Finally, my mind is still. It is over. I can rest. She is safe, and so am I.
I walk towards the house, feeling lighter, liberated, at peace. Everything is going to be OK. I can never fail her again.
Inside, I climb the stairs to our bedroom as a free woman. I take off my soaked nightdress and step into the shower. The feeling of the warm water running all over my skin is incomparable. A rebirth. My rebirth. I watch as the blood and mucus run down the insides of my legs, mixing with the soapsuds and disappearing down the plughole. Afterwards, I dry myself carefully with a towel and pull on a pair of clean knickers and pyjamas.
There’s a blue light outside the bedroom window, flickering. I have no idea what it is, but it’s comforting. I climb into bed. And then, finally, I sleep.
NOW
Helena
I am back in the kitchen again. Back with Jack, sitting at our kitchen counter. The cup of tea is cold now.
‘What happened?’ I say, because there’s nothing in my memory but a huge black hole. I have no idea. ‘After the crash?’
‘You were taken to hospital. Both of you,’ he replies. ‘You were in hospital for a month. They transferred you to a specialist psychiatric unit in the end, and you stayed there for ten weeks before they let you come home. Sophia was in hospital for three weeks.’
‘But she had a . . .’ My brain is crackling, like an old radio trying to tune itself. A single word forms, pushing itself forward from the noisy backdrop, ‘. . . seizure.’
‘She developed hypothermia from lying in the road, out in the cold. When the ambulance arrived, she was unconscious. They took her to hospital, and in the ambulance she had a seizure. There were complications after . . . she was sedated, and put on a ventilator for a while, in intensive care for a week. But she’s a tough thing, and she made a full recovery. While you were in the psychiatric hospital, and once she was well enough, we brought her to visit you, but you didn’t want to know. You weren’t yourself. You said she wasn’t your baby, you pushed her away from you, told us how sick we were to be trying to replace her with this other baby. We tried so many times, and then the final time you lost control, screaming at us all: your mother, me, the nurses. Saying we were lying, that your baby was dead. Asking us why we were tormenting you, how we could be so cruel. You were so sick. The doctors tried everything, all the usual drugs, but nothing seemed to work. You were convinced that Sophia had died. If we talked about anything else you were almost your normal self, but the second we tried to talk about her you would scream and cry and lash out.’
‘It must have been the guilt,’ I say, suddenly no longer scared. ‘I bottled it all up. There’s something I haven’t told you . . .’
Jack smiles gently.
‘About David? The night you nearly went home with him? You did tell me. You told me that Sophia was his baby, that she’d been taken away because you cheated . . . you were so ill, you were so confused. I spoke to him about it. He explained nothing had ever happened. He was quite honest with me, said he’d tried it on but that you’d rebuffed him. And look at her.’ He smiles again. ‘No doubt about it, she’s one hundred per cent mine. But you wouldn’t accept it. Kept telling me that the doctors were conspiring against you, that it was all a trick. At one point you were so angry you hit a nurse across the face. Eventually, we gave up. We stopped taking Sophia to see you. We stopped talking about her, and gradually you seemed to get better.’
‘But I knew she was dead . . .’ I say, even though I don’t know anything now, and wonder how I could ever have been so sure. ‘I felt it, when she left. I was so sure. How could I be so confused? How is it even possible?’
‘Darling,’ Jack says, ‘you were ill.’
‘And you’ve known about David? All this time? Why didn’t you tell me?’
‘Believe me, there were nights when I wanted to, when I just wished you were back to your old self and we could have a blazing row about it. But it wasn’t important in the grand scheme of things. I just wanted you to get better. And after all, you changed your mind in the cab, made him drop you home. There was nothing to tell.’
‘But what about my job? He – they – they stole it from me. And Ashley, she was so horrible to me . . .’
‘I never trusted her. But it was just bad luck, you handing over such a valuable role to Ashley . . . Ashley worked the system all right. I’ll never forgive KAMU for making you redundant when you were at your most vulnerable. It ought to be illegal. I know David felt guilty about it, thought he’d let you down. Well, he did. I wondered if it might have been revenge for you rejecting his advances, but I spoke to him afterwards, and he was as cut up about it all as I was.’
I look over at Sophia sleeping and wonder how I could ever have not known she was mine.
‘When I heard her earlier,’ I continue, ‘I knew even from her cry that she was my baby. It doesn’t make any sense. Why didn’t I believe you?’
‘The doctors thought it was your way of coping with what had happened, a side effect of the psychosis, the stress you felt during pregnancy, the infection you got . . . it was all linked. The perfect storm. It’s called dissociative amnesia. Your brain just shut down. You were coping the only way you could, by forgetting the parts that were too painful. We’ve been waiting so long for you to have a breakthrough. We’ve even taken you to see Sophia – several times, in fact – and for a while, you’ve understood what’s happened, but you never remember it afterwards. We’ve tried everything to make the memories stick, and finally, we tried the one thing we haven’t tried before. Your mum and I have been fighting for months about it. She didn’t want you to have ECT, said it was barbaric. But I realized nothing else was working. It was the last resort.’
His voice breaks and he stops speaking. I reach out and take his hand, squeezing it, but he doesn’t meet my eyes.
‘It’s been so hard,’ he says, croakily. ‘The hardest period of my life. Watching you lying on that trolley, knowing what they were going to do to your brain . . . wondering if you’d ever be back to normal again. Or if I’d lost you forever.’
The room with the speckled ceiling, the injection in my hand, the consultant with the oxygen mask, telling me the treatment would last only a few minutes. The headache afterwards. Going to bed and sleeping for fourteen hours.
‘I thought that was for my depression . . .’
‘It’s an effective treatment for many things. It didn’t work for your mother, that’s why she was so against it. But it’s been working for you. Except for the hallucinations. They’re still there, but you’re having them so much less often.’
I look out of the window, out at the road beyond, where the cobblestone wall once was.
‘The accidents,’ I say, and finally the clouds are clearing.
Jack stands up and pulls me towards him.
‘There’s only ever been one accident,’ he says. ‘The rest . . . they were all just side effects of your illness. Replaying it all in your mind, trying to fix what can’t be fixed. Confusing what’s real with what isn’t. Your brain’s way of coping with the trauma.’
‘The trauma of leaving Sophia in the road?’
‘No,’ Jack says, and there’s a tenderness to his voice that I have only heard once before, when he first held Sophia, that afternoon in hospital when my life changed irrevocably. ‘The trauma of watching Ashley die.’
NOW
Helena
Jack has just taken Sophia away from me again.
He has taken her back to my mother’s. He said it’s for the best, that it will take time for us to rebuild things, to make everything right again. He said he’s worried I’ll wake up tomorrow and I won’t remember any of today. That I’ve had lucid moments before in the past, but that they’ve been snatched away as quickly as they’ve come.
I try to imagine ever not knowing her again, and the thought is too painful to bear.
I spoke to my mother briefly on the phone before Jack left, and thanked her for what she’s
done for me, for us. How I have misjudged her – all those years, thinking she’d failed me, when she was actually suffering, ill, just like me these past ten months. I think of the way Sophia gazed at her in the kitchen earlier, with love and, most importantly of all, trust, and wonder how I can ever make it up to her, how I can ever thank her enough for loving my little girl as much as I do.
I am sitting on the sofa, my pink blanket over my legs, cradling my phone. There is a photo on there now. A new one. Me and my baby. Except she’s almost a toddler now; a giant, smiling thing, who threw her arms around my neck when she woke up, as though she loved me, despite everything I had done. They say babies always recognize their mother’s smell. I hope it’s not too late for us. I hope that I remember her tomorrow, and that she remembers me, too.
I keep pressing the main button on my phone, making the screen light up, looking at us, smiling together as a mother and daughter should. I am aching that she is no longer in the same house, that she has had to go back, but I know that I must put her first, and she needs stability, the familiar.
I press the button again.
I must remember her.
My phone lights up but then a warning screen flashes across it and it switches itself off. My battery is dead. I sigh and lay the phone down on the table. In my lap lies one of Sophia’s muslin cloths. I pick it up and sniff it. That same scent, so unmistakably hers.
Before Jack left, he went upstairs, then came down several minutes later with a small present. I recognized the cursive handwriting on the card attached to it immediately. Curly, with looped letters, pretty almost, nothing like the bullish character she tried so hard to be all the time.
‘I never opened it,’ he said, as he handed it to me. ‘It was addressed to you.’
The box is sitting in front of me now, on the coffee table. She was coming to see me that day, but what for? Just to give me this gift? How had we left things? I wish I could speak to her again, but I know I can’t. I accept that now. I will never know what she wanted to say to me, so I can only hope. Hope that she still cared for me, despite all the times we disagreed.
I open the card. My fingers are shaking as I pull it stiffly from the envelope. On the front is a pencil drawing of a baby, all round cheeks and curly hair.
I open the card. Inside, there’s just one word.
Congratulations.
And underneath; her name, spelled differently – Ashleigh – and a small, single kiss.
No great apologies. But I suppose she had done nothing wrong.
I open the box. Inside is a small silver photo frame. So plain and unremarkable that at first I don’t notice there’s something inscribed around the edges. The letters are tiny, and they feel bumpy as I run my fingers over them.
Here’s to strong women. May we know them. May we be them. May we raise them.
That’s it, then. Her final message to me: to raise my daughter to be strong. That’s all Ash ever wanted to be. A strong woman. She just went about it all the wrong way, didn’t realize you could be strong and kind at the same time.
I walk to the sideboard and reach into the bottom drawer, right at the back. I pull out my old work laptop, then scrabble about for the power cable. I haven’t switched this on since I went into labour, and I’m not sure if it still works. I plug it in and open the lid. It takes a few minutes, but eventually the screen flickers into life.
I open Google. I don’t have any pictures of Ashley. She wasn’t the sort to take selfies – she was strangely shy about it, didn’t seem to want to leave any evidence of her existence in the world. But there are a few pictures out there of the two of us. One I remember in particular, from the pop-up party, taken before David arrived, before I went to pieces. It takes a few seconds of searching, but then I find it. We are standing on that little stage, our arms around each other’s waists, our hair perfectly shiny and falling in sync, as though someone has styled it that way deliberately.
Our eyes are bright, wide, expectant, hopeful. And we are smiling at each other.
I run my finger over her face, think of what could have been.
And then I smile at what we were, if only for a short time. Two women, ready to take on the world.
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AUTHOR’S NOTE
This book is a work of fiction. However, the seed of the idea came from my own experience of new motherhood. One of my friends once told me that giving birth was like being in a car crash, both physically and mentally. It stuck with me before I gave birth, and it proved to be surprisingly accurate.
I was 33 when I got pregnant, and although my daughter was very much longed for, I was shockingly naive and had no idea what to expect. I’d been a wholly selfish ‘career woman’ up to that point – I was a successful journalist and PR consultant and knew nothing about babies, or how to care for them. Once the first few months as a new mum were behind me, I was amazed not to be able to find any novels on this subject, given all the women I knew who were also struggling to forge a new identity as a mum after so long in the world of work. And so I decided to write this story – a story for women who have struggled with this transition, in the face of a working world that is still so stacked against us.
I was lucky and am grateful that I didn’t suffer from postnatal depression, or, for that matter, postpartum psychosis. However, like many women, my sleep deprivation in those early days reached the point where I started hallucinating at night, imagining the baby was in bed with me when she was actually asleep in her cot, and my moods swung from euphoric to desperate with exhausting frequency.
To add to my stress, I unexpectedly found myself on maternity leave without a job to return to. Sadly, this is an all-too-common situation. It was utterly terrifying: this open-ended new ‘life’ that was completely alien to everything I had ever known, and that I was woefully underprepared for. And when I did secure some freelance work when my baby was only four months old, I was averaging three hours’ sleep a night, none of my ‘work’ clothes fitted me, and I felt exactly as Helena does in the book: a misplaced lump between two stools. Not yet confident as a mother, no longer a career woman.
It was the strangest time of my life. I had been the old me for 34 years by then, but a mother for only a handful of months, and despite my ferocious love for my baby, I felt bewildered by who I had become. I’d never really realized how much my identity was tied up in my work and independence.
Not working was very strange, and in the middle of the night I’d panic that I should be doing something with this time ‘off’. I read on someone’s blog that when you have a baby, it’s OK for you just to be looking after the baby. You don’t have to be trying to hold down a part-time job too, or finishing a long-neglected novel (!), or doing charity work, or whatever it is that you think is necessary to justify your existence as a stay-at-home-mum. That helped, a little. But it was still hard to give myself permission to do ‘nothing’. Even though I was exhausted and probably working harder than I had done in ages – just in a very different way.
*
I feel like I really lost myself in those early months. In fact, I would say it took a year for my confidence to return. Thankfully, I have a very supportive partner, who, due to the nature of his career, is around a lot more than most fathers. I genuinely believe my situation might have been very different were it not for the fact that I had my partner by my side every day during those life-changing early months as a new mother.
Because this is what it boils down to, in my opinion. Support. New mothers need support. They deserve support. It can make a crucial difference – can truly determine whether they sink or swim.
Post-partum psychosis is thankfully rare, but not so rare that we shouldn’t be aware of it, or the signs, which include: mania, depression, hallucinations, delusions, confusion, muddled thinking and a lack of insight in understanding that their behaviour is strange. It is classed as a psychiatric emergency, and should be treated as such. It can occur out of the blue, in otherwise h
ealthy women with no previous psychiatric problems, although it’s thought there’s a genetic link. In Helena’s case, her mother had also suffered from it, and this not only defined their relationship, but was also the reason she didn’t have any more children. What’s important to remember is that with the right treatment, most women make a full recovery and go on to be fantastic mums, as I truly believe Helena will do!
I wanted to share some organizations that provide support to women going through what’s often the most difficult period of their adult lives, whether or not they develop a clinical illness. Please support them, if you can, and share their details with anyone you think may benefit. Thank you, and thank you for reading.
Pregnant Then Screwed – campaigning for better rights for working mothers:
http://pregnantthenscrewed.com/
Maternity Action – offering practical advice on maternal rights and all things work-related in pregnancy:
https://www.maternityaction.org.uk/
Action on Postpartum Psychosis – providing information and peer support specifically to sufferers of postpartum psychosis:
https://www.app-network.org/
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I found out this book was going to be published when my agent, Caroline Hardman, rang me to say we’d had an offer. I was in the playground at the time with my toddler. Meanwhile, she was at home with a baby, technically on maternity leave, but working like a trooper to help me realize my dream. Given the novel’s themes, I love the fact that we were both looking after children when the deal came through. It just proves that motherhood really doesn’t need to mean the end of your career.
So, on that note, first and foremost I would like to thank Caroline, for all her support and enthusiasm for this story, and for working with me to get it in the best possible shape. I’d also like to thank her for answering all my Annoying Author Emails with the patience of a saint, for telling it to me straight, and for never giving up on me.
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