‘I FELT LIKE A FAILURE’
Mum opens up on struggles after her daughter’s birth to help other women
EMMA JAY had run a successful gym business for 15 years when she became a mother. It was a job she believed that, as a woman, she would inherently know how to do. But it wasn’t as simple as that.
She was looking around her, looking at other mums, watching them cope and wondering why she wasn’t. The pressure to keep up with work while looking after her daughter Quinn, who struggled with a milk intolerance and didn’t sleep for the first nine months, pushed her to a breaking point.
Just shy of her daughter turning 12 months old, Emma, from Neath, hit a brick wall. They had just returned from a family holiday abroad where Emma married her husband.
“I literally hit burnout,” she said. “I couldn’t function. I felt horrific. I just wanted to leave. I couldn’t get myself out of this dark place. I remember going to write a post about my business on social media, and I couldn’t string a sentence together.
“I had such severe brain fog, I couldn’t tap into my knowledge and my experience and put the words together... And I think that was the point for me when I realised something had to change.”
Emma, 44, said: “I had to sell the business because I couldn’t cope. I took some time out to be a mam and it was a massive knock to my confidence. But I realised that myself and my own health had to come first. I took two years out and gradually, slowly built myself back up, doing a lot of personal development, learning more. Even though I was a coach and I knew everything, I knew I couldn’t help myself. At the time, I punished myself because I didn’t have the career I used to have and why were other people achieving with young children and I wasn’t?
“Now I look back and I think ‘How many women punish themselves like that when there’s no need?’ We can’t all juggle everything, we’re all different, we can all cope with different things.”
Emma said part of her post-partum depression was fuelled by her lack of sleep. Quinn suffered with a milk intolerance and reflux. As a result she would wake every hour most nights for the first nine months of her life. Emma said that as a coach she recognised how it was affecting her body scientifically. The lack of sleep meant her body was craving energy and sugar, which would leave her feeling awful as a result.
She added: “So my body wasn’t repairing and recovering, my hormones were rebalancing. I then turned to junk food, even though I knew not to, because I just wanted to survive. And it’s just a vicious cycle. And then you look on social media to all these other people. I’ve got a couple of friends in a similar sort of business to myself. And I’d be looking at them, they were doing this cracking job, and I’d be thinking ‘Why do I feel like I’m dying inside and failing every single thing that I’m doing? And they still win in a life.’”
She sought the help of a coaching friend. She made her own health a priority again, making sure she ate and took time to herself. She has decided to open up about her experience in the hope that other women feel encouraged to do so too.
She said: “I think it is really important to talk about how you feel – I didn’t and I think that was my biggest mistake. My biggest mistake was pretending that everything was OK, pretending that I was managing really well, not admitting to anybody how I felt, not asking for any help at all. I was under the illusion that I could do this job, it is the most natural thing that a woman should be doing.
“And I’ve run businesses in two different countries. I was more than capable of doing anything business wise. Why couldn’t I do this job? So to me, I felt like a failure. And I think a lot of women feel that way.”
Since returning to coaching Emma has focused on helping women get over the issues she experienced. She is working with Mind and hopes to raise awareness of post-natal depression.