I'm going to take a little break from the science-based focus of this blog and talk a little bit about something that is very personal to me: Postpartum Depression. I feel this is relevant to the blog because, being a breastfeeding blog, I'm sure it attracts readers who either are parents or work very closely with parents. I feel that anyone who works closely with parents and particularly postpartum mothers needs to know what postpartum depression is really like, from someone who suffered through it.
My husband and I tried for about 3 years to get pregnant. I had been so anxious to get pregnant that I really hadn't thought about much beyond the actual pregnancy itself. All of my fantasies were of finding out I was pregnant and how I would be so overjoyed.
The moment I took that first pregnancy test, things already started to deviate from the path. I thought the test was a mistake, so I took 8 more. All 9 tests said I was pregnant. Why was I not crying with happiness? Where was the overjoyed smile? The screaming? The jumping up and down? I WAS happy, I just didn't really know how to show it. Thinking back, that was probably the first sign that something was amiss.
I had a textbook pregnancy. There were no complications or anything. But I had this feeling, and I just couldn't place it. I felt a bit sad, but not for any particular reason. I didn't enjoy going out places, I didn't want to interact with my husband, I was overly sarcastic yet very easily offended. I loved being pregnant, but I just didn't feel right. Still, physically my pregnancy was great..up until 36 weeks. My water broke prematurely, and being unable to get to the proper hospital my daughter was born in triage at our local emergency clinic. She was transported by ambulance to the hospital and I was left behind to be stitched up.
Her birth happened so quickly and so unexpectedly that when I first heard a baby crying, I didn't believe it was my child. But at the same time, I KNEW that child was mine, and I had an overwhelming urge to maul everyone in the room, like a mama bear. I needed to protect my child from them, and the urge was so powerful that I almost ripped the IV out of my arm and walked the 15 miles to the hospital. When my own ambulance dropped me off at the hospital, a nurse wheeled me into my room and I saw my husband standing there waiting for me.
Where was my daughter? WHERE WAS SHE? I began to panic and could feel my heart speeding up. I asked the nurse where my daughter was and was told that she was in the nursery and would be in shortly. When she left I asked my husband where my daughter was and he told me the same thing. I was furious with him. I hated him. He abandoned her. The mama bear instinct was strong, and again I wanted to maul everyone in the hallway and run down the halls screaming until I found her. But I didn't. Instead I waited patiently until finally the nursery staff wheeled her in. I vowed at that moment to never let anything happen to her. I still didn't feel very emotionally attached to her, but biologically, my brain and my mothering hormones were in overdrive and I knew I would climb mountains to keep that child safe..at least until her real mother showed up.
The first few days were a blur. I cried a lot, and I was stressed out. I dreaded the sun going down because my husband would go in and go to bed and I would be left with this fleshy, crying blob. Breastfeeding wasn't going all that well and my daughter was jaundiced. They almost had to admit her to the NICU. She spent a lot of time wrapped in her bilirubin blanket sleeping, and I was pumping all the time. And at night I would curl up on the couch and cry by myself.
Over the next few weeks things significantly improved. I finally began to feel an attachment to her, but I could never quite shake the feeling that something was off. Since she was born early I didn't feel ready. I felt like I had been thrown into parenting and even tasks like changing diapers or bathing her were a struggle. My husband was very un-involved. He was getting ready to deploy and was very busy at work. In her first 3 months alone he spent almost 2 months gone. When my daughter was almost 4 months old he was in a training accident that left him permanently disabled and I was left to care for him as well as my daughter. That was when things went very far down hill.
I began having intrusive thoughts. I imagined the knives in the kitchen floating over into my hands, and my hands were stabbing my daughter, as if acting on their own. I imagined myself throwing her off balconies, drowning her, driving into walls with my car, and overdosing on medications. These thoughts were horrifying. I didn't want to kill her, or drive into a wall, or overdose on medication. I was not suicidal, nor was I homicidal, but these thoughts would come to me and my brain would force me to think them. If I tried to push them away my brain pushed back even harder. Eventually I just begrudgingly accepted them. Yet the thoughts I was thinking about myself paled in comparison to the things I thought about others. I was convinced that everyone around me was incompetent. I thought my husband was going to accidentally drown her, or that my dad would forget the ceiling fan was on and raise her in the air.
The drive to protect her was extreme at this point, and nothing anyone did was ever good enough. On the one hand, I believed that no one was capable of taking care of my child. But on the other hand I knew that I, too, was incapable of caring for her. I still don't even know how I got through that first year, and in retrospect I wish I would have asked someone for help. There were a few times where things got so bad I considered driving myself to the ER and asking for help, or even just calling the police. But the problem was that for every bad night I had, for every moment I wished I could go back in time and undo my daughter's conception, there would be a decent day. I would wake up and get a lot done, and I would think that I was over the hump and everything would be ok. That was the cycle I lived in for almost a year.
At the end of my daughter's first year, I left my husband. I told him months earlier I was leaving, and when he was finally medically discharged from the military I moved out and didn't look back. I hated him so much at that point. I hated him for not being in the room when my daughter was born, I hated him for not staying with her in the nursery, I hated him for not helping, I hated him for becoming disabled (by no fault of his own), and I hated him just because he was the only person around who I could even justify hating. I even had intrusive thoughts about him. I imagined him dying in horrific accidents or committing suicide. These were not things I wanted to happen, but my brain was forcing me to think them. I hated those thoughts so much, but I was powerless to them.
I'm writing this because I know now that what I was experiencing was not some freak occurrence. It's textbook Postpartum Depression (the intrusive thoughts fall a little in the realm of PPOCD). Postpartum Depression does not mean you just sit around and cry and feel sad all the time. Actually, I really didn't feel sad at all. Instead, I felt absolutely, completely, bat-shit insane. I recognized that my life was wonderful and that I was blessed, and objectively I realized that despite certain horrible event things were looking up. But I still felt completely powerless, like I was just being dragged through life by the seat of my pants. It was like someone scrambled my brain and I couldn't make normal connections anymore. I would be overcome by even simple childcare tasks, or I would open the fridge and stare blankly at the food inside, unable to comprehend what I was even looking at. I spent a lot of time hungry and ordering pizza because I couldn't seem to focus on complex tasks like food prep. Everything was just weird and surreal.
But I know I'm not the only one to experience that. And I know somewhere out there is another woman experiencing something similar, and she probably feels alone and anxious, and those around her have no idea how to help. Or else they may not even recognize her symptoms as being PPD. They may think she's just lost her mind and has gone crazy. My husband once asked me when I was going to get over "that postpartum crazy shit". That answer is still pending, since I'm still not completely healed and I still struggle with intrusive thoughts (albeit infrequently). I think I'm doing quite well now as a single mother. I moved back home and went back to school, got a certification in Lactation Education, joined La Leche League, and returned to college to complete my bachelor's in nursing. I do still struggle though. I'm a work in progress.
I suggest those who identify with this blog post to check out Postpartum Progress, and seek help from someone: a friend, family, your doctor, a counselor, or even an online community. There's no reason anyone needs to go through that alone. It's not worth martyring yourself because you're afraid of what others might say or think. There's NO shame in asking for help.
http://www.postpartumprogress.com/
