Angela Scanlon: ‘It's still hard to admit becoming a mother wasn't perfect for me’
Angela Scanlon: I remember walking the street one Sunday morning, weeping
Presenter and podcaster Angela Scanlon has opened up about still feeling “guilty” about the difficulties she experienced after giving birth to her first child.
In a vulnerable chat on Deliciously Ella’s podcast, the Irish presenter said her world “imploded” after the birth of her first child Ruby in 2018, admitting she still struggles with guilt surrounding that time.
“It's still hard to admit that it wasn't perfect for me,” the Meath native said, noting that there is a lot of “expectation” around what becoming a mother will be like.
The 39-year-old said she remembers sitting with her baby thinking “oh, my god, what am I doing?”
“The fear of having this tiny, beautiful little soul completely dependent on me, and the fear that I would not be able to deliver for her what she deserved or what she expected or what she needed.”
Scanlon, who now has two children with her Cork eco-entrepreneur husband Roy Horgan, recalled one particular moment as her “rock bottom”.
“I was pumping and it became such a fixation for me.
“The emotion of being a mother was so overwhelming to me. But if I could focus on the mechanical side of being a mother, I didn't have to really delve into need and limitations and space and room for messiness...
“I was so green,” she said, “I was pumping like a crazy woman. I had a fridge full of breast milk.”
“And then I thought oh shit, I've got loads, I can take a few days off. That's obviously not how it works and suddenly I had no milk.
“I remember walking the street one Sunday morning, weeping, leaving a voice memo to a friend going 'I'm just waiting for the health food shop to open so I can buy some Brewer's Yeast, because my milk supply has gone down and the milk in the fridge has run out and I now have no breast milk...
“I remember pumping and getting a miniscule amount, and my husband was like 'you need to get some rest'. I was so wired that I couldn't.
“That was it,” she recalled.
“[My husband] was like we're done. He went to the local petrol station and bought some formula.
“I remember weeping as I went up the stairs. I was like, I can't look at you doing this,” she said. But the presenter said she also felt a sense of "relief".
"I felt a relief that he had kind of taken it into his own hands and been like "enough is enough".
“I ended up breastfeeding for nine months and somehow managing to get it back on track. But it was a moment where I thought, that is so manic, and so out of proportion for what's happening.”
At that point, Scanlon said she contacted a therapist and said the words “I need help.”
"It was the first time I had said that to anybody where I was like ...something needs to change, whatever it is I don't care, I don't have the answers anymore.
“I've read all the self help books, I've read everything. Since I was 15 years of age, I've been trying to consume all of these things and nothing is working for me please, please help me.”
"My hope for people is that they don't get to that point where they're literally falling apart to say, 'Can somebody help me,” the presenter shared.
Scanlon, who welcomed her second daughter Marnie in February 2022, said becoming a mother meant she couldn't be a "lone wolf" anymore.
"I had to depend massively on my husband. I had to depend on a nanny, I had to depend on people.
“I had never done that. I prided myself on being able to go wherever I wanted, whenever I wanted, pay with money I'd earned myself, I was completely independent.
“It was a shock to the system in so many ways, and to the way I had constructed my life.”
"Having to reach out and ask for help and be dependent on other people. That was a big issue for me.”
The Irish presenter, who published her first book in May, said the experience of becoming a mother for the first time also put her in touch with her "inner child” which she found “very overwhelming".
"I had compassion for myself in a way that was hard to handle,” she shared. “I thought, ‘I've actually been quite relentless with myself forever.”
“Then suddenly, I have this baby and I think, ‘oh my god, I was a baby. I was completely dependent on a mum who was probably struggling in a similar way.”
"I had compassion for my own mother - that was new for me," she said, adding that her "expectations around what perfection looks like as a parent" began to change.
The podcaster said it was the moment where she thought "whatever I've been doing up until now, I don't want to continue”.
“Whatever habits I've gotten into, whatever behaviours I have built my life around, I've gotten to this point, and it's not right. This is not how I want to be. And I don't want my daughter to learn that this is the way to be.
“Gratitude was one of the practices that I started to lean on really, really heavily,” she shared.
“It was something I dipped in and out of for a long time before that,” she said, “[but] I completely took it for granted because it was easy and free.
“And something that I had to do every day rather than just a pill that I could swallow and that would fix me.”
Offering some advice to listeners, the mother-of-two said it’s helpful to look back and see what you were doing when you were in a good place.
"Taking note of the things you're doing when you are in a good place is invaluable when those cycles or periods happen when you're not feeling so good,” she said.
“And gratitude was the thing that was a recurring theme for me”.
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