Warsaw Mommy Blog

This is something that I’ve wanted to write about for awhile, and I have finally screwed up enough courage to do it – maybe enough time and distance have passed for me to have the courage.

Max was such a wanted child: 6 months before we started trying to get pregnant, I lost some weight, started taking folic acid, did loads of reading and looked at hospitals in Warsaw. When I got pregnant – basically on the first try – we were delighted, and spent hours planning our lives with a baby, and going to prenatal classes, and talking to an English-speaking midwife about a water birth and being amazed almost daily at the changes in my body. We could not wait to meet Max, we were so excited. We bought a bigger flat. We bought bedroom furniture. We bought sweet little clothes and toys. We had grandparents-to-be on two continents, waiting with bated breath. Then Max came – and my whole life fell apart.

I remember in the birthing classes, the midwife told us that the baby born screaming is a myth; most babies come into the world calmly and lay quietly on the mother’s breasts, blinking and squinting. Max came into this world screaming and he did not really stop for the first 14 months that he lived on this planet. He screamed when he was hungry, then he screamed while he was trying to eat, then he screamed after he’d finished eating. He screamed when he was tired, but he wouldn’t sleep for longer than 30 minutes at a time – and he’d wake up screaming. He screamed when we picked him up and rocked him, he screamed when we put him down. He went through one stage for about 3 weeks where the only way he’d sleep was in my arms, when I was walking around in circles; if he fell asleep and I put him down, he’d wake up and scream.

My husband left the house every day at 8:00 and returned at 6:00 in the evening so I was alone with Max for about 10 hours a day, 50 hours a week, for the first 4 months of his life. He was born in early October and Warsaw autumns are grey and rainy, and Warsaw winters are miserably cold and snowy, so taking Max out for long walks was impossible. This meant that I was quite literally trapped for 10 hours a day, in a flat, alone with a screaming baby. If I wanted to take a shower or make a cup of coffee or go to the washroom or eat some toast, I had to mentally brace myself for the screaming. I remember psyching myself up, saying things like, “OK. I need to brush my teeth. I will put him in his crib and run to the sink and talk to him the whole time I’m brushing so he knows I’m still here and then I’ll spit and rinse and be back here in about 30 seconds. Here we go….” and I’d place him in his crib and run out of the room, the screams following me the whole way.

I was a wreck, but I thought that I was a wreck because of the constant screaming and the sleep deprivation; it never occurred to me that something more was going on. I never thought that I had postpartum depression, because I was so overwhelmed by motherhood, and by the fact that I hated being a mother to a child that I had wanted so badly. And then I began to have these kinds of thoughts: that I hated being a mother, that I was a terrible mother, that my baby knew I was a terrible mother and that was why he was screaming, that I could not ever stop him screaming because I was a terrible mother, being a bad mother made me a bad person, I hated feeling this way, I hated myself, I hated my baby. I began to wish he would just shut up, for Christ’s sake, just SHUT UP for five fucking minutes, can you do that, you little shit? I began to dream about walking out of the flat one day, just leaving Max alone in his crib screaming, and Piotr could come home from work in 2 hours, or 6 hours, or 10 hours and HE could just deal with this fucking nightmare child because I’D be on a plane going anywhere but here. If I’d been in Canada I would have talked to my mother or my friends, but I just couldn’t talk about any of this on the phone and it was too awful to try to write it all down in an e-mail, even though I tried more than once. None of my close friends in Warsaw have kids, so I couldn’t talk to them, and everyone else I asked told me to be happy to have a healthy baby. They were actually offended that I was spitting in the face of the whole ‘Matka Polka’ (Polish Earth-Mother/ Goddess) cultural protocol and was so ungrateful for my baby, when so many Polish women would love to have a child and couldn’t. How dare I complain about a little bit of crying? My role in life was to have children, and I should accept that role without question, without complaint. This plunged me into a deeper sense of worthlessness, of failure, of guilt. Who was I to complain?

This was when I began to realise that my feelings were not just sleep deprivation – this was something else and I needed to get some help. I asked some other non-Polish mothers from my prenatal class – for some reason, a bunch of us all had our first kids within 2 months of each other – and I’d call some other Warsaw mommies and describe Max’s behaviour and ask for advice. Unfortunately for me, these women had angel babies who rarely cried and who slept 5 or 6 hours a night almost from the get-go and they all loved being mothers SO MUCH that they all got pregnant before their firstborn was a year old – because for them, being a mother was such a fantastic, amazing, perfect experience. Hearing this made me feel much, much worse (of course), and my feelings of being inadequate and a failure as a mother were reinforced by one of my so-called friends saying to me, “Huh. My baby doesn’t do any of the things that Max does. I just don’t know what you’re doing wrong.” What I should have said was, “I am doing nothing wrong, you bitch.” But I didn’t; I couldn’t. I was so sure that my baby was miserable because of a huge number of things I was doing (and not doing) and it was all my fault and if I could just become a good mother somehow, Max would stop screaming. He did not stop screaming, and so I did not become a good mother.

I then turned to the medical profession for help: I went to see my doctor and started to tell her about how I was feeling. She cut me off and told me not to hold Max the way that I was; also, I shouldn’t let him get too dependent on the soother. I tried again to talk to her, she told me I had to make way for her next patient. I tried to explain about PPD, but she told me it didn’t really exist, and if I took a long walk every day I’d feel better. It turns out that I could have called Maria, my midwife, but that information was written in Polish only on the hospital website and so I didn’t understand it.

In desperation, I looked for a therapist or psychologist. There were only three English-speaking psychologists I could find: one was my friend and would not treat me; the second had a four-month waiting period; the last was someone I knew professionally, and he refused to treat me. I wrote an e-mail to a large private clinic with an English-language website – they only accepted e-mail queries and promised to get in touch after reading the e-mails – and I wrote, ‘I think I have postpartum depression. I am afraid that I will hurt myself, and my baby. Please help me.’ Nobody responded; when I called, nobody spoke English and when I tried to explain in Polish what was happening to me, the person at the other end was rude and dismissive and put me on hold and forgot about me, and eventually hung up. I couldn’t bring myself to call back.

I kept trying, I kept hitting walls, I was totally alone; I know that the language barrier and the cultural refusal to accept PPD as something real and devastating made my isolation more complete. If I had been back in Canada, I would have had so many other options – I would have been able to express myself fully and clearly in my native tongue and I’d have kept talking until someone listened. I would have had emergency hotlines, and crisis centers and access to clinics and doctors and I would have screamed until someone heard me. But I was here, in Poland, and I did not know what to do.

In the end, we hired a nanny and I went back to work. These two things helped. Max began to eat formula from a bottle and he started to sleep for 3 or 4 hours at a stretch, and that helped. I finally talked to my husband and even though he was not a professional, that helped. A friend took Max for the occasional weekend, and that helped. Spring came and the sun came out, and that helped. Max’s funny, sweet and utterly charming personality began to emerge, and that really helped. I found Heather Armstrong’s website and her personal journey through PPD and out the other side showed me that I was not alone and not crazy and that I could survive this. But the sad truth is that I did not start to enjoy my firstborn son until he was about 14 months old. I think another truth is that my PPD was something that I just gritted my teeth about and got through, all by myself. It passed. It ended. It went away – but I still wonder what that 14 months would have been like if I’d found a doctor’s sympathetic ear, or talked to a psychologist, or taken medication, or found just one other woman who would admit to the same experience, the same feelings. Maybe I would not have thought about throwing Max against the wall to just make it all stop – the fact that I did not hit him or hurt him or kill us both still amazes me, to this day.

I wish I’d been back in Canada when all this happened. I know things would have been different. It’s my one regret about moving to Poland – that I had PPD in a country where I could not get any help, no matter how many times I asked. The one thing I’d say to any woman who is thinking about hurting herself or her baby is: ask for help, start talking, start to scream. And don’t stop until someone listens to you. You don’t have to do this the way that I did – you don’t have to suffer through it and survive it. You don’t.