Learning To Be A Mother Again After Postpartum Psychosis

I remember the moment I first saw my son. I thought he looked like a stranger. I felt his skin against my own, the beat of his heart, and I wondered at the fragility of this life in my arms.

Three months later, an ocean away, I would look at his eyes and see devils in them. I was experiencing postpartum psychosis, triggered by a lack of sleep and the stress of hearing the worries of my in-laws.

By the time my husband took me to the emergency room, I was stripping off my clothes and screaming that we were all characters in Dante’s Inferno. The days that followed were fractured into moments of terror. I had no sense of time or place. I no longer knew who I was. Sometimes I was my mother, my husband, my son. The story of my life encompassed centuries, strands of novels I’d read, of films I’d seen.

Sometimes I remembered that I had a baby, sometimes I would call for him. Why wasn’t he with me? He must be dead, I thought, otherwise I wouldn’t have let him go. I clutched at the strange scar at the bottom of my stomach, and my hands shook every time I expressed milk into the metal sink, my breasts were inflamed, a tangle of knots.

'You have to get better so you can go home to your baby,' the nurses would say. Baby? I had a photo of a baby in my pocket, but I couldn’t recognise his face. I wrote my son’s name over and over again in a notebook my husband had left for me. I traced the letters, thinking that in writing, it would help me remember.

But when I was released, I still didn’t remember. When my son was put in my arms, I felt only absence. He was a stranger again.

It was physically painful to hold him. It felt wrong in every way. I wanted to push him away from me, and I tried to hide the horror I felt. I mostly felt horror at myself.

I was a mother who couldn’t be trusted. I tried to understand this. My husband started to sleep in the living room because he would find me in the kitchen, talking about wrapping our son in plastic. He tried to say it gently when he told me this, explaining that it must be the medication, but I could hear the fear in his voice.

Perhaps this is why I can’t hold him, I thought. I had sent my son away from me, it was a way of trying to protect him. And so I kept my distance, and I watched. I watched as my son reached for my husband. When his first words were Appa, and then banana, apple, tiger, a litany of words before he tried to say Omma.

I tried to remember to smile at him, but often I would forget. My face when I looked at him was a question, wondering if I would ever feel like a mother again. And he would stare back me, his face blank, a mirror of my own.

I held him every day, for a few moments only, or as long as I could take it while my body trembled. I would close my eyes and try to remember the hours we sat together, the way he’d clung to me.

Sometimes, I felt a deep sense of shame, what kind of mother was I? I couldn’t even hold my son. He had relied on me, and I had left him. I had broken, when I wasn’t meant to break.

I kept looking for parts of him that I would recognize. Where was the love I’d had for him? I thought it must be somewhere, it was hidden deep within, it was just lost, that meant it could be found. But it wasn’t lost, it was gone.

I took on motherhood like a task. I practiced smiling at my son, I timed my hugs, counting slowly while I held him. I told myself that pretending was necessary, that eventually, it would feel real.

Often I felt that I wasn’t the mother my son deserved. But then I thought of the pull I felt towards him, the mask that I put on willingly each day hoping that it would eventually feel real.

I understood that while I was waiting to feel love, I was overlooking something powerful. And I took comfort that in the action of love, there was the proof of it. I was still a mother, I was coming back to him, and we would not be strangers again.

Inferno by Catherine Cho is out now on hardback, audiobook and kindle.

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