“Toilet!” yelled the midwife. “Toilet!” I was in the final stages of giving birth and the midwife, unable to speak English and convinced I could not understand German, wanted me to push.
An hour or so later I was wheeled away, my daughter in my arms, into a dimly lit room where another mother was feeding her newborn baby. The nurse, kind but aloof, brought me a piece of white bread and cheese, lowered the bed to flat and left me there, presumably to sleep. But I was in complete shock. My boyfriend was out on the street, unable to stay due to Berlin’s Covid regulations at the time, and there was a little person on my chest, who still appeared better suited to her amniotic sac than the little knitted hat the midwife had put on her.
I was jerked from this stupefied state when I spilled a half-litre bottle of water all over myself, the baby and the bed. Unable to sit up, physically exhausted and cautious of the stitches holding me together, I found myself lying soaked in water with my daughter going at my breast like a jackhammer, while desperately trying to figure out how to unclasp my maternity bra and use the hospital phone at the same time so I could ask for help in my A2 German: “Ich brauche Hilfe, bitte.”
I felt immensely overwhelmed and pathetically helpless under the sideways stare of the woman in the other bed, but there was also something else building inside me. Something that in the weeks and months to follow turned out to be what the internet called postpartum rage.
When we were back in my studio apartment – back in lockdown – I continued to be agitated by what I experienced as environmental and physical microaggressions. The unrelenting heavy footsteps of my upstairs neighbour. My engorged breasts, now the size, shape and feel of gridiron footballs. The neighbour across the way blowing his nose like a trumpet day and night. An empty fridge and an each-for-their-own trolley-ramming mentality at the supermarket. And the 32 square metres that once felt cosy – now, at times, unbearably small for the three of us, the only private refuge the bathroom.
Outside things were no better. There was nowhere to go – everything closed, no café toilet to relieve the urgent requests of my bladder or check I hadn’t bled through my maternity pad, no friends to clutch on to. The Australian border was closed, and every day it became more and more clear to me that my family and friends would not visit me and my newborn, nor I them. I felt trapped in Germany (indeed, I was), the language more impossible than ever before. Meanwhile I was making regular trips to the internet café, my daughter strapped to my body, printing out hundreds upon hundreds of pages to send to the Finanzamt, Germany’s ATO, to which they would respond weeks later with yet more requests: where did the 60 euros that was deposited into your account in June 2018 come from?
Early postpartum looked nothing like what Instagram had suggested it would. I wasn’t lounging in a neutral-coloured linen pyjama set, eating a bowl of congee while nursing my always-contented baby as my equally put-together friends looked serenely on. I was in a constant oscillation between joy and despair and anger. I was down on my hands and knees in my underwear, smelling rancid with sweat, feeding my daughter like a cow her calf in the hope that she would suck free the blocked milk duct that was making my entire body quiver in pain. I was obsessively Googling things like: Should breastfeeding hurt? Can sleep deprivation kill you? Does my baby have colic? Will the Australian dollar go back up? Why am I always so angry?
At night, so long those nights were, I struggled the most. As I fed my daughter, teeth clenched against the pain of yet another blocked duct, all I could hear was the gentle snoring of my boyfriend next to me. “He’s only breathing,” I’d tell myself, “he’s only keeping himself alive.” Occasionally I’d move violently to stir him, other times I’d ask him to get me something, a glass of water, a tissue, pretext to wake him up. But when, with eyes still closed, he’d say to me, “Just give me a couple of minutes to wake up,” my rage didn’t feel irrational at all.
In the grand scheme of things, none of it was terribly bad, except maybe the sudden collective fear of door handles and other human beings. And yet these moments of small discomforts, big once compiled, left me raging: turned mostly inward, but occasionally, with great drama, turned outward. I had not expected these feelings, of course, and in contrast to the elated hormonal trip of pregnancy and the all-consuming love I felt for my daughter, this undercurrent of frustration and fury was rather vile and shameful – not to mention grotesquely ill-fitting to the image of the glowing new mother I’d been fooled into believing.
And that, perhaps, was my undoing: expecting a one-dimensional experience, when postpartum – especially in these times of prolonged isolation and uncertainty – was anything but. It was hard and it was lonely, and the anger, I can see now, was mostly just fear, the enormous responsibility of having borne a child into what feels like a very hostile world.
• Gabrielle Innes is an Australian freelance writer and editor based in Berlin
• Crisis support services can be reached 24 hours a day: Lifeline 13 11 14; Suicide Call Back Service 1300 659 467; Kids Helpline 1800 55 1800; MensLine Australia 1300 78 99 78; Beyond Blue 1300 22 4636 24.
