I’m running the Great Manchester Run on 19th May to raise money for the perinatal mental health team who’ve been looking after me since my son was born last year, and I developed severe postnatal depression and OCD.

This is hard for me to write because I’m not one of those people who can say - oh it was a horrible time, but I’ve never been happier now, and this is a neat story that can be wrapped in a bow. I’m still pretty ill, on a bunch of drugs and getting pyschotherapy two or three times a week, as well as going to a support group for mothers with severe mental health difficulties (the NHS has really stepped up).

But it‘s important for me to write this because not all women are ‘enjoying every second of being a mummy’ or any of the other crappy insta hashtags. Some women have to really fight to enjoy any single second of it.

I didn‘t think much about having a baby while I was pregnant, which sounds crazy but it’s the truth. I spent most of pregnancy either puking or crying, so I just thought that having a baby would kind of sort itself out. Labour would be hard, but I‘d be presented with my beautiful baby, I’d fall hard in love and everything would finally make sense. Like in one born every minute, right at the moment before the camera stops rolling.

So after 30 hours of labour and an emergency c section, I was ready to be transformed. I would stop being Hannah and start being MUM, which wasn‘t so much an identity as a biological imperative. It had to happen.

But it didn’t. My little boy was presented to me wrapped in a towel like a Russian doll and taken off to the neonatal unit for problems with his breathing and feeding. I spent the night off my face on drugs and wondering if I’d dreamt the whole thing.

I put a happy, morphiney mask on, smiled and said I was in love, and wasn’t he the most beautiful baby you’d every seen. But my head had started to say- are you sure he’s yours? He feels like a stranger. Did you even give birth? Have they mixed up the babies?

By the time my son got out of hospital a week later, I felt as though the surgeons had scooped out my personality along with my baby and packed me with ice. I became a robot, smiling, nodding, changing nappies, but thinking, he doesn’t need me, he could stay in hospital forever and be fine. I’m not really his mum. I looked in the mirror and saw nothing there that I recognised.

I became obsessed with breastfeeding (thanks breast is best) because it seemed like the only way I could make up for the lack of any feeling I had for my baby. If only I can make him dependent on me for food, then he will need me, and it means I can’t run away or leave him on the doorstep of the local vicar.

But of course that didn’t work and I fell deeper and deeper into depression. It became so wide that I couldn’t see its edges any more.

I started obsessively scouring the internet for stories of women who were ‘worse‘ than me, who were more terrible, less feeling than me. But all the stories I found were women who, despite their depression still all loved their babies- that was something that was sacred, that was something no one else could say. I was beyond the pale, broken. My baby would be better off without me.

I started having wild thoughts, thoughts of swerving into traffic, of throwing myself off the swing bridge. Then I started thinking, perhaps I am such a bad mum that I wouldn‘t care if my baby drowned in his bath. That I could trip and drop him because I wasn’t being careful enough. Would I even care? And then I started imagining drowning him on purpose, or throwing him downstairs- my own brain torturing itself with these images, saying- yes. This is you now. This is how bad, mad, evil you are. It was absolutley terrifying, like a living nightmare.

On the Worst day, just before the darkest day of the year, I said goodbye to my husband as he went to work and sat in bed feeding my baby. There were pillows all around. The images came to my head of my baby suffocating in all those pillows and I suddendly thought- I’m too dangerous. I can’t keep him safe. The only thing I knew for certain was that I had to protect my son from danger and that meant keeping him far away from me. I’m still not well enough to fully understand how sad that sounds.

I called 999 and told them I was worried I could harm my baby and that I wanted to die, and that they needed to lock me up.

As I sat in a hospital room in A and E, while very kind people, doctors, pyschiatrists came and told me that I was ill but I would get better, I just thought- I want to run away.

I wanted to run back in time, back a year ago, break down my bedroom door and scream ‘wear a condom!’ I wanted to run, still in my pyjamas, to the nearest train station and set up a new life as an orange juice seller in Marrakech (very inconspicuous).

So I let myself run. Once I got back home, I put on my trainers and just ran until the pain in my heart was overtaken by the pain in my lungs. I would run and run and see if I came back.

I did come back, I kept coming back to my baby boy. Days and weeks and months went by and I kept running away and kept coming back.

During this time I was helped, very slowly, back into myself again by the pyschologists, pyschiatrists, nurses and support workers at the perinatal mental health team, and by a wonderful army of family and friends.

Very slowly my baby seemed less like a doll, and more like a little person. Very slowly I started to look forward to seeing him in the morning, and to giving him a bath at nighttime. I started thinking about his smiles when I wasn’t with him. I started imagining a future with him in it, where he made sense, where he was the centre of my world, where he was my life’s best part.

So I’m running the Manchester run to raise money so that other women can be helped through the worst time in their lives. And I’m running it to run back to my beautiful little Rowan- who I’ll keep running back to, over and over and over again.