From the moment your baby is born, they are held by many hands - yours, your partners, nurses, doctors, family members - but who holds the mother?
Your baby is cared for, checked on, tests given -
but who checks on the mother?
I was forgotten.
They say that from the moment your child is born, you are instantly connected and in love - but what happens when you only get less than a minute to hold your baby and by the time you finally do you feel empty?
You see, my son was born a month early, due to my medical condition he had to be - my body, the place that was supposed to keep him safe, wasn’t. He was born with the umbilical cord wrapped around his neck twice - I held him in my arms for less than a minute when they noticed he was having difficulty breathing and then he was taken into the NICU. Two moments that will live with me forever are me sitting in my hospital room without my baby, and several days later the empty car seat in the back as my husband and I drove home because our son wasn’t able to leave NICU yet.
The entire experience did something to me, it changed me, and with each passing day I became less of the version I’ve always known myself to be.
Postpartum depression hit me hard. I felt like I was in a room, surrounded by people, screaming for help, but no sound would come out. How is it that my mind was constantly racing with thoughts, but my voice was silenced? I didn’t even feel like it was my life that I was living, as if I was watching a movie, my life was playing on the screen, but I wasn’t truly living it. Most days, it felt like work to physically lift my body out of bed, let alone breastfeed (which I pressured myself into because society has told me that I’m an awful mom if I don’t), hold my baby, eat, or even drink water - I just wanted my bed to swallow me whole and relieve me of this overwhelming sense of nothingness. I felt certain that my family would be better off not having me around, my dark messy cloud pouring rain all over them.
I’m not sure what was worse, the hollowness inside of my body or the excruciating guilt from having this amazing baby and not feeling like I could connect to him. I’ve spoken to many women before, women that shared my struggles, that have experienced the very thing that I was and where I showed them compassion, I had none of that stored for me. I was a failure.
I was given a lot of well-intentioned advice: Go for a walk, play with your baby more, pray, go to church, find a hobby, just wake up and choose to be happy - but what no one understood was that I was drowning and no amount of forced positivity was going to remove me from the dark hole my mind crawled itself into. All of this advice that was given to me, any and everything except for what I really needed which was Zoloft and talk therapy. Those were the things that I personally needed, but there is so much shame around mental illness and medications that I deprived myself of the help I needed because I was more worried about the opinions of others. Now, I was failing myself.
By the time I had my 6-week postpartum checkup, my depression had gotten so bad that I was pretty sure that at any moment I was going to be eaten alive from the inside out, by the monster it had become. I finally decided it was time for help and completed the survey provided to me as openly and honestly as possible, and I’m so glad that I did.
I didn’t start my medication on a Friday and feel like a brand-new woman by Saturday - this was not a get better fast process, it was going to take time and patience. At first, it felt like I had the flu, and I was suddenly more tired than ever, and I really wanted to give up. But the first day the medication began to work, it was as if my vision was suddenly clearer. I slowly started to find it easier to get out of bed, and with every day that passed I began to feel lighter and laughed more. My senses were heightened - the air was crisper, the sun shined brighter, and I was able to look at my son and feel so greatly connected to him, and revel in his warmth and scent. I was beginning to feel like me again. I was beginning to feel like a whole person.
When I look back at that time, there are a few things I wish would have been different:
I wish that mothers were checked on before their 6-week appointment, and definitely more than once. We need to hold the baby AND the mother. Our bodies just went through this earth-shattering journey, our lives are drastically changing, we’re sleep-deprived, hormonal, and we are no longer living for ourselves - we need to be held.
I wish that there wasn’t a stigma against mental illness and medications, we should all be able to openly get the help that we need. Sure, things like exercise and sunlight can be helpful, but they are not the only solutions, and they definitely weren’t the only solutions for me.
I wish that I gave myself more grace - why do we never grant ourselves the same love and care that we do to others?
Lastly, I wish that there wasn’t so much societal pressure to be perfect. Does anyone do everything right? We’re all flawed. No one can do everything right 100% of the time. It’s not possible and putting that pressure on ourselves to be perfect is only setting us up for failure (admittedly, I’m still working on this one).
I am not a perfect mom or person; I’ll probably never be and that’s okay - sings to myself “I can see clearly now the rain is gone…”.
#Depression #PostpartumDepression #MentalHealth #MentalIllness
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