Mum Kaylea Cross tells Jaine Blackman about the novel way she battled post natal depression

Many people have ambitions to write a book but for newly published author Kaylea Cross it means so much more than just the pleasure of having her words printed and seeing her name on the cover.

She credits writing with helping her get through her darkest days when she was suffering from post natal depression and thought her family would be better off without her.

“Writing gave me an outlet, it allowed me to escape from everything for a little while,” says Kaylea, 25, of Cutteslowe, Oxford.

“I hate to think what could have happened if I didn’t turn to writing when I did.”

Writing has been in Kaylea’s blood for a long time.

“I pretty much started as soon as I could hold a pen.

“When I was little I had a little notebook at my nan’s house. I would tell my aunt the stories and she would write them out for me until I old enough to write them myself,” says Kaylea, who grew up in Barton, Oxford.

In her teens she wrote romance stories (“which I’ll admit had a little bit of an adult theme to them”) to entertain her friends at Cheney secondary school and dreamed of one day having a book with her name on it.

After school she began working at the Westgate shopping centre, met her partner Matthew Musto, now 38, a fellow customer services officer, and had their son Tyler, in August 2009 followed by daughter Kensi in November 2012.

But she’d taken “a step away” from writing and all was not well.

“Even before I had my daughter I was struggling and on the verge of depression. We’d been trying to fall pregnant for over a year and I was diagnosed with polycystic ovaries,” says Kaylea.

“Eventually our wish came true but throughout the pregnancies I was haunted by everything that had happened after the birth of my son. He had to stay in the hospital after his birth for a few a days and I was terrified the same would happen again.

“Also my grandfather lost his battle with cancer the day after my 21st birthday when Tyler was a few weeks old.

“I started to feel like a failure as a mother, as due to all the stress of everything that was happening I couldn’t feed him the way I wanted to.”

When she had her daughter, she now thinks she had already set herself up for failure.

“I was consumed with wanting to be the perfect mother in every way,” she says.

“Everyone around me noticed what was happening to me but I couldn’t admit it to myself. I wanted to be able to do everything and I didn’t want to ask for help.

“I was barely sleeping and always crying.”

Then one day she broke down in front of her health visitor and was encouraged to see her doctor.

“They soon put me on anti-depressants and arranged for me to see a councillor and an outreach worker,” says Kaylea.

“And along with the help of the outreach support worker and my family, I used my writing to get me through the darkest time in my life.

Oxford Mail:
Kaylea Cross with her children Kensi Musto, one, left, and Tyler Musto, five

“I started to write again in hopes it help me relax like it had done in the past – a little story that wasn’t supposed to be anything really but when my depression took hold more seriously, I almost became dependant on it and the story itself took a darker form.

“Writing allowed me to escape the darkness within my own mind and gave me something else to focus on.”

She wrote a novel which grew in popularity on the reading/writing website Wattpad. Now Life On The Rocks has been published by an American company and is available on Amazon and other online bookstores as a paperback and an ebook.

“I still feel sometimes that I am going to wake up one day and find that all of this is just a dream,” says Kaylea.

“Life On The Rocks was never supposed to be anything big. I only started writing it to get back into the swing of things and it just took off.

“What I find most surprising is the amount of people who thanked me for writing it, as it helped them deal with their problems.”

And it’s certainly helped Kaylea, who is off anti-depressants, has finished the sequel, started the third book in the series and has a two year contract with Dream Big Publishing, in Michigan, on a 50-50 royalties deal.

“I am now over my post natal depression,” she says. “Of course I still have the odd bad day, as you never really ever fully recover from depression but I am nowhere near where I once was.

“I think once I started to understand and accept that I didn’t have to be perfect and I stopped blaming myself, things started to seem better.

“Now I am excited and over the moon about everything that is happening right now and I’m back to my old self.

“Even now if I am having a bad day I’ll turn to my writing and it just eases my stress away. Some people take bubble baths, drink a glass of wine or smoke a cigarette when they’re stressed but I turn to writing. I have to write, it’s who I am.”

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