A full circle moment

Last night, I sat in The Great Hall of the University of Newcastle watching an interview with Australian writer, Tim Winton, when I was catapulted to just under 30 years ago – a time when I sat in The Great Hall for the first time. It was my first day of uni and I was there to become a journalist. It was also the first time I had experienced a panic attack.

Mental health disorders were not a ‘thing’ in 1995. Clearly they existed, but no one talked about them, or really understood them.

I had been heading down, what I now realise, was a really rocky slope since mid-1994 when the pressure of the impending HSC, my perfectionism, and the lack of my perceived post-school options collided in an almighty shitstorm. I spent months studying until midnight, waking up at 4-5am with chest pains and a vomit or two before heading to the loungeroom to manage the angst with hot tea and re-runs of Neighbours. There were no special considerations. No one at the school knew. The day my HSC finished was the day my chest pains and vomiting stopped. Now that I could eat again, I celebrated with a bottle of Coke, and some Jatz with French onion dip. Little did I know that the end of this chapter would be just the beginning of a lifelong skirmish with fluctuating mental health ‘issues.’

Things got a little dark when I moved from my tiny country town of 3,500 residents to a city with around 300,000. I gave zero fucks about being accepted into uni even though it was all I had aimed for after slogging it out to achieve a magic number. I was flatlining, which by today’s standards would’ve been diagnosed as depression. Then there was the panic attack on day one that snowballed to 3 years of panic attacks.

My first panic attack was like nothing I had felt before. I had to get the hell out of that Great Hall, immediately, and take refuge in the bathroom. With lightheadedness, thumping chest, and gulping breaths, it was the epitome of fight or flight. I’d dived off a cliff and it was on like Donkey Kong. I was now in a long-term battle with myself.

My parents tried to help by sending me to a psychiatrist and a hypnotherapist, but it was a different time. The medications were hard core and there was no language around what I was experiencing. I didn’t tell the uni – I didn’t even know if it was an option. I couldn’t let my friends know – the shame would’ve killed me. Instead, I decided I would manage it myself – no medication, no therapy, no telling anyone. I developed workarounds and stealthy avoidance tactics. I had some healthy coping mechanisms such as digging my fingernails into my skin if I felt the panic rising in order to shift the focus from my thoughts. I kept showing up to classes (mostly!) and held down a number of jobs. I was a high functioning lunatic. Was I thriving though? Absolutely not! I was languishing and just scraping through.

God knows how I finished my degree as there was so much effort going in to appearing ‘normal’. But I finished it, graduated, and created more and more coping mechanisms (not always ideal) that allowed me to live a pretty good life. But the way my brain is wired means that the ‘crazy’ would keep rearing its head at the most inopportune fucking moments. It was becoming inconvenient, irritating, and exhausting. I’m sure it affected (and still might) every part of my life – from my career choices to my relationships, my parenting, and my motivation (or lack thereof).

As the years went on, I spent quite a bit of time ‘in therapy’ but it wasn’t until I said enough was enough at the age of 35 that I finally gave medication another go, and what an epiphany that was! With anxiety taking more of a back seat, I began to flourish, and even when shit went down – and it did go down (as it does for everyone) – I could keep my head above water.

Is it a perfect solution? Not at all! I’ve had to accept that my anxiously wired brain will always throw some curveballs. There’ll always be a niggling little voice inside that second guesses something I’ve said in a conversation or worries that I’ve overplayed a strength. There will always be an underlying fear that I’m simply not ‘good enough’. There will be times when people may need to talk me down from the ledge if I think I’ve upset someone. There will be a tendency for me to default to the ‘safer option’ (particularly career-wise), and I’ll still need to take the odd Gastro Stop tablet before I board a plane. But, time, age, experience, medication, and a sense of humour have been great healers. They have helped me to embrace my unique brand of ‘crazy’.

I can’t go back and be kinder to 17-year-old me, but I can now sit in The Great Hall, albeit still not a professional writer and still looking for escape routes.

I can now sit in The Great Hall and stay.

So apparently I dropped all the balls…

It probably wasn’t the best time for me to start reading a book entitled, “How Not to F*** Them up” (by British psychologist, Oliver James) in my very fragile pre-menstrual state, but as I walked around the library with Miss C & The Ranga in tow - it literally leapt off the shelf and into my hand.

I thought perhaps it might have mystical properties – that by simply touching it, it would give me the power to create well adjusted children or at least help me to fix some of my monumental stuff-ups, but as I opened the cover I realised it was directed at those with children under three – those who still had time to correct their mistakes before everything went to hell in a handbasket and said child/ren reached the magic age of three and spontaneously combusted.

Despite the fact my children are five and three-and-a-half, I devoured the first 45 pages of the book with an insatiable appetite – hoping like hell that I got something right, but quickly came to the realisation that I need to seriously reconsider my nomination for Mother of the Year.

According to the book, mothers can generally be split into three categories – Organisers (routine based mothers, full-time paid workers, baby works around them) Huggers (earth mothers, co-sleepers, stay-at-home mothers, works around baby) & Fleximums (a combination of Organisers and Huggers, part-time paid workers).

Apparently there are positive and negative attributes to all groups and some mothers will not necessarily fit the exact mould of a particular category. However, what James makes quite clear so far in the book is that genetics play little (if any) role in the personality traits of a child and that nurture is everything.

He points out that the under-threes require a responsive, attentive adult to help them develop into a secure person. On a positive note he explains that it doesn’t have to be the mother, it could be a father/partner, a grandparent, a relative or an attentive nanny or carer, and that if a mother is depressed or unresponsive, or if she is unhappy staying at home full-time, that a suitable caring alternative is preferable for the child. However, he then goes on to deliver the old day care centre chestnut citing studies which show increases in cortisol levels and behavioural problems in regards to under-threes in centre based care.

So basically for the general population whose alternative care option is a day care centre you are damned if you do and damned if you don’t.

I am the first to admit that I found mothering under-threes to be occasionally rewarding, but mostly relentless. I had two children 18.5 months apart and after the birth of The Ranga, stayed at home full-time for the next two years. I am almost positive I was suffering from depression a lot of the time. I tried my best to entertain and engage with my children, but know for a fact that personally I would have felt better if I’d been working part-time at that stage.  

I painted a façade of happy families and sought therapy along the way, but I was so afraid of the propaganda and ‘studies’ that told me that day care was an ‘evil’ place where children suffered at the mercy of their ‘selfish’ mothers, that my children may have inadvertently suffered as a result.

Certainly there were times of enormous fulfilment in my early mothering career, but mostly it was hard yakka. Those who take to early mothering with aplomb will be aghast at my confession, I’m sure.

I may not have been the archetypal earth mother, but for what it’s worth I tried very, very hard.

When I finally allowed myself to send The Ranga to day care for two days per week at 2 years, 8 months, it was like a friggin’ epiphany. The staff was warm and caring. The environment was stimulating. Hell, he could do Mister Maker craft until the cows came home and I could go to work without burdening anyone, and safe in the knowledge that he was well taken care of.

For my situation, part-time freedom meant better mental health, which in turn made me a better mother.

So yes – perhaps I fucked up (although no one has spontaneously combusted lately) - not because I sent my son to a day care centre but because I didn’t do it earlier.