Homage to Husband

On Father’s Day four years ago I was sobbing my heart out in a yellow bedroom with a new baby in my arms while a happy little party went on outside.

It was my husband’s first ever Father’s Day. Our baby girl was less than two weeks old. I’d managed at some point in those intervening days to get myself to a shop and buy him a card which I’d signed from the adorable bundle of wrinkles, dimples and milky-breathed sweetness who was now crying inconsolably.

In the garden were people I loved – my parents, sister, brother-in-law. My husband. Laughter and barbeque smells drifted up through the window. These people I could tell anything to. They loved me unconditionally.

But I couldn’t explain this. That I loved this baby I was holding but I didn’t understand how to be her mother. That I was wracked with anxiety and guilt because I felt so useless and incapable. That life had gone into a tailspin since I’d had her. That there was so much sunshine spilling into this yellow room but inside my emotions swirled like a tempest – jagged, dark and menacing.

When my husband found me in that bedroom, his face crumpled and he scooped the baby up, trying to placate her. I could see how torn he was – he wanted to help me but needed to try soothing our daughter.

Whether or not I had post-natal depression, I just don’t know. To say I did almost pays a disservice to those who are diagnosed and are so deeply debilitated by it that they need professional help to function. As a journalist I’d written so much about the extremes of it – psychosis, thoughts of harming babies, suicide. I didn’t feel those things. I just felt so terribly sad. Cards were coming in congratulating me on my new baby. I knew I should feel differently. Magazines, movies, books instructed me that I should feel euphoric.

I put on a brave face for the world but when the mask dropped my husband was there to pick up pieces and put them back together again. With others help but particularly with his patience and love, I built myself back up. Not to who I was before, but to that new me. That mother me. That one who could look after a baby, who did know what the different cries meant, who could console, who was capable.

Fast forward four years. Father’s Day was pretty special. We went to the park and sure, there were the usual calamities – tantrums over the swings, a mini revolution staged at the prospect of going home. It’s all part of the fabric of our lives, the sour with the sweet, the yang with the ying. I take it in my stride because I’m doing this walk with him, my husband.

Doing this triathlon is not just my event, it’s his. It’s had to be. If he didn’t understand me like he did, I’d never have been able to do it. Not for the motivational pep talks you understand – that’s definitely not his forte. But just in understanding that I need this. Because that darkness I felt four years ago is something that never really goes away, instead it’s something I’ve found a way of living with. I know exactly what I have to do to keep that faint black whisper from whipping itself into a storm. And so does my husband.

I need to train six evenings a week for this event – that’s six days worth of his downtime after work. But he just gets that for the hour I’m running, biking or swimming that I get to strip it all off – the anxieties or the worries. I’m not mother, cleaner, cooker, glass recycler, birthday-rememberer or wife. I’m tri-athlete in training, answerable to no-one except myself and the demands I choose to put on my own body.

So Happy Father’s Day husband. Thanks for helping me raise these girls. Thanks for giving so much of your time so I could pursue this dream. And thanks for understanding exactly what the dream means.