Introduction, or where we are now

Otto and Ava-Jane on-the-swing

Misery lit

Can we trump anyone on the misery we have apparently endured? We could certainly give most people a good run for their money.

The birth of our first son was the moment when I realised who I was. I had always loved children and awaited becoming a father with absolute delight.

Otto was born looking like Gollum but with all the appendages and digits that a father looks for – five (in a boy) and twenty all present and correct. So far so good, I hear you say… Otto was completely fine and has grown into everything the doctor might have ordered. He is intelligent – “his grandfather’s brains” as his grandmother will say, not his father’s – please note. He is good-looking, that doesn’t express the radiance he sometimes seems to emanate – a father’s opinion, of course. And he is genuinely decent, and this is what I value most. He has just received Student of the Week “For being kind and caring all week”, though having a little sister with cancer probably makes you a bit of a shoe in for Student of the Week in one category or another. As he himself admitted, he wasn’t the only Student of the Week that week. He has won it before, but in a small school where there are multiple winners, in a number of ever-changing categories, they probably feel confident that it will come round to them sometime soon. So very much so good I hear you say…

Otto was fine, his mum, on the other wasn’t. Really wasn’t.

We all know about post-natal depression, we all know someone who has suffered it to a certain intensity. But then there’s this other thing. This other thing that some people sort of know about, have heard about, know someone vaguely who’s sister has had it. And this is where the misery lit really sets in. In fact lit, literature, is probably the best place to start to get a handle on what puerperal psychosis is.

I think that what Mrs Rochester in Jane Eyre suffered from was puerperal psychosis – untreated puerperal psychosis. Her story was taken up by Jean Rhys in “The Wide Sargasso Sea”. In a recent TV drama, I can’t remember the name, (Victorian prostitute taken in and then dumped by a gentleman) there was also a mother character who almost certainly suffered from puerperal psychosis. As with all mental illnesses, it will have a number of different manisfestations and I can only write of the one I encountered. And I can can apply my own experiences to be able to describe it. So… If anyone has been in the unfortunate situation of not having taken LSD and being with someone who has taken LSD, this, to me, is the best way to describe the way it was being with Fiona, the woman I loved and whom I had married less than eight months previously – you do the math, as they say. And where the analogy of spending time with Fiona and spending time with a tripper falls down, is that it might be remotely funny spending time with someone talking gobbledygook if it wasn’t 24/7 for six months and if you hadn’t just had a baby with them.

Misery lit moment #1: holding your three-day old son with your wife jumping off the walls. Your mother-in-law having come to check on the situation and pronounced that it was the baby blues. You listening in via the brand new baby intercom on her calling her friends telling them that her baby was dead – but in a cheerful way.

She was generally cheerful for the first six months. One the way up of the first half of the manic depression wave. To be followed by the downstroke. Though, to be perfectly honest, the depression was far easier to deal with – at least you knew where she would be – on the sofa. Not “going for drive”, “talking to the horses” or whatever had taken her fancy at that particular moment.

But we got over it. She got better. Better to the extent that she felt she wanted another child. I think that there is a protection system that we, as humans, have, that allows us to forget the traumatic. If it wasn’t for this system we would all be only children as I really think that if women could truly remember childbirth, they wouldn’t do it again willingly. Men, only live it at second hand hence polygamy is almost exclusively a male vice.

We set ourselves up to deal with Fiona being ill again. We went to live with my mother. We had finally worked out the drugs that would prevent Fiona turning into Mrs Rochester and hand a handful ready for her to neck the moment the baby popped out.

We had been given a warning about Downs (this is a bit of a giveaway of my next Misery Lit moment, I know). but as Fiona was 39 and me 41, some risk was inevitable. We also thought that as Fiona had had “dead baby” thoughts when the baby wasn’t dead and her psychosis could be kicked off by any trauma, an (arguably) really dead baby that we had decided to kill ourselves, would be a very bad idea. So we went ahead…

Do you want the good news or the bad news? This isn’t an interactive book and I cannot really poll you on which order you would like the news. So I will start with the good news as it is quicker and simpler to recount and I am not right in the middle of it. Fiona was absolutely fine.

Fo, we call Fiona, Fo, well… her recovery was quite as staggering as her original fall. When she wasn’t well she hadn’t be able to be a mother but when she got well about a year later she became the mother that she always was.

I got the call that she was in labour as I was standing on the top floor of a jammed Park and Ride bus out of Oxford. Apart from being uncomfortable and slow, this would mean that I would be stuck in a jam to get out of the car park, further delaying my journey. So I pulled the ultimate card, much used in lame comedies – shouting out “my wife’s in labour” and it was true. A dependable lady bustled me to the doors to allow for swift exit and rejoinder with car.

Fiona had gone through the early stages of labour with Otto – our five-year old, Zac, his 11-year old cousin and the wasp exterminator. Taking it all in her stride, but I don’t think I flatter myself if I say she was pleased to see me. We lived 15 minutes from Milton Keynes General and an hour from Banbury. We’d had our first child in Banbury, loved them and kids were dying in MK. So my “shall we go to Milton Keynes” suggestion was turned down.

So began the drive to Banbury. Now I am not a fast driver but with Fiona panting in the back seat I was encouraged to go for it a little more than would be my wont. Fans of hers will be glad to hear that she was still able, in advanced stages of labour, as it would transpire, to give me some guidance and remind of of an upcoming speed camera. This is almost certainly the first and last time she has asked me to slow down.

One of the major motivators for my speed was the fact that my car was not, and is not, a sterile environment. It really is not the sort of place where you would want to give birth to a child, your own or third party.

And sure enough my pedal to the metal attitude paid off. Got to the hospital, ushered straight to a room. Midwife took down Fiona’s pants and away we went. Baby appeared within approx seven minutes of arrival to hospital.

This one also looked like Gollum, but Gollum with Down’s syndrome. She has never looked so Downsy as on that first night. A very nice paedriatician came to see her the next morning and basically said that just because she had all the pointers towards Down’s Syndrome – slanty eyes, low ears, sandal toes, etc it did not mean that she necessarily, had Down’s Syndrome… She did. And he also told us that even though, as he had explained, she did not necessarily have Down’s Syndrome, she should go for a heart check up as a lot of children with Down’s Syndrome, had problems with their hearts.

Misery lit moment #2: coming back from a heart scan with your one-day old baby, having been told that she has complete AVSD, having only vaguely understood that AVSD is not good so therefore assuming that complete AVSD is really not good, coming to terms with the fact that she has Down’s Syndrome and a really not good heart condition, and… wondering how to tell your wife, who has a much higher than 50% probability of going nuts just from the trauma of childbirth, a probability that can only increase with further traumas… Down’s Syndrome, a really not good heart condition, for e.g.

So, Ava-Jane, we called he Ava-Jane, Ava – a palindrome like Otto, but then with Jane tacked on, her mother’s second name and as a mitigation for the possibly overly glam association with Ava Gardner for a Down’s kid. We should’t have worried, on current evidence she will be able to pull it off with aplomb.

My protection mechanism in the run up to the operation was cowardly, I decided not to love her too much, in case she died. With all the medical conditions we had been through we had been bombarded with numerous statistics – 1 in 500 chance of this, 1 in 80 chance of that, and they had all seemingly gone against us, so when I hear a “high 90s survival rate” I immediately converted this to: 1 in 20 died. She didn’t die. It was a massive operation for someone so small with a heart so small. But a bit of gor-tex and some cow heart a surgeon’ with unfeasibly big hands, managed to put her together again. And she got better, very quickly.

This tiny little person who for four months hadn’t been able to stay awake for a whole feed, suddenly woke up from the induced coma that she had been in and rocked on a fully functioning heart.

Cheerful lit moment #1: darling little daughter having recovered from open-heart surgery, wife not having gone mad to the extent that she is able to, not only, deal with daughter with Down’s Syndrome and the really not good heart condition and ensuing open-heart surgery, live with mother-in-law and not go mad while, all at the same time, building a beautiful, special house for Ava-Jane, Otto, herself and your dear blogger.

We live in a converted barn, right next to my mother, this blogger’s problems of actually living with his mother are completely resolved by ten yards of separation – we live next to a lovely lady who enjoys nothing more than looking after the two small ones.

It is where I grew up and is a haven, not an escape, from the modern world… We are only 15 minutes from Milton Keynes remember, so not a total rural idyll, but bubolic enough, that I have only noticed one car as I have written this screed.

Let the smugness abound: I have also landed the perfect job, where I can leverage my limited skills in life – the ability to speak in street Spanish about the intricacies of Spanish football and iron lungs… I can smoke any fucker under the table. As I say, limited but useful having got a job with an old-school Spanish company run by a load of people who smoke a lot and talk football. On top of all that I am able to be creative, make decisions and generally do the stuff that gets me going.

Anyway enough of all that, this is supposed to be Misery Lit, I hear you cry, well, this where it really does get miserable, and this is where we are now.