I am 37 years old, happily married and have two children, who came along quickly after we got married in my late 20s. I instantly fell in love with them. However, I wasn’t really emotionally or practically ready, and developed postnatal anxiety.
I’ve always cared about the climate crisis, and since after having kids, and knowing it will affect their lives more than mine, I became motivated to make changes. We live a very “green” life.
I know how lucky I am to have two healthy children, but I longed for a third. I still can’t believe how fast my two are growing – many of my friends still have lots of time to enjoy with their toddlers. However, fears for the future and the impact on the planet left me consumed with indecision. I had counselling, which helped. My husband has always been content with two but happy to have a third if I wanted, so we tried. I got pregnant. Within a week I was wrought with an intense fear for the future and the impact of the climate crisis. I spoke to some friends, and at length to my husband, and had a termination.
Initially I felt relief, then devastation at what I had done. With the help of antidepressants and counselling I felt more on an even keel, but never at peace. After a year, I still felt sadness and regret, so we decided to try again. I became pregnant, and again, as if a switch had been turned, I felt intense anxiety and couldn’t see a positive future. Ultimately, I had a miscarriage.
Since then I’ve worked hard at trying to find contentment with my lovely family of four. How can I make sense of what has happened and reach acceptance of what I did?
I went to consultant medical psychotherapist and psychoanalyst Dr Jo Stubley, who said: “I was particularly interested in what motherhood meant to you. I felt there was a loneliness in your letter as well as anxiety.”
I got a sense of a sort of breathlessness from you, of lurching from one thing to another. We wondered where your own mother was in all of this? What about your dad? How many siblings do you have? Did you have an idea that three children was the ideal number?
“There seemed to be a lot of action from you instead of taking time to think,” said Stubley. “What’s got lost is space for grief, because it feels as if it’s been one thing after another. But what was driving you to have a third child? Were you worried about getting old? Did you feel you didn’t get something right the first time? These are ordinary responses to having a baby, but then the climate anxiety hits and that’s the bit that is really interesting, because on some level we should all have climate anxiety. Yet we all walk around with disavowal, dissociation and denial to not see how terrifying it is.”
I wondered what happened in between the idea of wanting a third baby and the reality. It’s almost as if you were living an “idea” until you got pregnant. I asked Stubley how you could move on. “I think you need to sit down and work out what this means to you in the context of your life history,” she said, “what it means being a woman, a mother of two v three, what it means to be getting older. You might have to work through your grief, the termination, the miscarriage [even the grief of your children growing up]. Drill down into what it is really about because we can all find hooks for anxiety.”
Please go back to counselling. Acceptance comes with time, and the ability to face up to what’s happened. But to do this you need to be still long enough for the more difficult emotions to be seen, and felt.
Every week, Annalisa Barbieri addresses a personal problem sent in by a reader. If you would like advice from Annalisa, please send your problem to ask.annalisa@theguardian.com. Annalisa regrets she cannot enter into personal correspondence. Submissions are subject to our terms and conditions. The latest series of Annalisa’s podcast is available here.
