Madness, Mayhem and Motherhood

by Nikki McWatters

  My pregnancy weight was falling off slowly. It was all the walking I did. The weekly cab fares from Katoomba were crippling me financially but I couldn’t get the shopping home any other way. I was trying to write. I was trying to write my story. But I just ended up with lots of suicidal poetry. When I’d decided to go through with the pregnancy and invite another human being into my life, I had been buoyed up by happy, loving hormones. But reality had weighed me down with evil, sad ones. Bad Nikki had left me alone for the whole pregnancy, thank God, but she was back and she’d moved in to stay, it seemed.

  I loved, loved, loved being a mum, but I needed to have something else to reach for. Something for me. A goal. I liked the book idea but every time I sat down to actually write words, someone needed something, the baby started crying, a basket of ironing arrived or Bad Nikki started telling me I was useless and disgusting until I just sat in the corner of the room, back against the wall, knees to my chin, and rocked and sobbed.

  I had stupid chickens. I thought it would save us some money, but one of them got egg-bound and I was going to have to dig the rotten egg out of its fanny with a stick, or get Rhoni’s husband to come and hack off its head to put it out of its misery. Ben said he’d do it but I didn’t want him blooded by chicken murder before he’d turned twelve. My herb garden was producing parsley if little else. My friends had stopped coming up to the mountains to visit me because I had become so boring and spent all my conversation time complaining about everything. Because everything sucked. Girl George moved to Noosa with her new man. She’d found her Mr Right after all and they were due to get married in a few months. She’d sent me a letter and a clipping from a magazine of her wedding dress. It was beautiful. I looked in the mirror at the frumpy mess in her tracksuit pants and oversized T-shirt and couldn’t ever imagine putting on a glamorous dress ever again. Sam had another baby on the way, was loving married life and the Jehovah’s Witnesses took up most of her time anyway. Bobby had just disappeared off the face of the earth, last heard from in some African outpost, never to be heard from again. Kate’s flower farm was going great guns and she kept ringing and inviting me to come and stay with them, and I thought that I might one day, but organising that with a baby and no car just sounded like way too much hard work. If I hadn’t had Rhoni just around the corner, I would have been a completely lonely island.

  I had become a hideous beast. My stomach was like a hessian sack and I hated it. My legs were an Amazonian forest of coarse hair, my eyebrows had sprouted into a shrubbery and my temples were going battleship grey. I was thirty but felt sixty. My teeth ached but I couldn’t afford a dentist. My knees creaked. I was falling apart.

  On weekends, the boys would play outside and chase the chickens, and I’d given them the chore of building a new hen house. They had to use some of the old materials the landlords had left in the back shed, so the hen house was a nightmare construction of broken bricks, wire and old clothes line. There was no way it would keep any chickens safe but it kept Ben and Toby occupied, so I kept telling them it looked awesome.

  I somehow managed to host a birthday party for Toby. It was a fancy dress do and I set up a ghetto blaster in the garage, invited his whole class and hosted a disco. Ben dressed as the Joker and Toby was a clown. All the kids had a blast. Toby scored lots of money in cards and I borrowed some from him to get essentials because I’d spent every last cent I had on party pies and sausage rolls. There were ratty, torn streamers flying around the backyard for weeks after the party but eventually the chickens ate them. And then one morning I woke up to find that a fox had eaten the chickens. There were enough feathers left behind to make a quilt. The boys were sad for a day or so but they still had the evil cat to play with, although he didn’t really like the boys so he wasn’t much fun as far as pets went.

  I scored another ironing client. He was actually damn cute and I began thinking sordid thoughts I hadn’t entertained in a long time, but I lost them cold when he told me he had once killed someone. Alarm bells. Anyway, I thought, I was so disgusting I could safely rule out ever sleeping with anyone again.

  One day I went to Springwood. A bunch of Jehovah’s Witness women were having me to lunch. I was so lonely and down that Sam had sent the local bloody doorknockers around to check on me. It was nice to know someone cared enough to look out for me. Sam was that rare thing: a true friend. Quite bizarrely, I was actually so lonely and miserable I ended up signing up for their Bible studies and I did it for many weeks, listening to stuff that went against everything I believed. I started off being argumentative, desperately trying to convert them to atheism, but eventually I surrendered and let them talk about Jesus and God and angels and demons and all of that and just let it wash over me. Fairy-tales were soothing when your soul was as black and dead as mine was during those dark days. But I did enjoy the women’s company. They were lovely, generous people and I thought it was sweet that they had their weird beliefs. They were very genuine. I found their fervour refreshing. It might have been nice to believe in something but I was too busy trying to stay alive and upright and I had never felt the presence of God or anything like that in my life. The only supernatural entity that hung around me was Bad Nikki and she was a complete bitch, plus I knew she was my own creation, not something external to or separate from me.

  I always got snagged on the JWs’ reluctance to let their children have blood transfusions though. That bit I could not understand, no matter how many times they tried to explain it to me. It was something about God owning your blood, and you couldn’t go around letting blood or ingesting blood in any way. But they ate meat? This I did not understand.

  ‘But the meat we eat has been bled,’ they told me patiently.

  ‘Rubbish.’ I laughed. ‘If I eat a rare steak there is blood all over the plate. If you eat steak, you are ingesting blood.’

  ‘No, it’s not blood: it’s plasma.’

  Oh for heaven’s sake! I really just couldn’t fight against silly logic like that.

  So I was at lunch and we were all sharing a bottle of wine between six of us, which left me nowhere close to funny. I needed a few glasses to just feel like talking at all. But I sipped at my thimble of booze and tried really hard to chat and begin conversations that had nothing to do with God. Harry slept in his pram in the corner of the room. The host served up bowls of vegetable soup.

  ‘Not for me, thanks.’ I smiled politely. ‘I want to leave room for lunch. I don’t eat much.’

  She raised her eyebrows and cocked her head. ‘But this is lunch.’

  Foot in mouth. Who served soup as a main meal? Where I came from soup was a starter dish. Maybe it was a mountains thing. Because it was always cold. Maybe it was a Jehovah’s Witness thing. The soup looked like blood, which I found monumentally ironic. I stared into the bowl and thought I could make out shapes, faces. It was like looking at an inkblot in a psych ward.

  I really thought I had held it together well. I’d been polite and smiled at people’s lame jokes. I’d not arced up at saying prayers before the meal. I was on my best behaviour. I didn’t grab other people’s wine and guzzle it, although I wanted to. But as I was coming back from the toilet, one woman from my Bible study group stopped me and held my wrist.

  ‘Are you OK, Nikki?’ she asked.

  ‘Sure.’ I forced a fake smile. ‘Why do you ask?’

  ‘I’ve been watching you lately and I’ve been worried about you. You don’t seem very happy,’ she said. ‘I work in mental health … well … the community counselling centre in Springwood. If you’ve got any worries or concerns during this postnatal period, I could organise an appointment with someone. Just to have a chat. I wanted to let you know that it’s all right to ask for help.’

  I just stared at her, dumfounded. Was I that obvious? I felt like I must have been wearing a placard around my neck saying Sorry: sack-of-shit depressed person here.

  I wanted to tell her I was
perfectly fine. I wanted to tell her everything was great. But instead I burst into tears. Like a crazy woman. And I told her, yes, yes, I thought I might need some help.

  I wasn’t the sort of person who asked for help. I’d grown up thinking that was a sign of weakness and an admission of some kind of failure. For years I had struggled mostly with myself and yet sharing my burdens seemed like a cruel and unnatural thing to do. I always tried to Pollyanna it up when I spoke to my parents, because I didn’t want to hear the disappointment in their voices. I was a walking disaster so I really wasn’t strong enough to know how much of a failure I seemed to the other people in my life.

  But there came a serenity and peace when I finally admitted defeat and asked for help from a professional. I wasn’t burdening them. It was their job to listen to wastrels like myself blubbering about what a fuck-up I was.

  ‘No, Nikki, not a fuck-up,’ the psychiatrist told me. ‘You have a chemical imbalance. We can give you something to help. There are medications that can quiet the voice that tells you that you’re useless and worthless. Those things are not true. We’ll try this one first.’

  I had a box of medication and a diagnosis of bipolar disorder. And there I was thinking I just had a case of postnatal depression. Apparently I did have that as well, but it was part and parcel of the bigger bipolar picture. There was also the distinct possibility of ADHD. I was a right proper mess. With my brain chemicals so all over the shop it seemed incredible I’d managed to get to nearly thirty-one before being diagnosed.

  I told my shrink about my suicidal feelings and she explained that sadly many people check out instead of asking for help and getting a diagnosis. Keeping problems to myself was not a unique thing. I wondered about Clay. Had he been just like me, suffering in silence, mentally grappling with himself for years before his Bad Clay talked him out of life?

  I felt freed to some extent with a label to affix to my silly brain. I had always known there was something not quite right about me. That wasn’t to say there was something wrong about me but I didn’t do life quite like a lot of the other people I knew. I felt everything differently too. I was wired a bit differently. I first tried to kill myself at the age of sixteen and no one noticed. I was just unconscious for a couple of days. Took a shitload of my mother’s pills. I’d been pretty damn close to it the night before I left Bill too.

  When I looked at my three beautiful boys, I was so glad I hadn’t been successful during those bleak times, and I knew they were the reason I wasn’t floating through the ether like Clay. They were the only thing that kept me tethered to Planet Earth.

  It was interesting to cast my mind back over my life and view it through the lens of my mental illness diagnosis. It all made a lot more sense. It was like taking a filter off the camera and seeing everything clearly for the first time ever – the wild promiscuity of my youth, my hyper-sexuality, my intolerance of boredom in any shape or form, my chronic impulsiveness. The partying. The self-medicating. These were things I could contextualise with the facts of my disorder. I wasn’t bad. I wasn’t a terrible person. I was just a fucking mental head case. And the doctor had given me pills that might just even me out and shut horrible Bad Nikki down.

  Bad Nikki was the secret imaginary friend who lived inside me and sometimes talked to me. I didn’t hear voices. I’d like to just point that out, because that’s a different crazy altogether – that’s someone else’s imaginary friend, not mine. I did hear voices, but they were all mine. And I decided that when I heard Bad Nikki talking, that was actually just sick me being a dick.

  After a month or so of medication, something pretty awful happened. Instead of shutting Bad Nikki down, the pills seemed to give her superpowers, and she got stronger and stronger and was saying some very, very bad stuff. I was teetering on the edge and fortunately Good Nikki talked me into going back to the doctor, who agreed to supervise me weaning myself off the drugs, although he really wanted me to try a few options before rejecting all medication outright. I was adamant. I had felt non-human on the antidepressants and had come so close to doing the unthinkable (I’d sharpened a knife one day and stared hard into the water as I’d bathed the baby; imagining unimaginable things on another). I wasn’t prepared to risk those thoughts again.

  On the drugs, Bad Nikki had gone from mildly annoying to aggravating and homicidal. I felt her on my back, her breath against the nape of my neck, and she scared me more than Jack the Ripper. She meant business and the drugs were acting like petrol on a raging fire. I wanted to tackle her myself for a bit to see if I could reason with her, talk her down off the ledge. I had, after all, known her well for a very long time. Slowly I was beginning to realise that she wasn’t some separate entity, not some dangerous mist that came and enveloped me. She was ‘me’. I was the squall and the lighthouse.

  I spent lots of time sitting and thinking in my overgrown garden. I got books out of the library about depression and mental illness and read everything I could. Medical journals. Biographies. There wasn’t much first-hand material though. It seemed that anyone who suffered from mental health issues kept it close to their chests back in those days. There was a lot of stigma. So much. And I guess, of course, that was part of the problem. No one talked about it or admitted it. Clay had let it destroy him. So many times I wanted to tell Rhoni what I was going through. Some nights I sat on the carpet with the phone between my crossed legs and thought about ringing any number of people. My parents. My sisters. Sam. Kate. Even Bill.

  Sometimes I did ring them but every time I came close to admitting my struggle with Bad Nikki, I held back. I didn’t want my friends or family to think I was nuts, broken, defective. I was ashamed and so I would just make frivolous small talk and say nothing of my troubles. And I began to understand how hard it must have been for Clay. It was so hard not to be afraid of reaching out.

  Her threats felt real and I was scared to talk to anyone but the doctor about my haywire brain.

  BAD NIKKI: They’ll put you in a loony bin if you tell them about me and they’ll take your brats off you and you’ll never see them again.

  Sometimes I lay awake at night and tried to imagine what Bad Nikki looked like. I’d only ever heard her voice and sensed her. I’d never actually seen her, so I tried to envisage her face, her smirk and her claws.

  But a strange thing happened. Instead of summoning up a vision of malevolence, a force of pure evil, I came to see her as an insecure, petulant and broken child who simply felt she wasn’t good enough so she lashed out from a place of sadness and confusion. She had wild hair, scatty eyes and a heart full of unshed tears. I began to feel sorry for her. She was immature and child-like; a tantruming dervish.

  And so, every time she reared up and began to wail at me I patiently tried to ignore her.

  ‘Hush now,’ I’d silently whisper. ‘Go to sleep. Leave me alone. It will be okay.’

  BAD NIKKI: I need alcohol. I need attention. Look at all the mess in this hovel of a house. You need to clean up.

  GOOD NIKKI: No. I’m going to drink some water and have a nap with Harry. The cleaning will wait.

  I began to see that she’d gotten used to bullying me into submission. It was a well-rehearsed dance. I’d given in to her before and felt afraid of her for so long that she was completely freaked out when I finally stood up to her.

  Back then I had to package my mental illness in a way that I could better understand it and, although Bad Nikki and Good Nikki were obviously both me and really did overlap sometimes, it helped me enormously to separate us into twins: Yin and Yang, Jekyll and Hyde. In doing so, I realised that, while my mental illness was an intrinsic part of me, it wasn’t actually ME and it did not define me (although it also did, if you know what I mean … no? I don’t even know what I mean. But it worked).

  I decided that I needed to find a way for us to coexist and the drugs that the doctor had given me had scared me into doing it my way without
further chemical intervention.

  The doctor monitored me while I tried to wrestle Bad Nikki into submission. The gentle, kindly psychiatrist listened and helped me make sense of myself. Mostly I ran on high speed and that never bothered me, although it sometimes unnerved those around me. Toby one day told me I vacuumed like a ‘squirrel on speed’ and it was an apt description. But when a low hit it felt like a complete wipe-out.

  Gradually I came to understand that my moods weren’t set in stone – they were like the weather. Some days were sunny and other days it rained. I stopped taking it so personally. It was just weather. So inch by inch and step by step, I learned to weather the weather! I became a sharp and intuitive climatologist. I took notice of that metallic smell that wafts up from the earth as rain approaches. I felt the changes of warm fronts moving in and heard the rumble of Bad Nikki’s thunder almost before she’d even thought to groan.

  When storms hit, I went to ground, taped up my windows and hid beneath a doona and told myself that it would pass. And it did. It always did. It still does. I read the weather patterns carefully. To this day, I wake up and lick my finger and hold it in the breeze. What will roll in today? Will it be sunny in Nikki World or drizzly and grey, or is there a hurricane brewing out to sea? Yes, I am aware that cyclones can be devastating. But from that time back in Leura, studying the patterns of my own mind, I was determined to wait out the bad days and not let Bad Nikki smash me to pieces with her hail. Some days were harder than others. Winter is always bleaker than spring.