Restoring identity after birth of son
This is not a self-help manual but it is an enlightening look at one woman’s journey through severe depression, writes Nicholas Reid.
There’s a school of thought that says men should not review women’s books about specifically female issues. Obviously I don’t agree with this line. What’s the purpose of a nonfiction book if not to enlighten people about something? And surely men need to be enlightened about how women think and feel. So here I am reviewing a book that is very much about a women’s issue.
Things That Helped is a memoir of postpartum depression – the severe depression that many mothers feel after having given birth.
Canberra-based now, but for most of her life a Melburnian, Jessica Friedmann had a history of mild depression. But she was not prepared for the tsunami of anxiety that overcame her when she gave birth to her son Owen. She makes it clear that her husband Mike was, and is, very supportive and did his best to make her first-time motherhood easier. Even so, she felt the extreme nature of the physical changes in her body, especially as she had had a caesarean section to avoid a breech birth.
There are the chafed nipples and weariness of lost sleep as she has to feed her baby by day and by night. There are the impulsive trains of thought and obsessions. There’s a loss of intellectual focus and an irrational sense of guilt.
Sometimes, she says, she felt either homicidal or suicidal. On top of this, there are the new limits to her movements and social life, as a newborn baby has to be nurtured. Loneliness and a sense of isolation well up. So how does she deal with all this?
Things That Helped is definitely not a self-help manual. It is a set of 12 detailed and sophisticated essays in which Friedmann considers all the things that helped her rebuild a sense of identity and confidence. Sure, antidepressant drugs and psychotherapy were part of it. She does not denigrate conventional medicine.
However, she is more concerned to use her psychological crisis to reconsider her life. Her love of weaving and of art helps. Although she’s a little shy about it, chilling out and watching ballet movies helps. She is particularly helped by analysing how she feels about her family and her upbringing. There is an essay on her formidable grandmother and another on the father whom she loves, but whose opinions grate on her. It is not an easy journey but by the end of the last essay she leaves the impression that she is now coping and moving on.
I admit there were moments in this book that alienated me. Friedmann’s casual references to gallery-openings attended and foreign trips taken suggest somebody very comfortably in the upper-middle-classes and used to a few privileges. Not your ordinary battling mum. But then in a late chapter, she addresses this very issue of privilege and her guilt about it. As for the lapses into Lacanian psychology and talk of women as mythic sorceresses, witches and disruptors – it’s very Feminism 101.
But the sanity of Friedmann’s approach overrides these moments. And her writing is both persuasive and ornate.