than section me as I had expected, involve social services or at best prescribe monster doses of lithium, she recommended that I pop a sleeping tablet. She used the analogy of diabetics who forget to take their insulin and explained how the rapid dip in sugar levels can trigger suicidal thoughts. Sleep deprivation, she explained, can work in pretty much the same way.
She instructed me to leave Leo with my mum, go home and sleep for 12 hours solid. I remember waking the next morning refreshed, mentally replenished. The Smiths were on the radio, birds were bickering outside. I felt that immediate and visceral urge to write - not to purge or exorcise demons, but for pleasure. However, the need to boot up my laptop was quickly overridden by a stronger, unfamiliar pull that came from 20 miles down the M62. There, my little man was waiting - and I could not bear to be without him. I had butterflies in my stomach all the way. For the first time since his arrival I was able to experience that rib-crushing heave of euphoria on picking him up.
I don't think for a moment I'm a Bad Mother for having felt like this, though it's taken a while to be able to admit it. But the bottom line is that sisters aren't doing it for themselves, we're doing it to each other. The sooner we allow that every mother's nature develops in its own individual way, the quicker we join the same side. For now, we're still taking the bait and trying to best one another, doing everything we can to prove that we're the perfect mother, just to give our men what they've always taken for granted.
by 
