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Death Disco 

An essay on postpartum mental health disturbances and the comfort of the uncanny. A reflection on the similar experiences of teenage years and barely recognising myself again in the postpartum aftermath.

Kirsty Crawford

Our kitchen table is a handmade thing. Plywood and industrial bolts.  

Weeks after birth, sat alone with my hands flat on the gritty surface, I came down.  

It came from nowhere and everywhere. Something (Some Thing), once dormant inside me, rattled itself awake and swam to the surface. 

At once, I was inside those beautiful arches again. Strobe. Damp heat rising from bodies writhing under the railway tunnels. Sweaty palms grasping plastic water bottles. 

Two pills, too much, too soon. Around me, while the music stacked sweetly to the point of no return, while it climbed to the reason we returned every weekend, to the silence before the chaos, I was already melting to the floor. A claw hammer peeling through my stomach. Dread. Sliding down against the stone walls knowing there was nothing I could do. Everything – all the faces, all the colours, all the sounds, all the smells – felt wrong. Everything was so familiarly unfamiliar. The chemical flow disrupted, giving way to a cascade of the uncanny. 

Minutes ago, I felt beyond all feeling. Things made sense. We were friends and strangers moving together through the space. Hot and alive. We were standing, sitting, running, blending through time which moved like a snapshot. Suddenly in a toilet cubicle, packed in a corridor, then pushing through the crowd to press against the speakers and let the music inhale us. Out into the smoking area with stolen jackets and winter snow where we chained cigarettes into fast, urgent conversation. It was all we could do to speak and keep speaking and kissing and losing each other and finding each other. Under the lights, thinking we might be the lights.  

Then the drop. Coming down too soon, the curtain pulled back. Shivering under a table waiting for the night to end. Or the day to begin.  

… 

Now, a lifetime away, a different kind of magic chemical static is failing me. Serotonin, dopamine, oxytocin. All pulsing and jumping to their own rhythm. A downward beat as the homeostasis of pregnancy ebbs from my body. I am sure my life has been hijacked by a strange, formless dream. Darkness and daylight mean nothing to the new creature that radiates from the centre of the home that was once mine. He is kinetic and incomprehensible. There is blood, sticky hot sweat, soft baby hair, gauze, tiny eyelashes, stitches. There is a mouth demanding my milk and howls of pain. There is nothing of the former left in me.  

At the kitchen table, the hammer blows again in the base of my belly. I realise that on emerging from a traumatic and whip-quick emergency surgery, I have become A Mother. A vast, tedious and treacherous identity that begs to be bolted to my warping brain.  

I am floaty and light. I feel like a helicopter pilot and imagine what it must be like to lift off and hear the muffled chop chop chop of the blades. What it must be like to whisk away, angling right and then left, then up over the hills. To never come back. The tips of my fingers are numb. I feel pixelated. Each little coloured square of myself blipping from the screen. 

I want to reach back for that girl, the one who stands outside the club with goosebumps and giant pupils. I want to mother her. I want to learn. I want to learn how to be a mother. I want to link arms with her and fall in-step as she walks. Through the tunnel, past the casino, over the Clyde and back to a flat in the Gorbals. I want to stop her for just for a moment, hair steaked with cold stars and streetlamps and say this is not it. This is not all of you. This is just one moment in time.  

She is so young and already processing deep grief in the only way she knows how. Trying to find a way through being twenty, being betrayed, being alone, being alive. 

I need her to know that one day her soul will anchor to a small human made from her own body. As she sinks into the filthy sofa bed watching the room shirk and the sun come up, I need to say to her 

one day you will create life, and when you watch him sigh in his sleep you won’t know what to do with the love you feel. It will boil through your veins, but still a heaviness will drag at you. It’s a chemical lottery. It will blindside you. But there is more. 

I look down and see that I am staining the kitchen table with tears. Thick in nostalgia with the elastic snap of anxiety running through me I hear my son mew in the next room. I can’t move. I need the pillars of myself, all the versions of before and after to come and sit at this table with me. To pull trust from the concrete cell of my mind.  

I am hesitant of trust and its ugly companion disappointment, but I must turn over all that I am to this process. I must drop my leaves rusted with rot and the weight of winter and wait for the first burst of new blooms.  

Trust that inside those arches surrounded by pals, just a memory in time, there was happiness too. 

That small newborn fists will become hands that will slot around my own. 

That there is love in this strange house and a life beyond.