Heather was an attendee at a support group session for mothers who were suffering from postnatal depression which was joined by Gemma Winter. Since the birth of her quads the previous October, Gemma had struggled valiantly against her condition with almost no one realising the depths to which she had dropped. When she got to the stage where she began to imagine herself harming her children, she opened up to long-time ally Rita Tanner and she got Chesney Brown to take her to Dr Gaddas who both prescribed drugs and gave her the details of the support group.
Gemma was reluctant to attend and when Heather began to speak, she was initially dismissive of the well-groomed woman, whispering an aside to Chesney that her knickers probably matched her bra! But when Heather described her feelings of inadequacy, thinking that she ought to cope when many other women over the centuries had, and how she couldn’t relax around her baby daughter, feeling sick with anxiety and guilt that she was going to infect her with the same emotions, Gemma was shocked to recognise a kindred spirit and told Chesney that it could be her talking.
When it came to Gemma’s turn to talk, she spoke of her intense fatigue and her nightmares when she did sleep of her babies getting harmed or dying. She went on to describe her guilt that she had no time to do diaries of important first steps or social media posts like the other mums and was worried that when her quads grew up, they would feel that she’d never cared. Heather assured her that they had all been in such a position and promised her that things would get better.