“In case you’re wondering where I’ve been”

Originally posted July, 2023 on haven (wordpress.com)

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A few weeks ago, a friend of mine had a baby. We go to church together and, I kid you not, this woman was at our bible study a week after she gave birth.

It’s funny—before I had a baby, it never occurred to me that comparing myself to other mothers could ever be an issue. I’ll be the first to say it: I am a fool.

It took me twelve weeks to make it to our bible study after I delivered. My son will be six months old this week, and regular attendance is still a struggle—albeit for multiple reasons, but personal desire and difficulty are among them. She showed up to group and my insecurities woke up and reared their ugly little heads, roaring like no other. Over the next week, the same mom attended multiple social gatherings, and I felt myself getting angrier by the day. How is she able to do that? Why is this so easy for her? Why is everyone so willing to support her, but they aren’t willing to support me?

At face value, I disagreed with myself. I couldn’t decipher my own logic here: I don’t have negative feelings about this person, I love her deeply. So why was I so angry? Why was I bothered by her personal decisions—decisions that clearly were benefiting herself and her family?

I tried to follow those thoughts to their ends. Tried to search out their roots, but was met with a tangled mess in my head that I couldn’t make sense of. I talked to some friends, to my husband. Tried to verbally process but came up emptyhanded and angrier than the day before.

I’d say I found the confidence to pray about it, but I didn’t. Really I just lost the energy to stay angry. I was sitting alone on my couch, calling in to hear the teaching for my women’s group that I, once again, was not attending in-person, when I finally turned down the speaker phone volume and started to journal about it. I am feeling so bound up with resentful thoughts, with distaste, with a feeling of being forgotten or left behind…show me what’s going on in my heart that has me so defensive, so angry at these women and so unsure of why.

And then:

Why did it get so dark, for so long?

And then:

Why did it get so dark for me and not them?

The first time I googled “postpartum depression” I was two weeks postpartum, neck deep into my first round of mastitis. It was late, like, late-late. Like, three or four a.m., long winter night type of late. My husband was taking his turn sleeping. Likewise, my newborn was asleep on his trendy little baby lounger across the room. I’d been fever-ridden for days, battling a temperature of 103 around the clock with a strict rotation of acetaminophen and ibuprofen to no avail. I was on antibiotics and every home remedy and wives tale for mastitis you can imagine. You name it, we tried it. My breasts were engorged, and not in a sexy way. In a deep, throbbing ache, punctuated by searing, tender-to-the-touch pain type of way. They felt like rocks full of rocks. Shit, they looked like rocks full of rocks. The only thing that would make them feel better would be draining the milk from them, but my baby’s latch and nursing skills just weren’t up for the job. My life was a cycling hamster wheel of three hour increments: baby sleeps, baby wakes up, try to nurse baby, cry because baby can’t nurse, try to pump, cry because pumping hurts, supplementally feed baby with pumped milk, clean pump parts, store milk, cry because I’m running out of time to sleep, prepare for next breastfeeding attempt, prepare for next pumping attempt and…surprise, the wheel is back at hour one and I haven’t slept a wink.

Exhausted is not the right word. I do believe I glimpsed the reason they use sleep deprivation as a form of torture, and I don’t mean that in a funny way, which is rare for me.

Anyway, I was sitting there, somewhere on that hamster wheel, trying to figure out if it was time to take my Tylenol, which, as you can imagine, I was having a lot of difficulty keeping track of (cue the crying, and then cue more crying about the fact that I was crying). Fuck it,  I thought. It was probably close enough to the right time. I dumped the pills into my hand and too many came tumbling out, bringing with them my darkest thoughts.

I should just take them all.

I’m not cut out for this. I can’t even feed my own baby. I’m not a real mom. I don’t know how to give him what he needs. My husband resents me—I’m no help here at all, I’m just sucking the life out of this family. I’m failing at this and we’ve barely even started. I’m so tired—so, so tired. I don’t know how I’m supposed to keep doing this.

I sat there and stared at my hand, full of those little red and blue ovals, and thought that Vinny—who was stuck caring for not only a newborn babe but also a freshly postpartum and very sick wife—and my baby, who I could barely take care of, feed, stay awake for….I thought that they might be better off without me.

And that scared the absolute shit out of me. What the fuck, I thought. I don’t think I’m okay. I put the pills back into the bottle. Took the dose I was supposed to take.

And then I googled it: postpartum depression symptoms  

There are a lot of really, really shitty things about the way our society educates—or doesn’t, really—moms—or their partners (!!!)—about postpartum depression. Or postpartum anxiety. Or postpartum rage—yeah, did you know that one is a thing? I didn’t. But, I digress. One of the shittiest things, I think, about this lack of education is the way they tell you about it. Try it—do a quick Dr. Google. Did you find a quick, impersonal, clinical, and vague list of bland descriptors like “insomnia, loss of appetite, intense irritability, difficulty bonding with the baby, loss of pleasure in activities, mood swings…”? Because I did.

And I read them. I checked quite a few of those boxes, to be honest, but you know what? I was only two weeks in—still the right block of time for a lot of my emotional lability to be baby blues, right? Plus, I had mastitis—literally the sickest I’ve ever been in my life—on top of a brand new baby. This was definitely circumstantial. How could it not be?

I clicked my off phone screen and pushed that list into a box in my mind and locked it up tight.

So now, six months later, I’m over here wondering: why did it get so dark for me and not them?

Search me, O God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts, said the psalmist.

And it was like He turned on a light bulb in all that darkness, and I suddenly saw where I’d been. I’d felt all these wild, foreign things because I’d been in the dark. It had been dark for me for months, and I hadn’t even realized it.

Shit, I thought. I think I have postpartum depression.

The thing is, I definitely wondered from time to time, you know? People did ask me how I was doing.

“How are you feeling?” and “You doin’ okay?” and, my personal favorite, “Are you feeling back to normal yet?” (LOL like, sorry what is normal? I have a baby? I’ll never be what I was before this, literally? Are you saying there is a specific way I should be? Get out of here with all that.)

But, I never knew how to answer them. What am I supposed to say to those questions? Are you really asking me because you want the truth, or are you asking because it’s the courteous thing to do? Because you know things are chaotic, but you also know I’ll smile and nod my head and talk about how beautiful it is to be a mother and watch my baby grow, grow, grow.

Call me cynical, but I think it’s the latter.

I’ve never had a baby before this, never gone through postpartum before this. How the hell am I supposed to be the one to know if I’m okay? If how I’m feeling, what’s happening in my brain, is normal? I’m not the expert here.

I mean, I thought I was okay. I was surviving. Waking up, keeping the baby alive— I was doing more than that; he’s been fat and happy and healthy the entire time. I’ve been able to laugh at stuff. I started having regular social interactions again. I love my baby. I know my husband loves me. I eat food, talk to my mom, go for walks. That must mean I’m okay, right? That’s not depression. It can’t be.

Because depression is monotone. Like zombie. Like gray, gray, gray, everywhere all the time. Like not getting out of bed, not taking care of yourself. That’s depression. Right?

That’s what I thought, anyway. I have zero firsthand experience with depression. How was I supposed to know what it would look like for me?

I thought the way I felt was completely circumstantial. We had a rough start—a long and hard labor, feeding issues, two bouts of mastitis…it made sense that I felt the way I did in the beginning. I was sad because of what happened, because of that massive hormone shift. I was tired because I was sick, and then because I was a new mom. I was afraid of setting down my baby, of him getting sick, of him riding in the car—because he was my first. I was overwhelmed because everything was new, everything was changing, everything was in transition. I wanted to be alone because I just wanted to figure it out. It would all even out around the edges soon. We just had a bumpy beginning. It would get better. It was all normal.

Right?

But I wasn’t sad. I was devastated. I cried constantly for at least the entire first month. And at everything—sick? Crying. Eating? Crying. Vinny brings me water? Crying. Have to pump? Crying. I wasn’t tired, I was exhausted. Truly sleep deprived. Unable to function in any remotely healthy emotional, mental, or physical capacity. Weeping to God during three a.m. feeds, why do you hate me? I wasn’t afraid—I was terrified. We didn’t set our baby down to sleep for two weeks because we were afraid he was going to die. When we drove, I leaned over him in the car, like I could physically shield him if we got into a wreck. I wasn’t overwhelmed, I was drowning. Explaining to my mother-in-law why we were or weren’t swaddling for whatever reasons we had required energy I physically could not muster. My husband telling me I had to learn how to buckle my child into his car seat pushed me to tears. I couldn’t do it. I didn’t just want to be alone—I was withdrawing from everyone. From everything. And that was just the beginning.

When I think back to the first four months, it’s dark. My actual memories are dark, dimmed down, stuck in perpetual twilight. Like the light dimmer in your grandparents dining room. Everything is muted and muffled, blurred around the edges.

But I didn’t know how to say all of that then. Those feelings were unknown to me. Too big to capture. They were balled up like too-tight fists, swinging in any and every direction. Trying to explain how I felt was like trying to run in water. Like my mouth was full of sleep every time it opened. Pulling the seams of those thoughts and emotions apart now, trying to put them into words—it still feels off. I read those descriptions and they’re accurate, sure, but somehow don’t do the experience justice. Yes—I felt all those things. But it was so much louder than those words can show you. It was all those things, but tenfold. It was all those things, but they were deafening in absolute.

Do you know how many times I wondered, in my anger, why doesn’t anyone tell you it will be like this?

Why didn’t anyone tell me that it would be so hard? That I would feel like the way I did? That it would take so long to cultivate a sense of normalcy? I was so angry for so many months. Why doesn’t anyone talk about this?

They don’t tell you—they don’t talk about it— because it’s not normal.

Seven weeks after I gave birth, I gave a friend a ride home from an engagement party (my first solo outing). She was pregnant—a touch “overdue”—and we talked in my car for a while about my experience in labor and postpartum so far. I remember telling her how the placenta manufactures progesterone while you’re pregnant and when you deliver it, it takes all that progesterone with it. I told her how, once the dust settled on day two for me, it felt like my soul plummeted off the side of a cliff and shattered at the bottom.

She recently brought that up—the way I described that.

You know what she said?

“I kept waiting for that to happen, but it never did for me.”

The pieces are coming together. I probably had postpartum depression. Odds are very high that I still do. I’m angry about that, too.

I prayed more, journaled more. Talked to my friends. They responded with things like I wondered if you had it, and, I didn’t have an experience like that, and I really thought you weren’t okay. Which sounds kind of shitty now that I’m writing it down, but it wasn’t like that in the moment. Their words jogged loose forgotten pieces from the haze of early postpartum: my parents asking me if I was okay, telling me they were worried. My aunt, checking in on me weekly. A friend in my living room, crying while I told her about the Tylenol.

This darkness, how has no one seen that I’ve been lost in it? If they’ve seen it, why haven’t they said anything? This anger in me—I’m constantly riding the sharp edge of this unfounded irritation—where is it coming from? My husband has seen it. My friends have. Do they think that’s normal for me? Do they think I’m just an asshole now? Why hasn’t anyone figured it out? Why haven’t I?

That question really got me.

Why has it taken me so long to figure this out?

A few nights ago I found myself on my couch, weeping into my husband’s arms as I unfolded this in front of him. He listened to me. He asked me questions. He wanted to understand. He helped me understand.

I’m one of those people you could categorize as a “doer”. If I see a problem, I find the solution—preferably the most efficient one—and fix it. Period.

I feel so ashamed that I didn’t see my own problem. So embarrassed to not have been able to fix it. To be exposed, to be seen like this. For everyone I know to see me in the most vulnerable state I have ever been—I feel humiliated. I’m afraid that people will look at my newly postpartum friend and see all she is capable of and then turn and look at me and think wow, Haven really couldn’t get her shit together. Look at how controlling she is, how uptight she is now, look at how MIA she’s been—she must not want to be around us anymore. I am afraid that realizing that I’ve been depressed after so long, realizing it so late, somehow makes it not count. Makes me look like I’m just rooting around the refuse of my matrescence for excuses. For an alibi.

I’m afraid that, because I didn’t have any risk factors, because I didn’t see my own big, fat, waving red flags, no one else will believe me. I’m afraid that it doesn’t matter.

But I’m a little further on down the road now, and my hindsight is kicking in, and the light of life is slowly filtering in through the dimness of what has been. I can see now that I wasn’t okay, that I haven’t been okay this entire time. And I can say it now, too.

I feel those things less, now. They’re still there, don’t get me wrong. Some days are worse than others, but they’re not as loud as they were, not as deafening. I have the capacity, or at least more of it, for self-reflection—obviously. I didn’t have that for a long time. I used to look at my labor and feel weak for how long it took, how hard it was during, how hard it was after. Now I look at it and think, I’m a fucking badass, dude. Look at what I’ve done. Look at where I’ve been, what I’ve walked through.

And because of the distance slowly accruing between myself and that dark and dense mind fog, I can see that this does matter. Not when I figured it out, but the fact that it happened. All those times I lamented no one telling me, no one talking about it—I’m here telling you. I’m here talking about it. It might not look like what you’re expecting—in fact, it probably won’t. You’ll look for it in the mirror and you won’t see it, won’t recognize it, because you won’t even really recognize you. How can you see a stranger when you can’t even see what’s familiar?

I’m not writing about this as a big boohoo. My experience with postpartum depression hasn’t been debilitating, and for a lot of people it is. I did have a lot of support, probably more than most new moms, and I’ll say confidently that that support probably lessened the severity of my depression immensely—who knows what it could’ve been without the help I had. I don’t really want to know where I’d be now without all the love and prayer and mealtrain and grocery drop offs and check in texts I had. One particular friend would come over biweekly and stay for hours. She vacuumed, did my dishes, did my laundry. Held my baby. Stayed with me when I didn’t want to be alone, talked to me when I wanted to talk. She gave me what I needed without making me tell her what that was, and that was everything to me. It carried me further upstream than either of us will ever know.

Anyway.

All this to say, I don’t really know what this means for me yet. Doctor? Medication? What does it mean for future postpartum Haven? I’m not sure, but I’m trying to figure it out. Right now, it looks like talking about it, writing about it, praying about it. Mucking around in all my muck and asking God what to do with all this stuff in my head.

I don’t know if I’m okay yet, but I think I’m getting there.