The path to motherhood was one strewn with anxiety for Gemma Tamock.
“I certainly was afraid,” she writes in her into the 2022 SBS Emerging Writers’ Competition.
“Afraid of the discomfort of pregnancy, the danger of childbirth, the pain of breastfeeding. The fear of being abandoned... There was, to my mind, a complete encyclopedia of things that could go wrong.”
After a stressful pregnancy where her son wasn’t receiving enough nutrition, and an induced birth, she hoped for the promised maternal bliss. Instead, she developed postnatal psychosis, a mental illness that can impact women after childbirth.
Her response was to write through the pain, confusion and terror, she explains on .
“When my son was born, I got postnatal psychosis. I actually spent a lot of time trying to write myself sane, in a way, or trying to at least use words to help me understand what was happening to me,” she tells the podcast.
Tamock’s highly commended SBS Emerging Writers’ competition entry, , is her first-ever published piece of writing. It traces her meeting her husband, Joe, through salsa dance, and features magic-realist spiritual scenes with a goddess who gave her courage during her pregnancy and birth.
Not considering herself a spiritual person and coming from a Catholic background, writing a dreamscape-style narrative was a way to make sense of her experiences.
“I wanted to do it in a light way, because I was really tired of writing and crying. The lightest way I could do that was to explore it through my relationship with Joe, because we met dancing salsa.”
Tamock says her experiences inspired her to use writing as a personal journey to self-knowledge and self-discovery. “(Start by) writing for yourself, writing to work something out, to explain something to yourself, for yourself first,” she advises.
“What do I make of this otherworldly thing that might also just be my subconscious, my intuition, or is it all of the mothers who have gone before me? Is it the mother spirit?.... I didn’t want it to be a symbol of being ‘mad’, because it was too lovely. It was too lovely and personal and delightful a relationship.”
Tamock and fellow SBS Emerging Writers’ Competition highly commended winners, Sidney Norris and Alexander Burton, discuss on the podcast how the competition theme of “emergence” led them to unpack real-life experiences in a way that was both cathartic and compelling.
When Tamock found out her story had been highly commended, she started crying. The win came after years of rejection. She had reached a point where she had dramatically declared to her writing group that she was quitting. Thankfully, her writing group convinced her to give the piece to them for feedback, which encouraged her to submit the revised story to the competition.
“I said, ‘Oh, finally,’” she tells the New Writer’s Room podcast on getting the news her story had been highly commended. “I was expecting the same sort of wall of silence to greet me. It was amazing to be heard.”
Listen to Gemma, Alex and Sidney on the latest SBS Voices podcast episode of , in the , , , , or wherever you listen to podcasts.
For help with perinatal anxiety and depression, call PANDA (Perinatal Anxiety & Depression Australia) on 1300 726 306 or visit .
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