Postnatal life is a lot like pottery. Some women have beautifully painted pots, proudly displayed on shelves. Others have cracked pots that cannot hold water.
Health Life Parenting

Postnatal Depression and Pottery

Postnatal life is a lot like pottery. Some women have beautifully painted pots, proudly displayed on shelves. Others have cracked pots that cannot hold water.

By Jame Smith of mumonthenetheredge

Life metaphors have always struck me as invariably silly.

Life isn’t in the least like a box of chocolates. If it were, who the fuck is eating all the caramel swirls? Answer me that. Greedy bastard. And if life gives you lemons, you can’t really make lemonade unless it also happens to have conveniently gifted you sugar and carbonated water/baking soda.

Neither is life that much like a roller coaster. In my experience, there isn’t that much hanging upside down in the company of screaming teenagers on a school trip—but maybe I’ve been doing it wrong. I’m not even convinced by Shakespeare’s all the world’s a stage. If it were a play, there’d be way more intervals. I really need more intervals.

Nope. What life is really like is one of those paint-a-pot shops.

Bear with me as I extend a metaphor beyond all tensility, sensibility, or indeed probability.

You often don’t get that much choice in what kind of pot you get or time to plan your approach. It might be sturdy earthenware or delicate china. An intricate teapot or a comedy cat. And it’s your responsibility to make something of it in the very short time allotted to you before the next group booking.

Sure, you get to decorate it as you wish, but only using the colors and tools immediately available to you. The colors don’t always come out as you planned. It’s hard to get the detail right. You make mistakes. You can use a wet sponge to try and rub them out, but you’ll still be able to see them once it’s been through the kiln, so you’re probably better off just adapting the design as you go along.

Sometimes there’s someone to offer you advice, but mostly you’ve got to do it all yourself. There’s invariably someone next to you doing something better. And in the end, you may or may not be pleased with the results.

So each and every one of us is a pot, lined up on the shelves of life, stretching as far as the eye can see. Some of us will be displayed, pride of place, up front and center. Some of us will be half-hidden behind a spider plant. Perhaps we get to choose the pots we want to be arranged next to — possibly those with similar patterns. Some folks are happy to be on the highest shelves; others lurk in safety near the bottom rungs.

Sometimes, just sometimes, pots get broken. Maybe they were already fragile. But when the pieces shatter, they will never be put back in quite the same way.

There are two natural enemies of pottery: the first (obviously) is bulls and the second is small children. And it’s having children that broke my pot wide, wide open.

I think most of the mothers I know would admit to a few cracks postpartum. Some may have been relatively minor — hairline fractures. Others weren’t. Some had ugly, raw gouges. A few completely smashed. I don’t know many that came through the process completely intact, as before, without tarnish or at least a little fading round the edges. And mostly, we don’t talk about it. We fall apart in private and show our best side to the world.

There is a very bad habit in our modern world of just chucking out and replacing broken stuff without even trying to fix it. Simple consumerism—the pursuit of perfection, maybe. And if we don’t write it off as irreparable, we still don’t ever think of it or use it in quite the same way again. Slap it back together with a bit of superglue or gaffa tape, stick it in the little loo where no one will really see it. Hide it. Move on.

When my pot broke, I did pick the pieces up eventually. With a bit of help. But it wasn’t water tight anymore. (Hell, I spring leaks from various orifices every time I sneeze unexpectedly or watch a bloody John Lewis advert). But it’s still standing. I’m still standing.

We have never bottomed out the veritable melting pot (see what I did there?) of mental health in the UK (or the world)—something that affects an estimated 1 in 4 people at some point in their lives. It is not just a women’s issue; mental health is very much an equal opportunities affliction. Oh, we pretend to understand it, to sympathize, to be PC. But in reality we mostly just avoid it, medicate it, wait for it to go away. Stigmatize. Blame. Roll our eyes.

Pull yourself together.

Everyone’s got problems.

Try looking on the bright side.

Change the record.

I don’t need that kind of negativity.

Other people do this all the time.

He’s no fun anymore.

She enjoys wallowing.

Why can’t she just get over it?

Why can’t he just be grateful for what he’s got?

You’ve probably thought one or more of these things about one or more of your acquaintances over the years.

Then it happens to you.

And you can’t make the effort. You can’t face the day. Even getting out of bed feels so HUGE a mountain to climb that you can hardly make your limbs obey you. That heaviness pervades your body, your mind. You can’t bear to see people, nor to be alone in your own echoing, fickle, foggy head. You obsess over details, become overwhelmed by minutiae, anxious about every little thing. You can’t make decisions. You can’t think, plan, engage.

Life is reduced to a series of motions you go through but can’t feel and emotions you feel but can’t sort through. There is an unrelenting ebb and flow of panic and lethargy, hyper-reality and detachment. All you can do is grit your teeth, put your head down, focus, try, fail, repeat. Over and over and over again.

The battle to maintain structural integrity, to keep up a flimsy shell of functionality, to hold all your pieces together — it takes all the energy and concentration you can muster.

For many women, postnatal depression is their ‘intro’ to mental health issues. Crazy 101. And it’s pretty fucking scary. And the only thing even scarier than all that is the aftermath — what happens when the fog lifts and you finally put your head up again.

She’s delicate.

He’s weak.

She’s a flapper.

He’s lost his edge.

She can’t cope.

He’s changed.

She’s a dramatist.

A neurotic.

Overwrought.

Unstable.

Spoiled.

You’re put in a box that people won’t let you out of again. It’s like they can’t see your pot anymore—they can only see the cracks. Like that’s what you’ve become. That’s what you’re worth. Damaged goods.

This is not always so. Elsewhere in the world, survival and experience are embraced. Kintsugi is the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with lacquer dusted or mixed with powdered gold. It treats breakage and repair as part of the history of an object rather than something to disguise. It even highlights the cracks and celebrates them as something actually adding to its value.

And that, folks, is why postnatal depression is REALLY like pottery. Kintsugi.

Because you are not damaged or ruined. You are uniquely beautiful—not despite your scars but because of them.

If I know anything from watching two whole episodes of Time Team on the History Channel, it’s that the broken pieces of pottery are what archaeologists will find thousands of years from now. It’s how we all end up—at the very end—dashed on the ol’ rocks of life. Dug out of a trench by a future Tony Robinson. What story will your pot tell, I wonder?

The golden veins that hold my pieces together are a map of love—the only thing that really heal or seal the cracks.

And as I sit here on my shelf, gradually collecting dust, they glint in the afternoon sun. Blinding flashes of hope.

This post was originally published on mumonthenetheredge. 

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About the Author

I’m the mumonthenetheredge – Nether Edge being an area of Sheffield, my home town in the UK. I’m not sure what I’m on the edge of. On good Mummy days maybe I’m on the edge of glory. Mostly I’m on teetering on the edge of sanity. Often I’m on the edge of a toilet seat trying to have a crap whilst being assaulted by two small girls. You can visit me at mumonthenetheredge, on Facebook, or follow me on Twitter. Expect neurosis, profanity, angst and over-sharing.