Writing About the Difficult things

When I wrote the first piece, the one from last year about postpartum depression, "In Case You’re Wondering Where I’ve Been”, the larger purpose behind it was for my own personal processing. I’m one of those people who processes things externally—I have to talk or write something out if I’m going to figure out my feelings about it, lay eyes on the truth behind it. If I don’t, it stays jumbled and tangled up inside of me, pieces of something unrecognizable. I have to shake it all out of my brain and body in order to thoroughly examine it. That’s just the way I am.

So that’s what it was, mostly. I think it also served as a sort of confession. An offering to the people in my life; my way of being open and honest, albeit impersonally, because it was too hard to do it face to face.

And then there was this little slice of purpose that showed up as I wrote, this recognition that part of my struggle was that, while this was an incredible difficult thing, it wasn’t something people really talked about. I didn’t know anyone personally that I could turn to or felt comfortable doing so, no one who had walked this path or felt and thought these things before me. How unprepared I was for postpartum depression, for realities of postpartum life and early motherhood in general, despite traditional preparation, totally baffled me.

And that’s the part, really, that changed everything.

A few days ago I reread that piece for the first time in a long time, maybe since I posted it. I cried all over again reading my own words, looking at my own past, feeling my old feelings and remembering how hard it was, how painful. How lonely. How isolating. How long I spent confused by what was happening in my brain, in my life, in my relationships. How long I spent in the dark, not knowing what was going on, what was normal, what to do about it. How angry I was that no one told me, that no one talked about this. How badly I wanted to change that.

That anger, and that piece of writing in particular, set me into motion. They lent me the momentum that launched me into becoming a childbirth educator, and then training to become a lactation counselor, and holding workshops and postpartum meetups and talking to moms about being moms. It rekindled my love, old flame that it is, for writing, and uncovered a longing to write about motherhood in particular.

Since then, I’ve had multiple requests and questions to write or talk about or provide resource for other things—difficult things. I’ve wanted to say yes but haven’t known how. Haven’t known what that could look like. These are things that I haven’t been through personally, that I want to handle with the utmost care, and that I want to be most truthful and accurate and honest about. But it’s occurred to me that this is needed, more than most of us realize, I think, and I’ve decided to give it my best shot.

So here we are, a little over a year later, and I’m hoping to talk about The Difficult Things together. The things we don’t talk about but probably should. The things we go through as mothers that no one prepared us for, that maybe no one could’ve prepared us for. The dark places we walked through and felt completely alone; I want to talk about them all. To walk, instead, hand in hand through someone’s story and light a candle and leave it for the next mother, to help her see a step ahead and know she isn’t alone, that someone else has walked her path—or at least a similar one—and she is not alone.