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‘I now have a 24-year-old son living in a neighbouring county. I think of him every day’

Martina Mitchell will speak about her experience of bereavement, an eating disorder and a concealed pregnancy at an event in Co Leitrim later this month

Martina Mitchell at her Ballinmore home, Co Leitrim: She left the hospital without holding her baby, but a “lovely nurse” had taken three photos of him using a Polaroid instant camera. She still has them. Photograph: Brian Farrell

Marese McDonagh
Mon Sep 12 2022 - 04:00

When Martina Mitchell was 16, and terrified that she might be pregnant, she used her babysitting money to buy two test kits. She remembers being so nervous that she dropped one of them down the toilet.

“And then the other one worked and of course it said I was, and I nearly died,” the Co Leitrim woman recalls. “I threw it away and I pretended it didn’t happen.”

It was the second major trauma in her Iife. When Martina was 10, her father died suddenly after having a heart attack at work.

“I was Daddy’s girl,” she says.

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On the morning of his death, her father had peeped into Martina’s bedroom to check on her before leaving the house, as she’d had her tonsils removed the previous week.

“He didn’t come home again.”

Mitchell’s childhood had been very happy, with her parents devoted to their six children and to each other.

“The last thing he did was give his pay cheque to his workmates to send home to us. And that was him gone,” says the 40 year old, who still remembers that nobody sat her down that day amid the chaos in the house to explain that her father had died.

“I was standing there. Nobody noticed me,” she says. “I heard my mother being told he was dead. I heard every family member being told but nobody told me. Some woman said to me ‘your daddy took a turn’ and I had that hope that maybe he wasn’t dead.”

Within a few years, Martina had developed an eating disorder.

A “chubby” child, she found secondary school “terrifying” and was devastated when she was taunted about her weight.

“I would vomit everything I ate. I used to feel dirty if I ate.”

When her mother discovered the reason for her significant weight loss, Martina was taken to a counsellor who “could see it was the death of my father” and helped her resolve the underlying issues.

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Martina Mitchell can still recall her terror as a schoolgirl and being unable to find the right time to tell anyone she was pregnant. Photograph: Brian Farrell

Martina Mitchell is due to speak about her experience of bereavement, an eating disorder and a concealed pregnancy at an event in Co Leitrim on September 29th.

One of those who helped her turn her life around, retired mental health community nurse Hubert McHugh, has organised the Health & Wellbeing evening at Killenummery parish hall in Dromahair.

“Martina had a very difficult time but she accepted treatment and came out the other side and I think she is a shining example to other people who may find themselves in difficult circumstances,” says McHugh, who retired in 2019 after 40 years working in the mental health services.

Martina Mitchell can still recall her terror as a schoolgirl and being unable to find the right time to tell anyone she was pregnant until the night she went into labour.

Her sense of isolation was compounded by the fact that her older married sister was pregnant at the same time. On the night that both babies were born in the same hospital, her mother turned up, only to be told her 16 year old was also there and that she was about to get not one, but two grandchildren.

“I was in denial so I had been doing everything I normally did, going to school, doing my babysitting. I was a tomboy in the house so my mother had me doing the boys’ jobs like the lawn mowing, lifting the gas bottles, all of that heavy sort of work. And of course I said nothing,” she says.

“And then my sister announced she was expecting and I was like ‘oh isn’t that great’, [thinking] now I definitely cannot say anything. Everyone was looking forward to her baby. It was so sad, everyone was protecting her. My mammy would be like, ‘Tina you lift that, your sister is pregnant.’”

Mitchell remembers “vomiting my guts up” throughout the pregnancy but never being able to find the words to tell any of her siblings, including a brother who “was like a father to me”.

In retrospect, she believes her mother must have suspected that the eating disorder had returned and so would have been very reluctant to comment if she did notice any weight gain.

“I’d have my school T-shirt, my school jumper and then a big fleece on over that. In warm weather I was nearly passing out,” she says.

On the day her baby was born, her mother had made Martina go Christmas shopping in Cavan. “I walked the town with her. The sweat was rolling off me. I’ll never forget it because I had been in labour from that morning.”

That night, when the pain became unbearable, she eventually told one of her sisters, whose boyfriend then drove them to the local hospital.

“They wanted to wake my mam but I said ‘no, you can’t do that to her’,” Martina says.

The cousins were born within a few hours of each other and were put in the same nursery.

Martina does not have pleasant memories of her experience in the hospital. She recalls one staff member, “the wickedest woman I ever came across”, who mouthed the words “concealed pregnancy” to any colleague who came into the room and who treated her in a judgmental rather than a reassuring manner.

Her baby, “a lovely little boy”, weighed in at 7lb 4oz.

“When he was born I was in total shock. I was asked did I want to see him and I panicked and said ‘no’,” she recalls.

Martina was put in a downstairs room on her own, but ached to go to the nursery when she heard babies crying upstairs. But she was also afraid of causing her mother more upset. “I was like ‘don’t worry Mam, we won’t keep him and nobody will know about it’. I’d seen the state of the woman. She was as white as a ghost.”

She left the hospital without holding her baby, but a “lovely nurse” had taken three photos of him using a Polaroid instant camera. “I still have them. She said they might fade, but they never faded. I used to just sit at home looking at them,” Martina says.

The hospital referred her to social services and while Martina’s mother would ultimately support her wish to keep her baby, she feels she was let down by others who pressured her into allowing him to be adopted.

Martina Mitchell says she is telling her story, hoping others might see that no matter how hopeless a situation might seem, there is help out there. Photograph: Brian Farrell

“A social worker kept saying ‘we will get this child adopted. It’s the best thing. Martina can finish school and she can go to college and we will forget all this happened.’”

The baby was placed with a foster family before potential adoptive parents came into the picture, and Martina was asked to sign a form which she understood was so that the baby could have medical care if required.

When she told her mother and her siblings that she wanted to keep her son, they supported her. “My brother started to make a cot for him. My granny bought clothes.”

A meeting was arranged with the couple who wanted to adopt her son, at which Martina had understood they would hand her baby over to herself and her mother. The Mitchell family sought legal advice, but a solicitor told her she had signed the form and nothing could be done.

“I now have a 24-year-old son living in a neighbouring county. I think of him every day,” says Martina, who has three other children who now know about the existence of their older sibling.

“I was watching a programme about Magdalene laundries with my daughter and I burst into tears and I ended up telling her. I had been afraid she might judge me but not at all.”

In 2014, a favourite cousin, who had also lost his father at the age of 10, died and Martina found it hard to cope. “I could not stop crying. Every time I tried to sleep I could see his face.”

One night when she was feeling particularly low she rang a friend who came to her, realised she was having a breakdown and brought her home and encouraged her to try to sleep.

“Only for that friend I might not be here. Hubert was brought on the scene to try to fix this mess and he came every week and talked to me and was my safe space,” she says.

McHugh referred her to the local mental health team and her medication was adjusted, which also made life easier. Gradually, she says, through her weekly sessions with the community nurse “I was able to start talking, processing and healing from all my traumas”.

There are many positives in her life now, apart from her partner and children.

“Gardening is a huge thing for me. I think plants calm everything. I love the outdoors and dogs. I breed pedigree dogs.”

She says she is telling her story, hoping others might see that no matter how hopeless a situation might seem, there is help out there.

In recent weeks Martina Mitchell sent a message to her firstborn telling him “I have never stopped thinking about you. I am here for you whenever you want to talk to me or if you want to talk to me.”

Among the speakers at The Health & Wellbeing Event, an offshoot of Leitrim’s Health is Wealth, is former Galway hurler Justin Campbell, who will talk about addiction and gambling, while Leitrim GAA manager Andy Moran will discuss the benefits of exercise when it comes to mental health.