You should be happy. You should be overjoyed.
You should be looking at nursery colours.
But yet there's this nagging feeling that...that I don't love the baby
and that the baby is what's causing the depression,
so by taking me and the baby out...
..I can get my life back.
My filter just started seeing everything horrible.
I was vile. That's how I've described it, over and over.
That I was the most vile version of myself.
There was days that I just felt if I opened my mouth,
all that was going to come out was tears, hatred, anger.
I remember, kind of, prodding it and half of me not wanting it,
because it was definitely an "it", to move.
But then the good side of my head, the loving, maternal side,
that wasn't so dirty and infected with illness,
wanting the baby to move.
But it's this constant fight between this want to have a baby,
then the illness telling you you're not good enough,
you've already fallen at the first hurdle.
When you walk into a maternity shop and everything is pink and floral,
I'm going, I'm a bloody tomboy and I'm having to change my style.
I am no longer me.
I am an alien spaceship. I'm a carrier. I'm a cow.
Every element of pregnancy is living...
well, being a mum, is living for somebody else.
I lose my identity in that
and I think that's part of what causes the depression.
And it makes you feel quite ill, thinking that I'm blaming
this unborn baby that's done nothing wrong.
I remember holding my husband's arm and saying to him,
"I'm not sure if I can love the baby."
I've talked about killing the baby,
I've talked about trying to kill myself and wanting it all to stop
and this feeling of suddenly actually having to confront
this perfect baby
but know that all my thoughts leading up to it hadn't been...
People want to talk about, "How wonderful, you're pregnant.
"How far along are you? "Is it a boy or is it a girl?"
And you're going, I don't even really want to accept that
I'm pregnant.
"Yeah, hi, I don't want my baby, but I'm seven months pregnant. Do you feel the same?"
That's not something you really say at a coffee morning.
It makes you feel like a crap mum before you're even a mum
to just admit that you're not feeling happy about being pregnant.
My super elegant gynaecologist, she asked me how I was,
and that was the breaking point, and all the emotion came out.
The words were messy and...
..like a torrent of tears whilst I'm...
..half naked, legs akimbo.
Anyway, she told me that there was such a thing
as antenatal depression.
I can't cope with the hormones that happen to your body in pregnancy.
I think on top of my Italian and Polish hormones, it's just too much.
Erm, and instead of, sort of, nesting and knitting booties,
I kind of... I fight and I'm angry.
My gynie referred me to a psychotherapist
and I got stuck on a lot of medicine,
and it worked...so quickly.
I was walking with my mum and I remember crying and saying,
"I feel so good, I feel so light.
"Is this how normal people feel on a daily basis?"
And then also so sad again in that constant conflict with myself,
why do I have to take medicine to feel like this,
to feel like everybody else?
That moment you hold your baby, everything's OK.
I'd never seen an actual newborn baby.
That purple, bloody, weird alien, kind of covered in white gunk
and covered in me, and it was literally like I'd taken
an ecstasy tablet that had just taken effect,
high on love,
which is how I imagine everybody to feel throughout pregnancy.
And I think, for me, that's the sadness of antenatal depression.
To spend nine months that are meant to be the happiest months
of your life worrying, hating your baby,
not being able to talk about it, not being able to admit it.
The books will say how your body changes and how your boobs will start leaking
or what size your vagina will be when you're giving birth,
but they don't talk about how to deal with our feelings.
It needs to be normalised that not everybody
is full of the joys of spring when they're pregnant.
I can sit here and I can curse myself for having had it
but, yeah, it's an illness.
I didn't choose to have it,
it chose to plague me.