SEVEN YEARS AGO I curled up into the shape of a pill bug beneath the table at which I now write, desperate to block out the one-year-old who wanted and wailed, whose first word was more and not Mum. I recall the porosity of my skin, how vulnerable my identity felt then to breach. There was a flood of tears as I realised I could not take a moment to myself to recover myself, a flush of shame at being unable to control my disintegrating ego. They say it takes a village but in the aftermath of family violence, our village was population two. My son placed a gentle hand upon me, beckoning me to unfurl; I crawled out of hiding to explain my Mad self using words that a child could understand.

SOCIETY HAS HISTORICALLY treated Madness with fear and derision, which has the effect of disabling people whose brains operate differently. Some of us mask our Madness to avoid detection, but hiding takes its toll. Becoming a parent adds layers of complexity to managing one’s mental stasis: it can be terrifying to realise that you are responsible for the health and wellbeing of a tiny, precious human. Whatever self-care regimes one has relied upon till then – long baths, weekend lie-ins, leisurely reading – are voided or at least challenged by the reality of having to meet Baby’s needs. 

Author Rachel Cusk was vilified by critics and parents alike when she painted a realistic portrait of the hallowed institution of motherhood in her 2001 memoir A Life’s Work. Cusk didn’t even apply clinical language to her struggle – she was just being honest. In the decades since, people have become more open about mental health. It’s expected that new mothers will be stressed out, mourn their loss of independence and resent the unpaid labour of household management. Yet while real-life struggle across the curated social media feeds of neurospicy mumfluencers is one thing – #nofilter tears in the face of sleepless nights, endless tantrums and multiplying messes – ongoing Madness is suspect. Despite the marketing gold rush being bolstered by so-called authenticity, a mother (or birthing parent) requires a safety harness if ever she is to dance near the abyss. In memoirs such as Anna Spargo-Ryan’s A Kind of Magic or Jami Nakamura Lin’s The Night Parade, a reader will forgive the authors their mental breakdowns because each writes a reliable partner into her backstory: someone to pick up the pieces and keep child protective services at bay.

Although Ariane Beeston also writes with a stable husband in the wings, her memoir Because I’m Not Myself, You See breaks ground by offering a rare portrait of postpartum psychosis along with an insider’s view of child removal practices. Beeston was only twenty-one when she accepted a job at the NSW Department of Community Services (DoCS). After working the helpline for eighteen months, her subsequent role as a child protection worker was to identify children at risk, remove them from their parents and place them with family or foster carers while awaiting Children’s Court. Beeston describes cases that were particularly heart-wrenching, where a parent was unable to maintain sobriety or was otherwise unable to jump through the system’s hoops. Although Beeston argues that her intentions were good because her goal was to restore children to their parents, in hindsight she came to understand that the practice of child removal has its ugly roots in colonialism and disproportionately impacts marginalised populations. Throughout the book – and in a helpful, well-researched appendix – Beeston references the continuing intergenerational harms of the Stolen Generations upon Indigenous parents, noting that those who avoid antenatal care for fear of losing their children can trigger the very child protective services notifications they were desperate to avoid. 

Beeston burned out after ‘years of hearing and carrying horrific stories of abuse and neglect and trauma’ within ‘a broken, racist system’. When the opportunity arose to step back from frontline work, she took her dream job as a departmental psychologist at a DoCS office in Western Sydney. Six months later she was married. Soon after, Beeston felt her pregnant body become ‘open to public scrutiny’ in the same way it had when she had practised ballet; this scrutiny nearly triggered a relapse of disordered eating. At the time, Beeston felt guilty for her lack of emotion: ‘It is as though all my feelings have been stripped of colour. The baby is inside of me, but doesn’t really feel part of me, but is somehow also all of me?’ 

Beeston counted on feeling a surge of love from the moment of Henry’s birth. She believed that her experience of working in child protection would give her the knowledge she needed to bond with her child; instead, the vicarious trauma of witnessing families broken apart by a failed system only heightened her anxiety. Beeston masked the worst of her depressive symptoms and intrusive thoughts at maternal child health check-ups, presenting well enough to go undetected. Citing a 2022 study published in The Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, she states that even though many mums experience ‘unwanted intrusive thoughts of intentionally harming a baby’, there is no corresponding increase in the risk of infant harm: ‘How many mothers are punished by child protection for their honesty, for “reaching out”?’ Neither DoCS nor the broader medical system are designed to, or capable of, helping the people they purport to.

Beeston’s weight plummets; Henry hardly sleeps because he is tongue-tied and can’t latch and so Beeston doesn’t sleep either. While her husband is away for work, she grows paranoid:

Every time the doorbell rings, I think the social workers are here to take him and I lie on the kitchen floor until they leave. I pull the curtains shut. I switch off all the lights.

Always sight the child.

They’re coming for him. The nappy rash is so bad, they’re going to come and remove him, and everyone will know what a terrible, terrible failure of a mother you are.

Beeston feels herself losing touch with reality. She glances at her baby and, for a split second, watches him morph into a little green dragon. She drapes muslin cloths over the pram when going for a walk to hide her dragon baby from prying eyes. One day she gets the feeling that she doesn’t actually exist, that she has already died and so no one will miss her: ‘It feels as though I have solved some great puzzle of life and death – all the pieces of existence have fallen into place.’ 

Fortunately, Beeston’s private health insurance afforded her a three-week stay as inpatient in a mother and baby unit that specialises in caring for women with severe perinatal mental illness without separating them from their babies. In the ward she laments that as a psychologist – the child of a GP, no less – she should be able to fix herself. She later learns that among mothers with postpartum psychosis, a significant number are mental health professionals like her who have a strong support system and are relatively socially advantaged. Around 600 new mums experience postpartum psychosis each year in Australia – and although it’s considered a psychiatric emergency that places both mother and baby at risk, there are no screening assessments in place. It’s a sign of systemic failure when a woman ultimately blames herself for not being able to overcome a condition the medical profession does not adequately support. Even though we have a better language now, so many still slip through the cracks.

SEEKING ANOTHER VOICE around motherhood and madness, I turn to Gulp, Swallow, whose author, Brooke Boland, was diagnosed with postnatal depression and anxiety when her son was three. The book’s non-chronological essays recall rural life, new motherhood, pregnancy loss and a disintegrating marriage. 

After giving birth to her son in September 2018, Boland and her husband moved to Jervis Bay for a sea change. Boland remembers how after giving birth:

The whole world shifted on its axis. Warm was no longer warm enough. The sun was too bright. Night was day and vice versa. There was tummy time, and no time at all. It was complete torture; it was the best time of my life. 

Eight months into their sea change, bushfires raged, forcing the family to seek refuge at Boland’s parents’. Boland was unable to write at the time; she reflects upon how ‘catastrophe refuses representation in its immediacy’. In the context of this reflection, Boland begins to unpack ‘the private grief’ of pregnancy loss. Her writing on miscarriage evidences disenfranchised grief, much as Beeston grieved the second child she could not have. Boland’s sorrow is streaked with anger that neither her husband nor the healthcare workers believed her while she was miscarrying.

After the bushfires there was no relief: Boland and her husband’s roof caved in, a plague of cicadas landed, and then an invasion of millipedes arrived with the pandemic. Boland’s self-searching feels expansive set against a landscape of primordial time, mortality, the cruelty of nature. While house-sitting in a ‘minimalist cube of glass’ for two months, Boland recalls how dissociation became ‘its own kind of unreality’:

Watching the waves curl into themselves from inside the glass house, I felt reassured. Those waves have rolled for aeons. I was a speck in their eternal rotation. I was nothing. What did I want to do with this short nothing?

Boland understands the stakes of writing the personal: ‘Writing non-fiction from this position brings a certain risk: friends and neighbours might not like your observations, they might resent you. You might even censor yourself.’ The stories are strongest where Boland gets close to uncomfortable truths through lyrical prose; elsewhere a journalistic distancing leads away from the emotional core. Still there is a beauty and understatedness to the work as a whole, where traumatic memories come in pieces and must be gathered like clues to form a greater understanding of what Boland went through. These stories approach the truth slantwise, through quiet vignettes concerned with nature and animals: domestic, industrial, wild and extinct. There is a wavelike motion to Boland’s atemporal tellings and retellings from different vantage points and perspectives that reflects the ruminative quality of the traumatised mind.  

Where Boland finds herself complicit with her own disappearance in her marriage and life – ‘More wife and mother than myself. My body feeling strangely like someone else’s’ – I think back to my own post-baby body curled up like a roly-poly, desperate for an exoskeleton to restore to me my sense of self. Beeston’s narrative recalls to me my own fear of child protection services, how paranoid I was during the year-long family court ordeal when I was subject to randomised urine tests to prove my sobriety, how frightened I was of doing anything out of step. This fear has stayed with me: a hypervigilance of ways others might perceive me. I have tempered my life into one of such rigid studiousness and control that I no longer recognise the wild woman I once was, and I mourn the distance between selves. 

Although my story diverges from those of Boland and Beeston – my Madness was rooted in childhood, and giving birth paradoxically set me free from the worst of my depression and suicidality by giving me someone to fight for – I see all of our experiences as operating within a delicate ecosystem, where so much care is needed in order to give both mother and baby the best chance at wholeness. Boland and Beeston write openly of the ways that motherhood affects the slipperiness of mental health; I appreciate how these stories tear down prescriptive expectations, helping to normalise the entire spectrum of emotions that can occur around pregnancy, whether one is Mad or not.

_{Photo credit: Philippe from Pixabay}