The Day I...:
met despair
Hazel Rolston battled with post-natal depression for many years. She tells Ruth Dickinson about her journey from despair to recovery...
The day that Katherine had her cardiac arrest, was almost like the day bomb went off for me that I had been waiting for most of my life.
She was ten weeks old when we discovered that nearly all of her intestine was through a hole in her diaphragm where one of her lungs should have been.
The day after her operation the nurses had taken all her monitors off because they said she was doing well. Then her dummy fell out. Her breathing slowed down. She turned blue and I realised she had stopped breathing. Steve and I were ushered out immediately and within seconds the crash bell went.
I felt as if God had let me be pushed beyond what I could bear. In the middle of a crisis I suddenly started to be angry with God.
Four days later, we were allowed to take her home. I remember the nurse saying, “Well it’s all over, off you go and enjoy the rest of your life.” I was bemused. I couldn’t just put it all behind me.
The whole experience was isolating. A lot of my friendships were with people who had had babies the same time as me. Often the conversations revolved around brands and baby clothes and so on, but to me it seemed trivial. I was busy thinking, “Is this going to happen again?”
I recognised almost immediately that something had happened to me that day, but the onset of depression was gradual. I started to feel intensely guilty, blaming myself for Katherine’s illness being missed. I felt I had failed as a mother, that I had let her suffer for ten weeks.
I went from having general negative feelings to suddenly entering feelings of self-loathing. I started to feel suicidal. She was only six months old, and I remember thinking, ‘if I go now she will get somebody much better, Steve could marry somebody else’.
It took a turn for the worse when I developed a fixed anxiety. I became completely gripped with the fact that Katherine might not smile at me. Initially, the compulsion to see her smile had an urgency about it, it was almost as if someone was holding a gun to my head and would blow it off if I couldn’t give the right answer. I went to the GP for medication and the best way of describing their effect is that they removed the immediate sense of danger. The gun was still there – but it had been set down.
But then I had a new anxiety. The thought went through my mind one day: “How do I know I am not a pedophile?” I was so frightened it stopped my ability to think. My fear just kept escalating, and I can honestly say that was my worst moment. It’s as if I was meeting despair.
I found coming to church really hard during this time. I felt that there was not really a place within the church for my level of brokenness. I found the sermons didn’t seem to reflect my desperation. But God in his grace always gave me something.
Medical treatment was an important step for me. I also had a great mum’s group at church where someone would look after our children, and that gave us some respite so we could pray and cry and support each other. Those little steps helped me to take bigger steps, which were eventually to go to counselling, have some cognitive behavioural therapy and face old hurts from the past.
Prior to post-natal depression happening I somehow thought that if I had a problem I could run into church and pray about it and that God would not let me reach a point of complete brokenness. My perspective has shifted now. The Bible is full of examples of people who do follow God who do trust God, but for whatever reason God allows them to go through really dark, difficult unexplainable situations. I believe that our faith really isn’t about our triumphant answered prayers, it is about seeing God on our journey, trusting him in those dark places and also trusting that he can bring us into lighter places.
Katherine is now 11. We talk quite openly about the fact that I have been ill and that at times I feel like I was not the mother that I wanted to be. At this stage she is very accepting of that, though there may come a point in the future where she is not. What I hope for her is that she comes to an acceptance, as I have, that life isn’t perfect, but that’s ok.
‘Beyond the Edge’ by Hazel Rolston is published by IVP. Read her blog at www.mybeyondtheedge.com
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