Book Review: After the Storm, by Emma Jane Unsworth

I was sent an early proof for this honest and brilliantly written memoir. I came to it with no expectation, really. I haven’t read Emma’s novels - Animals and Adults - though I’ll certainly seek them out now. Also, I didn’t suffer from Post-Natal Depression. Oddly, I didn’t even experience the dreaded ‘third day blues’ on which, I was warned by other women and our NCT teacher, our milk would flood in and we’d cry all day. I suspect that this was partly because I simply didn’t have the energy to process anything at the time.

I had what I now consider to be an averagely traumatic first birth. There was a worry about my daughter’s heartbeat and after some toing and froing I was given an emergency c-section during which I lost two and a half litres of blood. Almost half of it, apparently. I’m forever grateful to the serene and efficient theatre team and the fact that my spinal anaesthetic meant I couldn’t see the gory floor. The loss wasn’t quite enough to need a transfusion - though I was dimly aware through my opiate high of someone ‘getting the blood guy on the phone’ - but more than enough to leave me wraith-like for some time afterwards. Often, when I first woke, I couldn’t move my legs. A day or so in, after a fierce battle to swim up from unconsciousness, I was so weak I convinced myself I was dying and calmly instructed my husband to call an ambulance because someone would need to feed the baby. Fortunately, it turned out I just needed to be fortified with some apple juice and a piece of toast, but those early days weren’t a breeze.

Despite escaping PND, though, so much of this extraordinary book rang true with me. The subtitle is Post-Natal Depression and the Utter Weirdness of New Motherhood, and I don’t think there’s any mother who won’t relate to at least some of what Emma so eloquently articulates. She vividly recalled to me how my daughter’s screaming induced pure animal panic in me, how once it started - and there were months during which it seemed it barely paused - I could think of nothing but stopping it. I remembered the well-meaning people who kindly reassured me they didn’t mind the anguished howling while I strained out a smile, inwardly screaming, “I MIND! SHE BLOODY MINDS! JUST LISTEN TO HER!” Every moment my baby was quiet I felt equal to the alien new blue-collar job of motherhood. And every moment she was screaming - so many moments, they smeared into weeks - I knew that what was being asked of me all day, every day, half the night, every night was impossible.

The section where Emma tries to join friends for afternoon tea and the civilised world literally does not fit her anymore will stay with me forever. I vividly remember those occasions: bumping a laden buggy through squeezed-together tables, muttering apologies, praying for the nap to continue, with my seeping, sweating, unfamiliar new body squeezed into weird new clothes with extra holes in. The divorce between my work, my life, my mind and what I had previously considered my self was jarring. It felt permanent, although it proved not to be. I had been prepared on some level for the fug of exhaustion and the vomit-spiked hair, but not to feel incapable of finishing a sentence even in my head.

Emma writes with humour as well as with brilliant clarity. (I, too, resented the shrill and jumped-up Upsy Daisy for having her own bed on wheels to trundle around the Night Garden.) And she expresses things here that I have rarely seen written down about disappointment, boredom, shame and rage. I’ve read and written a lot since editing Night Feeds and Morning Songs about mothers’ stories being routinely undervalued and dismissed, and about the difficulties mothers face in carving out time for their own careers and creativity. This piercing, fierce, raw and beautiful book will help go some way towards redressing that balance. It will change and perhaps even save lives.

I actually hadn’t expected to enjoy the newborn days as much as I did - I figured they’d be brutal and boring, and those low expectations were my friends whenever they were just that. But we are bombarded by images of ecstatic, subtly but impeccably groomed women, suffused with love, enjoying tranquil moments of deep connection with their beaming infants in beautifully appointed, airy, pastel-hued rooms. It’s easy to believe that hype, and the jarring shock when reality falls short - as it must do - is so, so damaging to women. It feels like ingratitude, weakness or self-indulgence to confess that we’re struggling. The scorching guilt of admitting that the deeply desired state of motherhood sometimes makes us feel stifled or furious or despairing prevents so many women from accessing the help and support they need.

There has been a change, I think, in the way we talk about these things. The excellent essay collection The Best Most Awful Job, edited by Katherine May, struck a chord with many women with its truthful takes on the madness of child-wrangling, and I especially loved Saima Mir’s essay on maternal rage. This recent advertising campaign for Portal - showing a woman struggling with breastfeeding - had me in tears and time-travelling back to my daughter’s earliest days with its accuracy.

And After the Storm - this truthful, visceral, dazzlingly well-written memoir in which Emma shares her experiences of vulnerability, fury and desperation - experiences that I believe will resonate with many mothers - is an essential contribution to this discussion. I cannot thank her enough for writing it.

After the Storm: Postnatal Depression and the Utter Weirdness of New Motherhood by Emma Jane Unsworth is published by Profile Books.

Night Feeds and Morning Songs: Honest, Fierce and Beautiful Poems about Motherhood, edited by Ana Sampson, is published by Trapeze.

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