Читать книгу An Angel on My Shoulder - Theresa Cheung, Theresa Cheung - Страница 6

Angels don’t worry about you.

They believe in you.

Author unknown

‘If you could just fill out this form,’ my health visitor said with a gentle smile.

‘What’s it for?’ I asked.

‘I need to get every new mum to fill one out. It’s just a formality. Just try to answer the questions as truthfully as you can.’

My tired eyes scanned the form. It was an Edinburgh post-natal depression survey. I’d filled out one just like this a year and a half before when my son was born. My health visitor held out her arms to take my 12-week-old daughter from me so I could work through the form. I sat down and glanced quickly through the questions:

Have I been able to laugh or see the funny side of things?

Have I blamed myself unnecessarily for things?

Have I felt anxious or worried or scared or panicky for no reason?

Have things been getting on top of me?

Have I had difficulty sleeping because of unhappiness?

Have I felt sad or miserable?

There were a few others, but they were all pretty similar. I could clearly see that the questionnaire was trying to help the health visitor assess the state of my emotional health.

At first I toyed with the idea of being brutally honest. Yes, I was feeling tired and unhappy, and I had been crying myself to sleep at night between feeds, but there was no way I was going to admit this on a form. Besides, it was only a phase I was going through and I would soon shake it off. I’d done my reading and I knew all about the post-baby blues. I decided it would be far better to put a positive spin on things – wasn’t that what everyone did? In fact, it felt ridiculous doing the test in the first place. I wasn’t depressed. I wasn’t ill or anything. I wasn’t contemplating harming myself or the baby. I was just feeling a little low. I grabbed a pen and ticked all the ‘Hardly ever’ options.

As I closed my front door behind the health worker I felt a rush of relief, but that relief was also tinged with disappointment. My mother had always encouraged me to ask for help if I needed it and here I was refusing help when it was offered because I was frightened of being labelled a bad mother. But then I reasoned that I was doing the right thing. What if everything got out of hand and a few tears at bedtime were somehow diagnosed as full-blown post-natal depression? Visions of social workers swooping in and taking my children from me flashed through my mind.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but that was the moment when I really started to lose a sense of perspective. My husband was working hard to pay the bills and I was alone with the kids all day and spiralling fast into depression. Neither of us had parents that were alive, and apart from my brother (who was living abroad at the time, so visits were sporadic), we had no close family to give us a break from time to time. Hiring an au pair or nanny was out of the question for me, not just because we were watching the pennies but because I was paranoid about trusting anyone to look after my precious babies. So there I was pretending that life couldn’t get any better when in fact I was struggling to keep my head above water.