Hand, foot, and mouth: an essay on depression during motherhood.

 “Ahh” the doctor said knowingly, as he peered into her mouth. “Looks like hand, foot, and mouth to me,” he then explained while examining her toes. “You’ll need to keep her home and away from everyone.” he concluded, handing me a prescription for more pamol with the cautious warning, “you’ll need it.”

I used to think hand, foot, and mouth was something that only plagued unlucky sheep. However, toddlerhood has shown me that if there's a gross bug to catch, they will catch it. They just seem to lick everything in sight. This prognosis of having our usual routine disrupted made me feel a bit all over the place.

//

I feel dull. And dulled. Each day that stretches before me yawns, gaping, open, an unfathomable expanse of wondering how I’ll possibly cope. The clawing anxiety sets in too - if these days are long and heavy right now, how much more will they swell and expand in a few months time when my second baby arrives?

Am I meant to feel this way? Maybe this is the united, fearful story of all parents. I know that my judgement isn’t to be solely trusted, please do add the salt, but everyone around me looks as though they are enjoying it all, the chaos, the jumble, the exhaustion. Or perhaps, at the very least, they appear to be coping.

I’m trying very hard to enjoy it too. However, the act of trying only inflates my insatiable guilt, because shouldn’t mothering be the most natural thing in the world?

//

I find it difficult to see the value in what I do. I know that I’m raising my daughter with love and that this loving she gets from us, her parents, is everything. Yet, within the reality of each day it’s hard to see this as mattering especially in comparison with the loud, shiny, successes beyond our four walls. I cook and clean and wash and love, but never feel like I have anything to show for it. My work is swallowed, fully and uncomfortably, to within the guttural depths of each day, only to be repeated again and again with the next dawn.

//

My husband and I got lucky. We found each other in our late teens and were married a few years later. This is both a gift and a constant work in progress. Making time for each other usually comes last, the scraps leftover at the edge of each night.

He is wonderful, though. In the depths of these dark floods, however, I bubble with resentment towards our differing roles. This warrants a firm scolding from myself for not being grateful and content enough within these early years. The guilt chokes me, again, thick and burning in my throat.

Am I supposed to feel so deep within this expanse, so small and at the will of every tide, each day?

//

The baby in my belly is a capsicum and then a broccoli and then a cabbage. I don’t recognize my unfamiliar exterior, my morphing, shapeshifting skin. My body (me, I should say, though it feels difficult to connect those two dots), feels big and raw and strange. I don’t know who she is, with the annoying maternity jeans and the too-short t-shirts. It’s a bloody miracle though, isn’t it, all this growing? But I only dwell in the discomfort. 

Body positivity is a remarkably easy practice when it’s not towards yourself.

//

Maybe I just need to start making those casseroles in the slow cooker and decorating the house for each occasion and using better filters. Then perhaps I’ll be able to step back and feel proud. Like I’ve accomplished something.

//

I think perhaps I’m fine, but just a little bit lost.

//

My toddler is sick and tired of being sick and tired. Bath time arrived and just as quickly left; a question that provoked her into sobbing in my arms. I tried to change her nappy as her kicking and screaming intensified, her cheeks flushed with fever. She peed all over me, the couch, and the floor. I mopped up the floor and changed my clothes and soothed her all at once, accomplishing none of these things very well, while the dog kept trying to lick the floor. I yelled at the dog and my toddler became more inconsolable. She refused to take pamol and I just cried and cried with her. 

I often feel like the worst mum in the world. And a pretty awful dog owner too.

When I put her to bed, with her spotty mouth and red eyes, hands clutching her prized giraffes, the guilt washed over me again. She deserves someone who can cope.

//

Looking out of the kitchen window, I notice that some of the seedlings that my toddler and I planted together a week ago have begun to sprout. 

This. This is warm. 

This is the nicest I’ve felt in a while and that makes me feel sick.

Why can’t my daughter’s smile, her arms wrapped around my neck, the way she runs into my embrace, why can't these small miracles be what breaks through my spells? Why not the baby somersaulting in my belly, my husband’s familiar love, our warm home, our loyal dog; why are these things not what snaps me out?

These are the best, most incredible parts of my life, but for some reason they cannot pull me out of my own darkness.

Instead, it’s some run-of-the-mill seedlings that make me not fear what tomorrow holds. 

//

I swallow red pills, bright blood droplets, 325mg of ferrous sulfate.

I swallow tiny white dots, iodine, to help my baby’s brain.

And I swallow oblong splinters, to try and help mine.

Pregnancy makes you rattle.

//

It’s a balancing act of wooden chairs, all of this, this vague attempt of coping and fighting this beast day in and day out. The chairs are all precariously stacked and ready to fall at a moment’s notice. If one isn’t in quite the right spot, a leg slips or a panel sticks, everything comes tumbling down.

- The correct medications, going outside, talking to people, sunshine, keeping busy, not having wild pregnancy or newborn hormones, getting enough sleep. -

These are the chairs that I try to stack each, painstaking day.

//

This is just one of those spells, I know it is. I am far away from the raging tides that used to floor me. I have tools now. I have strategies now. Sometimes they just get lost on me, that’s all, and it takes a few days to find my feet again.

Sometimes all you need is time to take you through.

Then I can see that having her sticky, pineapple-ly hands reaching for me is what matters. That my husband wrapping his arms around me matters. That being the person, their person, that they both go to when they need to feel loved, is what matters. That no matter how impatient I get with the dog, that she still brings me her favorite toy. That no matter how much I want the earth to swallow me whole, that this feeling will pass.

Stacking your chairs takes time, Healing from hand, foot, and mouth does too.

//

I’ve really stuck my foot in my mouth with this one.