Darkness that nearly wrecked a new mother
Lynsey Love tells how her dreams about parenthood were crushed by postnatal depression. Ruby Kitchen reports.
FEELING A failure as a new mother, Lynsey Love believed baby Willow would be better off without her.
All the hope, the anticipation, had been crushed by the weight of deadly postnatal depression.
There were days, she says, when she couldn’t open the curtains. When she would count the hours until her husband came home.
There was something undone, she believed, between her and her beautiful newborn daughter.
“I was failing at every hurdle,” says Mrs Love, 36. “I just felt so alone, so completely worthless. It came to the point that I felt she would be better off without me.
“She was just a perfectly normal baby. For some reason I thought there was something wrong with me and her.
“It breaks my heart now, when I think of what could have happened.”
Mrs Love, a fitness instructor from Baildon, is brutally honest about her battle with postnatal depression after the birth of Willow, now five.
It very nearly destroyed her, she says, close to tears as she shares her story.
When we meet, at the Red Lion in Burley-in-Wharfedale, Mrs Love is surrounded by Ilkley mothers after one of her classes, all juggling their own babies.
This is a new wave of wellness, she says, with the pub opening early to accommodate their weekly chats.
What happened has brought her a new direction, says Mrs Love. And she doesn’t want any mother to feel as isolated as she did in those first few months.
The dark depression
stemmed, she believes, from the weight of expectation. That motherhood, while tiring, would somehow be magical and fulfilling.
The reality, she adds, was rather different.
“It was like being in a car accident,” she said. Her labour had been traumatic, lasting 26 hours, before she suffered Lynsey Love said she thought her daughter Willow would be better off without her. an extreme haemorrhage and lost consciousness. She could barely move for 48 hours and her husband Pete had been the one to care for both her and their new daughter.
“Nobody ever tells you the graphic details,” she says. “I felt I’d lost my dignity as a woman. I was just helpless.”
But this was only to be the start of 18 months of personal torment. Unable to breastfeed, she blamed herself. Her baby didn’t sleep and she blamed herself.
At baby groups, all the other mothers seemed to be coping. Why couldn’t she?
“I felt as if everybody else knew what they were doing,” says Mrs Love.
Although terrified Willow would be taken from her, she still struggled to ask for help. Eventually she did turn to her GP and was offered counselling and medication.
It would be another year and a half though, she says, before she started to feel herself again. It was exercise and doing something for herself that made the difference.
After the birth of her second baby, Jasper, now two, Mrs Love switched careers, taking on the Sweaty Mama franchise for new mothers across north-west Leeds and Bradford.
“There’s a lot of misconceptions, when you have postnatal depression, that you don’t love your baby,” she says.
“That couldn’t be further from the truth. I loved my baby so much I was consumed with it. I felt I wasn’t good enough for her.
“I want to share my story to help other mothers.” I FELT WORTHLESS: Lynsey Love, above, and left with daughter Willow and son Jasper, says she wants to share her story to help other mothers going through the same ordeal that she suffered.
I loved my baby but felt I wasn’t good enough for her.