Aussie mum's 'rock bottom' after neighbours call police over her baby: ‘Soul-crushing’

It's 11pm and you can hear a baby screaming in a nearby apartment. They’ve been at it for at least 20 minutes but it feels like a lifetime. What do you do?

Ella Waters was the exhausted mother at the other end of this scenario last week. She spends her nights going in and out of her one-year-old’s room, rocking, patting and lying next to him as she tries to soothe him back to sleep. He wakes at least three times a night - every hour and a half on a bad night - so Ella and her husband normally take turns, but he’s recently broken his arm, so for the last few weeks it has only been Ella going in to resettle their toddler.

She’s completely wrung out by this unending ritual, and while rocking her son back to sleep late one night, she bursts into tears. Her husband takes over the patting and shushing and tells her to go to bed, so she cries herself to sleep while their toddler screams the house down in the room next door. At around midnight, after Dad has finally settled the defiant toddler, there’s a knock on the door.

It’s a police officer.

Mum's 'rock bottom'

“Opening that door and seeing a police officer walk up the stairs was just rock bottom for me,” Ella tells Yahoo Lifestyle.

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“God bless him, he’s got a medical bag with him and he says he’s conducting a welfare check because he got a call about a distressed baby.

“He looks at me and asks if I’m ok and I’ve just lost it in front of him. He was so lovely.”

Ella, 25, knows most of her neighbours and was left questioning why they didn’t check in on her themselves, particularly because screaming in the middle of the night is not out of character for her son. “I’m coming to terms with it now and I really hope the neighbours were just doing the right thing by my son, but at the time it was just soul-crushing,” she says.

Ex-cop weighs in on incident

The next morning, a still emotional Ella recounted the events on TikTok, with the video quickly clocking over 100,000 views and eliciting an incredible outpouring of love, mostly from other mothers who recognise all too well the struggle of life without the traditional ‘village’.

“I’m so sorry… clearly people who have never had children before,” one person says, while another shares, “My son has autism and ADHD and has frequent meltdowns… we’ve had child protection at our door several times… there’s nothing more soul-crushing than trying your hardest then something like that happening.”

An ex-cop was also among the commenters and wrote, “I went to a call like this. I walked in, hugged the mum and made her a cup of tea and we sat and talked. [Her] two-year-old was so bored of us talking she fell asleep.”

Mum innundated with support following incident

Others pointed out that although the experience was distressing and could have been handled differently by the caller, in a more sinister scenario, a call to the police could save a child from harm.

Ella has also had friends reach out since watching the video and they’ve dropped by with meals and offers to help watch her son so she can get some rest.

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“I feel like sometimes it’s easier to share on TikTok rather than individually speaking to people,” she says, “I don’t want to be like, ‘Look what happened to me, feel sorry for me’.”

“TikTok was like a way of just getting it off my chest and expressing it instead of getting angry and holding on to it.”

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