When Catherine held her baby Jake in her arms for the first time, she did not feel love.
There was no connection. No fulfilment. Certainly no ecstasy.
In that moment, she was overwhelmed by a single thought. Catherine wanted to run away, as far from all this as possible.
It wasn’t how she’d felt almost exactly 12 months earlier, when she’d held her first baby in her arms, marvelling at his fingers and toes.
There was a difference, though.
Catherine’s first baby never drew breath. He wasn’t alive when she held him.
Along with her partner Chris, they made the decision to terminate the pregnancy due to fetal abnormality.
When Jake wriggled and cried and clutched Catherine’s flesh, she stared back at him perplexed. Where were the feelings? And would they ever come?
Mothers on the Edge: When Catherine met Louis Theroux
Louis Theroux’s brand new BBC documentary, Mothers on The Edge, opens with Catherine in the Mother and Baby Unit at Bethlem Royal Hospital, six months after Jake was born.
She was sectioned after trying to take her own life.
Jake, rosy-cheeked and chubby-legged, has just learned to sit up, and plays on the bed beside Catherine.
“Do you enjoy cuddling him?” Theroux asks.
Without a pause Catherine replies, “No.”
She thinks that’s why she took an overdose. “Because he deserves better than me,” she explains matter-of-factly. “Someone who could love him.”
Louis Theroux has two new documentaries coming to BBC Knowledge. Watch the trailer here. Post continues below.
Despite so desperately wanting to feel love for Jake, she told Mamamia how “completely disconnected” she felt from him.
“I felt really sad about that, and I couldn’t make sense of the feelings I had,” Catherine explained.
Catherine had suffered from depression and anxiety in the past, but the feeling that hit her after the birth of Jake was nothing she’d ever encountered before.
“Absolutely nothing can prepare you for birth,” Catherine said.
“It was incredibly painful. I was in labour for 33 hours in the end. I was pushing for four hours and he wasn’t coming out…”
When Jake was finally delivered, Catherine said: “I couldn’t remember anything, I couldn’t remember how to hold him, how to feed him.”
She began to feel ‘overwhelmed’ and ‘trapped’, which threw her into a spiral of shame. She had a beautiful, healthy baby boy, she told herself. What did she have to complain about?
“It’s a natural process. Women have babies every single day,” she said, as though she was still mad at herself that her experience was riddled with pain. “And yet I felt like I did… I felt guilty.”
When perfectionism meets Instagram
Catherine has been a perfectionist for as long as she can remember.
Her husband Chris jokes with Theroux in the documentary, “you’re lucky you’re seeing her without make up,” in a scene where Catherine appears defeated.
“I followed loads of pregnancy posts on Instagram,” Catherine says, prior to having Jake, “and I saw how much they love their children and I think that almost set me up to fail.”
Theroux scrolls through Catherine’s own profile. There are no hints of how dark her life has become.
“We were talking about getting him adopted…”
When Catherine first recognised her ambivalence towards Jake, she certainly didn’t tell anyone.
As Theroux addresses during the documentary, the weight of social expectation placed upon new mothers can be crippling – meaning that if you don’t experience profound joy or gratitude it can feel like the ultimate sin.
Catherine went through the motions, changing and feeding, not sleeping, and then changing and feeding again. But the elephant sitting on her chest didn’t go away. He just bore down harder.
Her partner knew she was tired and overwhelmed, which he assumed was normal.
But when Catherine turned to him one day and suggested Jake be adopted – a baby they had both wanted so desperately – he knew that she needed help.
Some days, she couldn’t get out of bed. She felt like the worst thing a woman count be. A mother who did not love her baby.
“I think you do love him”
There are moments during Theroux’s time with Catherine where his befuddlement is palpable.
It’s not that Catherine does not know how to care for her baby. She knows she can change him and feed him and pick him up and put him back down for bed.
It’s just that she, in her own words, doesn’t love him.
More than once Theroux says, “I think you do love him,” a spectator in what appears to be a connection between mother and child.
Catherine remains silent.
The night Catherine goes missing
While at Bethlem Royal Hospital, Catherine goes missing after being afforded a provisional walk.
Hours pass.
Catherine had tried to, for the second time since giving birth, end her life. It wasn't long before she regretted it.
She was rushed to the emergency room and revived, before eventually returned to the same Mother and Baby Unit.
"I look back now and feel so sad for that woman," Catherine told Mamamia.
It's been six months or so since that night.
"The way I feel now about him is completely different"
There was a moment, Catherine recalls, when Jake was about eight months old, and he began to giggle uncontrollably.
"I'd waited so long to hear that laugh, and it's something that really helped us bond. We have a really good relationship..." she said.
Medical professionals at Bethlem Royal Hospital suggest during the documentary that her traumatic birth impacted her capacity to bond. Catherine knew what it was like to love someone so much and lose them. She knew the all-consuming grief. Perhaps it was a survival tactic. If she didn't let herself connect with Jake, then if something were to ever happen to him, she'd be okay. She'd never have to feel that again.
It wasn't a strategy that would work long term.
Is there some of Catherine in every mother?
"What I saw in the mother and baby units was an extreme version of something that many new parents grapple with," Theroux said after filming.
Uncertainty. Fear. Panic. Anxiety. Self doubt. Guilt.
According the the World Health Organisation, 12 per cent of new mums experience a mental disorder, with many reluctant to seek treatment.
Having a history of mental illness increases the likelihood of experiencing postnatal depression or postnatal psychosis, both which are explored in Theroux's documentary.
There is a moment, as the camera pans across the Mother and Baby Unit at Bethlem Royal Hospital, which only consists of a dozen or so beds, that one wonders: Why must a woman be sick and unfathomably desperate to be offered such support?
Why do we wait until a mother is in the midst of psychosis, or in the throes of depression, to provide them with psychologists and psychiatrists and a variety of other experts who essentially teach you how to do this brand new thing?
Imagine if such support was readily available. People who teach you to play, and watch your baby when you haven't slept in four days, and help you feed and change a child.
Imagine too if the care of children wasn't divided so rigidly along gender lines, and if 'maternal instinct' wasn't simply assumed because someone happens to have a uterus.
Imagine if the weight of expectation fell evenly on the shoulders of men and women.
Perhaps then, so many mothers wouldn't reach breaking point.
Mothers on the Edge will air Thursday, July 4 at 8.30pm on BBC Knowledge which you can find on Foxtel.
If you think you or someone you know may be suffering from depression, contact PANDA – Post and Antenatal Depression Association. You can find their website here or call their helpline – 1300 726 306.
Top Comments
Women like this have always existed. I have one or two in my own family tree, and mothers who don't love or abandon their children have been written about in literature and historical accounts for centuries. Queen Victoria was famously non-maternal, despite the 9 kids. (She just had a really high libido and in a world without contraception, babies were the inevitable result) Infanticide was extremely common throughout antiquity, and even fairy tales (in their original forms) are chock-full of evil mothers abusing or abandoning their unwanted children in the forest (these characters were later changed to stepmothers when they were written down to make them more palatable to the target audience at the time).
So this idea that "maternal instinct is universal and all women have it" is actually a very modern myth, and people like Catherine and their children are the victims of it. Open acknowledgement and discussion of this is long overdue, and props to Louis for doing what he does best and finally tackling an issue that no one wants to talk about.
The best thing said to me when I was pregnant with my first was that sometimes you won't like your baby very much. It was said by someone who I thought was a great mum and it made me realise that it is okay to not be totally on board with motherhood from the get go, that it takes time to get to know someone and we don't always get off to the best start with new people. Sometimes you will look at the screaming, wriggling mess you created and think "I really don't like you at all" and that is okay.