Joyce’s choices: My mother’s trauma, postnatal depression, dissociation and later-life resilience

Since I was a boy in the 1970s I’ve heard my mother Joyce’s darkly humorous story of her being so confused after my birth that she considered dropping me headfirst on to the brown inch-square tiled hearth around our fireplace in small town Aotearoa/New Zealand.

Mum couldn’t hold me longer than 34 weeks, so I was born six weeks premature. As I was being delivered, the doctor told her that she’d need to cut her to help relieve any pressure on my skull as it was as ‘delicate as eggshell’. After the birthing I went straight into a humidicrib.

Six weeks later I was released into my mother’s care. My father was working long hours as an animal-carting truck driver, and the rest of the family in town did not understand how unwell and fragile she was. Home alone and not at all clear-headed, in front of the winter fire, mum recalled the doctor’s words and wondered to herself were she to drop me on the hearth ‘if yolk would come out’.

Then another part of her said, ‘But a good mother wouldn’t do that’. And so I survived.

Postnatal depression

About one in seven new mothers suffer with postnatal (or postpartum) depression (PND). It left my mother feeling confused, unaware of the passing of time, and unable to cope with routines she’d previously found straightforward, like grocery shopping and getting the empty bottles out on time for the milkman each afternoon. When I was about 3 months old mum changed me over from breast milk to powdered baby milk formula, but once in the first few days she didn’t mix it smoothly enough. It was with this frustration that I wasn’t properly suckling the bottle - and a sense that maybe it was all too hard - that she wondered if yolk would come out of my eggshell-likened skull. And it was after this potentially deadly thought that she spoke with a friend who was struggling with being a new mother again, who’d recently been to a doctor. She told mum she should go to the same doctor.

I realised I was off the planet pretty much as soon as I had you. I remember I didn’t cook many meals. We ate a lot of fish and chips. The earliest memory of the feeling of disconnection was to do with just not being able to talk to people. Wanting to and thinking about it, but saying to myself, ‘What could I talk about? They’ll just think I’m silly’. So I wouldn’t talk in unfamiliar social settings. To go grocery shopping, I’d have to make a detailed list in the order of the shops I’d need to go to. It’d take me an hour to make the list in the correct order. If I got it out of order I wasn’t able to work out what to do.

The doctor prescribed what she describes as uppers and downers, of which she was to take one of each twice a day. If she felt too s/low she was to have a second upper, and if she felt too speedy she was to have a second downer.

But I didn’t know how I felt. I thought other people could see but they couldn’t. I felt isolated. Neither of the mothers helped and my sister didn’t help, but she had three kids of her own. Though I didn’t ask for help.

This disorganisation and isolation lifted after my brother was born more than two years later, but one symptom persisted. When my father wasn’t with her for support and she was challenged by any decision she hadn’t thought about in advance she would feel herself floating, as if disconnected from her body. She has no memory of dissociating before the PND.

Even though I overcame the worst of the disorganisation, I know once we came to Australia [a decade after I was born], I’d want to go shopping, say for clothes for myself, and I’d have an idea of what I wanted to get, but I’d get into the shop and have no idea, and then I’d just walk out because I’d think, ‘I’m just not with it. My body is disconnected from my mind’. It would happen with all sorts of things. My mind was floating. In those times I couldn’t latch on to anything.

These episodes of dissociative floating continued in the same pattern for many decades.

Two earlier shocks

My mother lost her first baby, a girl, also at 34 weeks, due to cervical insufficiency and haemorrhage, ten-and-a-half months before I was born. After an emergency caesarean section my never-quite-to-be sister lived for just two days. Mum remembers my dad - who’d flown in a light plane across the North Island to be with her - helped her walk from her recovery bed to the nursery to see her baby and that she had dark hair.

Mum recalls that she didn’t grieve and that both her mother and her mother-in-law downplayed the loss, suggesting that babies often die and she should try again. Most women of their generation had experiences of miscarriage or neonatal deaths. There was no funeral or memorial service. She did not seek and was not offered counselling support. This was not unusual at the time.

In recent years my mother tracked down the hospital records, still stored in the regional hospital’s basement, more than 50 years later. It provided comfort as to the medical facts of what the doctors and nurses did back in 1969. There was no death certificate.

Decades earlier, on 1 September 1943, when she was 18 months old, my mother’s family suffered a devastating traumatic loss. With her mild-mannered well-respected father at the wheel and her gentle pious mother holding her in her arms in the front seat, and with her older brothers John (almost 10) and David (almost seven) in the back seat, coming around a blind bend on a gravel road, their car collided with a truck.

My grandmother, my mother, and John were thrown out of the car through the front windscreen. John died of his injuries. Her father later faced trial for negligent driving and was acquitted. It was a story in the local newspaper, but she never heard anyone in the village speak about it.

At 18 months old at the time of the accident my mother has no explicit memory of the event. She does still retain some fear of being in a car on gravel roads, but my father’s truck-driver expertise and her own exposure therapy with him at the wheel allowed her to venture beyond sealed roads.

It is my mother’s recollection that the tragedy and associated grief was never spoken about by her parents, or certainly not in front of the two surviving and two subsequent children. She does recall her mother complaining of having ‘terrible nights’. Her brother David shared the same birthday as his older brother. Imagine the extreme mixed feelings as the anniversary/birthday approached and arrived. David died of aggressive liver cancer in his mid 40s.

While we can’t know the specific impact of these earlier traumatic shocks on the likelihood of my mother developing PND, it seems reasonable that these losses and the lack of there being a way to talk about and come to terms with them may have been significant in forming the background on which the depression took hold.

Till death do us part - and then what?

My parents had met in 1961 and were married in 1966 and were in no hurry to have kids. They were well matched and had a long, respectful, cooperative and joyful marriage. We migrated to Australia in 1981, mum became the main breadwinner, like it or not, and early retirement allowed more than twenty years of slow and satisfying adventure caravanning into every part of Australia.

My mother is happy for me to write that she relied on dad, as indeed he relied on her for other things. Mum’s reliance however had a clear emotional aspect that meant in his company she could avoid her floating dissociation that began with my birth.

Unfortunately from 2014 my dad began to become unreliable. He began to lose his famous sense of direction to Alzheimers, and two years later their caravanning ended and he gave up his drivers licence. By the time he was too unsteady for mum to care for him at home, his dead parents and younger brother were all alive again, as were dead friends, pets and his beloved work dog, in his timeless displaced memory.

For my mother this was a time of extreme stress and sadness as she processed the painful reality that his losses - and thus hers - were permanent and accelerating. Tasks that had always primarily been his, such as driving and organising maintenance of the car and house now fell to her alone.

After more than two years in aged care - of distressingly patchy quality - dad died of heart failure in 2021. COVID was in full flight but we managed a not too tiny funeral where we were able to say goodbye. By this time mum had already grieved the loss of the ‘complete’ husband she had known for many years, once she came to accept that Alzheimers only has one outcome.

Since my father’s death Joyce has realised that she no longer has her episodes of dissociative floating. What began in 1970 ended in the years up to 2021. Perhaps it began to end when it became clear that dad couldn’t make routine decisions at home. It was certainly ending, on reflection, once my mother was living alone and visiting dad in his care home, from which he was always hoping to leave. How does she explain this?

I suppose I’ve overcome that feeling by having to manage everything by myself, starting with the little things. There’s no-one to ask. I have to do it myself. I guess I just slid into it once he went into care. It’s good to be able to be like this now.

With her best friend and best support no longer available for her to rely on, my mother faced a clear choice: Would she simply be unable to manage some tasks because her dissociative part would rule, or would she overcome this dissociative response in order to achieve new things? Would she allow her world to be smaller, or would she develop the competence, the strength, to enlarge her capacities to allow her world to expand into the field of loss associated with my father? Would life be defined by what was, or by a new resilience for what now needed to be?

Joyce’s inner voice and choice

How conscious was this? How did she think about it and how did she talk with herself? She didn’t mix her words, including some harshness of her inner voice!

‘C’mon you stupid b*tch, of course you can do it! You’ve got no choice. You’ve gotta do it.’ That sort of thing! I think a lot. Mostly I question myself, or ask myself what am I going to do. The inner voice is there.

It seems a reasonable hypothesis that out of necessity my mother found her internal resources to bring the part of her that had fled after the shock of surviving a second near death birthing experience - that part that found it safer to float separately from her - back into the other parts of herself. She accomplished a reintegration.

It brings Joyce great joy - as it does to my brother and me - to see herself so full of life and competence and self-reflection. If he were able to see it her husband, our father, would also be joyous, relieved and very proud of her successful internal work.

My mother, Joyce, has reviewed this and has given her permission for me to publish this here.