I learnt an important lesson while I struggled with the unpredictability of pregnancy, birth and the fragility of very young children. I was not in control. I can see now that the anxiety I had struggled with for more than a decade was about fear of losing control. I had feared suddenly being overwhelmed by homicidal or suicidal impulses. I feared having a panic attack so debilitating I would shut myself up in my house forever. I conjured up fantasy danger.
When my first child, Polly, became so ill with RSV positive bronchiolitis that she stopped breathing three times and was given the last available neo-natal intensive care bed in NSW, I experienced real danger.
One thing anxiety had already taught me was to ask for help. The morning after my 13-day-old, 5 weeks premature baby daughter had been intubated I rang Dr Peter Barr, a neonatologist who was also a grief counselor.
It was the words he said to me that proved to be the first key to my anxiety.
“There is nothing special about you. There is nothing special about Polly. Terrible things can happen and they can happen to anyone. Safety is an illusion. Danger is reality.”
In the space of a few sentences I realised I had never been in control. My attempts to imagine the very worst had been useless and debilitating. It was a huge step forward, but I had more to do.
The passing on of stories, games, rhymes and traditions from your own childhood is one of the pleasures of parenting. But there are other memories that return, some of them not quite so delightful.
I visited a counsellor when my daughters were still small (yes, Polly recovered with no ill effects). She asked me how I was feeling.
"Fine, but, it’s funny, I keep thinking about something that happened to me as a child. Something I haven’t thought about for ages. It was just a weird thing that happened to me on a school excursion when I was 10 or 11."
I was sobbing, rocking back and forth, clutching a cushion to my chest.
And I began to tell her about being run over in a motel car park while on a school excursion. I was unhurt but the car had driven over me without stopping and no one had ever been held to account. My teachers had minimised the event. I had related the story very occasionally over the years, but in a isn’t-that-a-bizarre-thing-to-have-happened kind of a way.
I began to tell the story in the same blasé fashion, but not for long. I can’t remember whether it was something the counsellor said that triggered the flood of feelings or whether it was thinking about how I would feel if something like that happened to either of my own daughters, but I was suddenly in tears.
"Why didn’t anyone do anything? How could they just let me be run over like that and do nothing? Why didn’t the teachers call the police? Why was someone allowed to drive into a group of children, run over one of them and then drive away, without any consequences?"
I was sobbing, rocking back and forth, clutching a cushion to my chest. I had no idea I had bottled up this fear and fury for all this time. It was only having my own children that made me think differently about what happened to me.
Perhaps my anxiety neurosis was the healthiest part of me. It dogged me until I dealt with what I needed to deal with. It refused to let me go.
Once I had experienced the fear and fury that was attached to being run over I could see some sense in what I had previously thought of as madness. My intrusive violent thoughts had often been at their most intense when I was driving. As I drove past an unsuspecting pedestrian, I would frequently frighten myself by thinking that I could just turn the wheel and . . . The next thought was that there was nothing to stop me. Now, thanks to that sobbing, furious moment in the counsellor’s office, I could see that there had indeed been nothing to stop the person who ran over me, except the kerb.
Perhaps my anxiety neurosis was the healthiest part of me. It dogged me until I dealt with what I needed to deal with. It refused to let me go.
One night, I woke feeling deeply agitated. Every time I closed my eyes I saw the most terrifying images. One was of a pair of disembodied hands. They were some distance away, floating in the black darkness, illuminated by a strange green light. The other was an image from a horror film. I saw a toy monkey looming at me through the dark.
I struggled against the nightmarish images that seemed imprinted in my brain. I wanted them to go away . . . why wouldn’t they go away? I wanted to shut them out.
Hang on! Hang on! If your crazy bits are the healthiest part of you, then maybe you shouldn’t fight this. Maybe you should allow yourself to see those weird images and go with them. Maybe they are trying to tell you something you need to know.
I was suddenly calm. More, I was exhilarated and astonished.
I know this all sounds like psychobabble and maybe it is. I am no psychiatrist. I can’t tell you whether I am making any sense. All I can tell you is what happened to me. I allowed myself to look at the disembodied hands and the looming, nightmarish monkey. There was another vision too, a dead child, behind bars! Oh God! Could it get any worse than this?
Hang on, maybe the child isn’t dead, maybe she is sleeping. And the bars are the bars of a cot . . . and the monkey? Maybe it is her toy, hanging half in and half out of the cot. But the hands, what about the hands?
Suddenly I felt I knew what I was seeing. The hands were those of a night nurse in a children’s ward in a hospital. She was doing her paperwork at a desk illuminated by one of those green desk lamps. The child was a baby in the cot next to me in the ward and the monkey was her toy. I wondered if I had remembered my time in hospital under observation for gastroenteritis when I was 18 months old.
The sights I saw in that hospital were nightmarish to a child who found herself in a very strange place, away from everything that was familiar. But to the adult I now was, they were unexceptional.
I was suddenly calm. More, I was exhilarated and astonished. It was incredible to suddenly get a window on an experience I’d had as a tiny child brought to me by nothing more special or miraculous than my own brain.
Was it a real memory? Is that what I saw when I was an 18-month-old in hospital, awake and terrified in the night? I don’t know. Whatever they were, those intrusive images, visions, hallucinations – I don’t know quite what to call them – began by terrifying me as signs of incipient madness but ended with a calm that has never quite left me.
Plain-speaking Jane by Jane Caro is published by Pan Macmillan Australia and available now.
