“I have seen it said many times that one has to be 100 per cent sure before one decides to have a baby, but I’m not sure that I’ve ever been that sure of anything.”
I have never thought seriously about suicide, but there have been times when the anxiety was so bad that I wondered if I would be better off dead. Though I was mostly well again by the time I started seriously thinking about motherhood, it didn’t feel fair to bring a child into the world when I could potentially become sad again – a world in which, despite my best efforts, I might damage them irrevocably, so that one day they were in a therapist’s chair themselves.
The anxiety was even more of a concern: when I was at my worst, I thought death waited around every corner, and that I was sick with every disease going. It seemed unfair to inflict this anxiety upon a child that I knew I would love so desperately that my fear that something might happen to them had the potential to become overwhelming. I didn’t want to limit that child’s life, or potentially pass on any anxiety to them.
Though there is much more openness about mental illness than there used to be, I now see that I was carrying an awful lot of stigma, and to an extent I still do. Though these were valid concerns, the extent to which I was allowing them to dominate my life was standing in the way of my own happiness. Ultimately, I didn’t feelof being a mother. Standing on the other side of the decision, I feel sad about that.
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