Introducing COOKIE!!! The monster is here

Weighing in in the red corner at 9 lbs 6 oz is Cookie. Welcome to the world baby girl.

Surely this cant be a new born!? Thank God it was a C- Section after all!

Starbucks has to be reminded to share the baby with everyone. If she had her way she would be the only person allowed to hold Cookie.

Fat face.

Last pregnant rant, I hope:

One of the worst things leading up to the birth of my children has been the comments made at the end of the pregnancy once the baby is due:

These questions seem to fall into several categories:

1) are you sure you haven't had the baby and forgotten to tell me?
No. I will tell you, but can't when she's not here!

2) are you sure you're not actually in labour and haven't noticed yet?
This includes comments about checking between my legs to see if I'm not secretly dialated, or if Cookies head is not already there. It's not. Isn't it well known that actually labour is quite painful.... A lot of people seem to have forgotten this lately.

3) are you doing enough to make the baby come?
Despite all of these being old wives tales, encouraging me to have sex, eat curries, EXERCISE, drink castor oil, poking up there, rose hip tea, copious pineapple eating, people seem determined that I need to recount to them which of these I have done and account for why they have not worked. The general message - I'm not trying hard enough and must do more.

4) why haven't you had her yet?
Errr it's not up to me! And it's not like I am deliberately trying to keep her in like I feel like I am being accused off.
Best one today, whispered to me in church following a nod to my massive stomach, 'hurry up!'.

5) have I had any signs of labour, often labelled twinges but not substantiated with what a twinge might be and how a twinge might relate to being in labour.

I think people are probably just trying to let me know they care and showing interest, but in my overly pregnant (and getting quite desperate for a natural birth to occur before my c section deadline at 42 weeks) state, it just makes me want to curl up in a ball (currently impossible) on the floor and cry. I'm tempted to turn my phone off but then people will just be convinced i am actually in labour.

End of hormonal pregnant rant.

Thank God I have so many people who care!

Suicide Mark II

I know mourning is a journey, so i am unsuprised to say that my thoughts around Lovely's death have already changed this week. I battle between wanting her to have been suffering a mental health break down, and not.

On the one hand if she committed suicide when having poor mental health it makes it more bearable in that she wasn't herself, and that explains why it was so out of character, and not deliberately harmful to others. It also takes some of her active choice away, and it seems less painful that she didn't deliberately choose to leave us all behind with these complex emotions.

On the other hand, if she died not being herself, was she a victim. Someone who should have been helped, someone i failed by not noticing and forcing myself upon, to fix her. Someone mistakenly making a big statement whilst not being herself. If she wanted autonomy in death, mental health labels are erasing this.

Monday night me, Princess and Honestly were invited around to Lovely's widows house. He wanted to give account of her last few days, he wanted to explain that he had tried to help her, and he was clear that she had a mental health problem....

He painted a picture of a girl overwhelmed by a deep internal feeling of fear and dread, of an over consumption of thoughts about an inevitable demise with no respite. Someone very different from the person we knew, at least for her last two weeks. I didn't see her in those two weeks so i don't know what it looked like, and cant argue with this. But she sent me a very normal text message half an hour before she died.

My latest, very tough struggle, although perhaps it is just a sideline for me to distract myself with, is was Lovely my friend? I only saw her once in the last three months, and that was ad-hoc when she had come to London so see another friend she had recently made whilst travelling. She stopped answering the phone to me, she apparently phoned a list of people the day before she died in preparation - i wasn't one of them, she didn't once tell me how she was genuinely feeling. Without these things, what kind of friendship did we have? By the time i had found out that she'd died, another friend of hers had already flown back from Africa on an urgent flight, if i was such a good friend how did it take me so long to find out?

Were we even friends, or was i deluded? This makes me cry. 

Lovely had a lot of people in her life that she tried to pacify and make happy at her own personal cost, perhaps i was just another one of these. Whilst i thought we were close friends was i actually just another rope pulling her down. Another burden to be lifted only by suicide?

Born in the shadow of death....

So i should be logging on here to happily announce to my world that Cookie is here, alive and kicking and letting me know about the realities of having a 4 person family. However she's not. I am 40 weeks at the moment but still no sign. If i get to 42 i have a ceasarian booked ready. She's not even born and a sanction has been put in place, 'come or 'i'll come and get you'.

So my reason for writing now? Lovely died. She was 32, married and had more friends than.... average. But she committed suicide on Friday.

It's been hard to take. I've never experienced suicide before, i've never experienced the annoyance of knowing that if an individual had of done something different i wouldn't be in this pain right now. And that a deliberate and premeditated act to kill herself was capable of being part of Lovely's personality.

I've been REALLY struggling to reconcile the Lovely i knew, with someone who would take their life in a dramatic manner. Only a few hours before she died we were texting each other an inane conversation about Cookie. I call her Lovely as she would describe everyone as Lovely, if she said something even vaguely negative about someone,and often blatantly true, she would apologise, and say 'that sounded horrible, what i meant was...' and put it in a really nice way that couldn't even offend the person she was talking about.

I understand that she might not have told me that she felt suicidal as i am so pregnant, and i knew that she was 'down' but when did down turn into so depressed it is hard to recognise my friend amongst it all? Do you have to be clinically depressed to make the choice it is better to be dead than live anymore? Is poor mental health a convenient label for anyone who acts contrary to how society dictates we should?

Last night i looked up death by hanging on the internet and it really helped. It gave me not only the gory details so i can create a film in my head of Lovely's last few minutes, but also some very general comments about why people choose this form of suicide. And i think it's helped.

The Department of Health and Aged Care of Australia calls suicide by hanging a "particularly confronting display of resistance, defiance, individual control and accusatory blame"; it is "a rebuke and statement of uncaring relations, unmet needs, personal anguish, and emotional payback". Lovely conformed, she stood up for all the homeless people she worked with, she fought for asylum seekers with mental health problems rights, she was an avid support of amnesty international and would hold events for them, but when it came to her personal life she struggled to stand up for herself, she struggled to overthrow the middle-class values she was bought up in, stiff upper lip, don't complain and get on with it. It currently helps me to think that she was lucid and rational in her last actions, that eventually she got to breaking point and decided that enough was enough, she would be making a stand, a massive 'FUCK YOU' to the world.

I'm not saying she was justified, and i'm sure soon I will begin to feel cross with her for choosing to make this statement than to live it out and make the changes she wanted to see happen, and remain my friend and companion. But it helps me to consider her an active participant, not a victim of something else taking over her. As you can tell I have a very primitive understanding of mental health. Although I'm not convinced that mental health plays a massive role in this. Am I being naïve?

RIP Lovely.