In memory of my mother, Andrea: There is a photo of us walking across the spindly marram grass near the beach at Waipū Cove. You are smiling at the camera, and I am walking towards you, head bowed, little blonde bob glossy in the afternoon sunlight. It is an actual photograph, not a digital one. A lot has changed since you were alive.
I dream of that grass, of you, often. Sometimes you have your long, curly hair in French plaits, other times you are wearing a white, billowing dress, but you always say the same thing to me: ‘Keep going.’ I can never remember the sound of your voice when I’m awake, but when I’m sleeping, it is clear. A gentle sound, silvery and soft. It comforts me.
I seem to hear that phrase often, too, in moments that I need it most.
Once, it was the robotic tone of the kids’ plastic walker, the one that lights up and sings. Keep going, it said, enthusiastically. I’d kicked it, tripped over the bloody thing parked in the middle of the hallway, and avoided falling straight on my back. That would’ve been terrible, if I had. I wouldn’t have been able to get up.
Only an hour before, I’d taken the kids to the pharmacy, waited in the car with them, parked right outside. I was there to beg. My back injury had relapsed, worse than ever, and my partner was away on a fishing trip with no reception. The kids and I had covid—no one else could help. I was in agony. The pain always triggered my anxiety, which meant—combined with the kids being up at night, sick—I hadn’t slept properly for four days. I begged the pharmacist for lorezapam and pain meds and she’d said she couldn’t accept the doctor’s prescription I’d been given. It wasn’t in the right format; the pharmacist said.
I’d told her that she had to accept it, she had to, because I hadn’t slept and I couldn’t even lift my babies into their cots and I was this close, so very close, to walking in front of a f***g bus. Did I mean it? I don’t know. But I couldn’t bear the thought of waking up and facing another day of it, or not waking up, so to speak, but being forever awake, when you have nights and nights up with sick kids and anxiety, every day rollingintoone like one long continuous loop that never ends. I had two under two, and they never seemed to sleep at the same time, especially when they were sick.
I had tears in my eyes, but I was angry, too; why won’t you help me? I am at breaking point! The pain and anxiety were all around me, choking me, smothering me, and I had no room to move, to breathe. A little voice told me I was a very bad mother to even think this, so very bad, to even say it out loud, to articulate this feeling. To even write it out now, for people to read, makes me feel like a terrible mother. But I couldn’t swim anymore. I couldn’t breathe. I was drowning. It was all too much.
Was I just being dramatic? Other people can cope with this. Why can’t I? Up until they’d found out what was wrong with my back, it’d been inferred that the pain was in my head. Maybe I was going insane. Maybe I was just weak-celled. Maybe I had to toughen up.
But then, the pharmacist seemed to see the look in my eyes. Something changed. I was in a crisis and needed help and sometimes that involves medication.
I swallowed the pills as soon as I got home. No water, I just knocked them back dry. I made the kids’ bedtime bottles, got them into their pyjamas. I didn’t want them to see me cry. I pulled their sleep sacks on, had a cuddle, squeezing their shoulders a little tighter, kissing their foreheads a little longer.
I was horrified with myself. Who was I? What was I becoming?
I padded down the stairs, then I kicked that walker in the hallway. ‘Keep going!’ it said so loud I nearly kicked it again out of fright. It had a chirpy tone, like a child, excited and lively. It was jarring. I felt solemn, morose. Depressed. It was the last thing I wanted to hear.
The house was dark and empty, and I was alone. But my heart was slowing, the pain lifting.
Keep going, I told myself. That stupid bloody walker was right.
That night I fell asleep to the sound of the rain on the roof. Miraculously, the kids slept through, too. It was all I needed – a reset, some sleep.
I could keep going now, taking every day as it came. It took a few months, but the anxiety went away, eventually, as my back started to improve, and I came off the meds. It was slow, healing, as it always is, whether physical or mental. I know this; I’ve had many tower moments in my life, dark moments of despair, like most people, I suppose. This was, by far, the hardest.
That happened, even though I had two beautiful children, the lights of my life, who needed me. Even though I had a roof over my head, food, people who love me.
I used to think, Mum, how could you leave me? I was only 2, still a toddler. Now I know—it was never about me.
In all the photos, you look younger than me now. Because you are. Eternally 29. The pictures are flat and glossy, two dimensional. I cannot touch you, really. I try to conjure memories, but they don’t come.
The night with the walker, I understood more deeply than ever. But I also know you never really left me. I still look for you in the stars, in the trees, in the ocean. I wait for your signs. In my dreams, we are out in the grass beside the beach, and I am still a child, and you clasp my hand and say, ‘keep going’. And that’s what I do.
I wish you’d known, Andrea, that the good days come around, eventually. The sun rises, bad days pass. It is not embarrassing, nor weak, to use medication when you need to. Healing is possible. But mostly I wish you could take my hand, clasp it, and those of your grandchildren, too, and I could hear your silvery voice in the wind at Waipū—keep going—and not only just in my dreams.
I am grateful for my post-natal experience as it has provided a clearer direction for Nappkin. We will provide funding rounds for parents in crisis who require maternity nanny services for one or two nights, so they can sleep. The first funding round will open in October.
hannah norton writes 