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Clare Moriarty: ‘I was shell-shocked by how close I’d come to hurting my baby ... I thought a lot about single parents in the days that followed’

We need to recognise the very real, clinical nature of depression. We also need policies that recognise that different people have different experiences of new parenthood

Once upon a time, the life of a young woman was principally directed towards motherhood. The chasm between what’s expected from us in new parenthood and the lives we live just beforehand is as wide as it’s ever been. Photograph: iStock
Clare Moriarty
Sun Jul 07 2024 - 07:00

There will always be bad nights with small babies.

On one of those nights, I was at the infant coalface, and for whatever reason, I just couldn’t get mine settled. Her lovely round tummy was full, her nappy clean, and yet there we were, chest to chest in a desperate mutual grip, heartbeats in a ratcheting shared crescendo. We’d already been out for one of her beloved night walks – the combination of the cold January air and her warm cocoon in the baby-carrier providing instant solace. As soon as we got inside, she started up again. The idea of those screams ricocheting around an apartment-block courtyard that turned even modestly squeaky suitcase wheels into a community torture device kept me indoors. We’ll figure this out in here, I thought, from my imagined prison.

I can remember vividly, extending my elbows to hold her at arms’ length away from me, and thinking, yeah, I’ll just quieten her down with a little shake. Now, if you had asked me before I gave birth, how an adult could find themselves contemplating shaking an infant, I would have told you that such barbarity strained the resources of my well-adjusted mind. That night, the thought stayed with me for a while before I put her down wailing in the cot and woke my husband to tag him in before retreating to the livingroom to sit shell-shocked by how close I’d come to hurting her.

I thought a lot about single parents in the days that followed. I was very glad of that hand-over.

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In my experience, momentary shifts from psychological wellness into something frantic are common in early parenting and needn’t be triggered by anything radical. In my first maternity leave, I occasionally wondered whether I might be postnatally depressed. On days mothering didn’t come easily, I found it difficult to generate any sense of esteem. Babies – delightful though they are – can be capricious. One is not rewarded for one’s efforts. Nor is one compensated for injustice (as anyone who has had the fanciful thought “they didn’t do a single nap today – they’ll probably sleep amazingly tonight” can attest).

On bad nights, I wondered whether my occasional unhappiness was an issue of changed psychology and brain chemistry, or better explained by structural stuff that seemed almost tailor-made to produce alienation. My husband got hardly any time off work and Covid abounded, so I spent a lot of time alone with my baby. Work frequently intruded on maternity leave. Material submitted for publication long before I took leave required rounds of revisions and copy-editing that could neither be delayed nor done by someone else. I spent a lot of time in an unpleasant cycle of urgently wishing the baby to sleep so I could work and feeling terrible about those feelings. I love my work and struggled to do it in stolen moments, especially when I thought about who they were stolen from. Additionally, parenting scrutiny and informational overload are at an all-time high. The sense that we need to be feeding and weaning our babies perfectly and disciplining with the optimal ratio of gentleness to consistency is palpable. Social media seems indispensable for community and information, but good God stay out of the comments sections.

Structures that aim to support parents and babies are largely based on a univocal definition of family. Policies imagine a mammy and an indifferent daddy, with simultaneously retired and youthful local grandparents. Dads have careers that can’t be disrupted for long, and mams have jobs that may or may not matter, but they’re the kind of thing that can stop dead for an extensive period and immediately restart (and indeed might allow you to look after children for the second half of the day when your children start primary school). Accommodations for other family models are often very ad hoc.

Interesting philosophical work is being done on parenting. Laurie Paul has written powerfully about transformative experiences like childbirth and parenthood that change you fundamentally, raising major complexities for rational decision-making about deciding to become a parent. ‘Matrescence’, a term alluding to the massive upheaval of biology and identity that motherhood entails, is under renewed discussion, too. The more of this analysis the better. We need language and concepts to articulate experiences that are too often rendered private or explained only at an individual level. But we also need to think urgently about the structural and community-level shortcomings that are compounding the difficulty experienced by new parents and primary caregivers more broadly. If recent politics have taught us anything, it is that a huge portion of the population feel under-supported and under-recognised for care work – work without which, nothing can happen.

Once upon a time, the life of a young woman was principally directed towards motherhood. The chasm between what’s expected from us in new parenthood and the lives we live just beforehand is as wide as it’s ever been. We should expect the spectrum of transitions into parenthood to be as broad as those of personality and experience. Commonalities, especially among different routes to parenthood, are important to emphasise, but so are discrepancies. I often felt one difficulty of new motherhood was trying to adjust a fundamentally untransformed me to a set of material circumstances that were very badly tailored to who I’d become. We need to recognise the very real, clinical nature of depression, but interrogate how such issues are worsened by failures of policy. Flexible, shared leave policies and robust, consistent public health infrastructure would go a long way to helping people feel less alone and alleviating the impact of “baby blues”, in whatever format they emerge.