My church did a service today focusing on stories of pain and tragedy. This is what I shared.
When I realized that I loved my son, he was almost four months old. It had taken me that much time to become a mother in any way more than name only. Eli’s needs had been met up until then, as much as I knew how to, but love wasn’t part of the equation.
I was diagnosed as being clinically depressed in college, although I have struggled with my depression for nearly as long as I can remember. During my pregnancy I chose to wean myself off of my medication so that Eli would be exposed to as few side effects as possible. By the time he was born, I was unmedicated for the first time in almost ten years and felt great. My midwives and primary care doctor had instructed me to immediately begin taking medication again to ward off postpartum depression; though I knew they were right, and I definitely did, I chose not to do so. I figured that since I had done so well without meds for the last few months of pregnancy, I could certainly manage the baby blues.
When Eli was twelve weeks old, I screamed yet again at him, God, the world, myself, so loudly and so long that I did some sort of damage to my vocal cords. My dog ran away from me and hid because he was so frightened. After day five of having a sore throat on one side and being baffled as to its cause, I realized what had happened, and that twelve weeks was more than just the baby blues: this was full-fledged postpartum depression.
I spent the vast majority of those first three months completely enraged at everyone. My depression in the past had manifested as anger turned inward, as deep sadness; now that it was back with a vengeance it showed as pure, unadulterated fury. I had wanted a child for so long and the one I ended up with was not who or what I imagined, and I was certainly not the mother I should be.
I am good with babies. I’m the person to whom other people bring their kids to get them to stop crying. I can get kids to eat foods they won’t normally eat, sleep when they won’t normally sleep, and so on and so forth. My kid? Apparently, I sucked with him. He slept about half the amount of time newborns are supposed to sleep per day, ate constantly but was still constantly hungry, and cried whenever he wasn’t sleeping or eating (and sometimes he cried while he was doing those, too). Breastfeeding hurt like hell. All this stuff that I had read in books and heard from other moms about breastfeeding being such a great time of bonding? Complete lies. I was in excruciating pain the whole time, whether he was eating or not. And if I looked at him, he would start screaming.
Then I found out that he wasn’t getting enough to eat. So I had to start supplementing him with formula, which as far as I was concerned at the time was pretty much like feeding him poison. What kind of breastfeeding mother can’t make enough milk for her child? How does supply and demand not work the way it’s supposed to? Well, in my case it didn’t work because I had thrush, a yeast infection that inhibits milk production and causes a great deal of pain while breastfeeding. I am a doula. I work with pregnant and nursing women all the time. And yet I did not recognize the symptoms of thrush, of hunger, of colic, of postpartum depression.
With all these factors plus the added bonus of sleep deprivation, my postpartum depression was in control. I look back now and do not recognize the me of that time, because in all practical ways, “I” wasn’t there. I was living moment-to-moment, praying, to a God who I fully believed wasn’t paying any attention to me, that all of this would just stop. And in the middle of the sleepless nights, the baby screaming, my screaming, my self-harm and self-destruction, Ryan was trying to adjust to being a dad and the husband of a crazy person while working full-time and having his friends move away as they graduated.
My therapist spent fifteen minutes in our session this past week saying in different ways, “Do you realize that postpartum depression happened to you? That you didn’t cause it?” And I honestly couldn’t say yes. Part of me knows intellectually that I didn’t, but all the rest of me feels like I chose not to go back on my medication, I chose not to see all of the classic signs of a mood disorder, I chose to give into the anger.
I am currently out of the worst of my postpartum depression, with the help of time, medication, and therapy, but I am now living in a sphere of anxiety that is constant. I’m not so angry or sad anymore, but my guilt and shame are immense. I have trouble breathing, heart palpitations, tingling extremities, and worst of all, the pervasive, intrusive thoughts. The thoughts that I have done irreparable harm to my son. The thoughts that I am not doing any of this right. That I will fall on the stairs and hurt Eli. That if people really knew what I was like, the battles I’m facing, that there would be no one left for me. That I shouldn’t buy that ice cream because we haven’t started saving for Eli’s college tuition yet. That I have no right to have these feelings because there are so many people in the world with real problems. That I’ll be a terrible doula because I didn’t see what was right in front of me with myself, so no client will want to work with me. That my forgetting sunscreen on vacation means I ruined the whole trip. That anxiety is a sin and if I just cast all my cares on Christ, really cast them on Him, really had enough faith, I wouldn’t be here. That my family and Ryan’s family will think I’m a bad mother, and that they will be right. That Ryan is never going to be able to forgive me for the months he had to suffer silently and alone, with no one to talk to and a home that was anything but. That I won’t recover, that a bad day means I’ve chosen the darkness again. That all these thoughts don’t make sense and yet I cannot stop them from intruding into my reality. And above all, the thoughts that God has heard all of my screaming, all of my weeping, all of my wrath, seen all of my pain, and has turned away.
Eli is a happy baby who I love very much, thank God, and I am doing better. But better is not well. Better is not the picture of health. It is not peace, or the absence of guilt, or forgiveness. Being better does not erase the damage, the rawness, the deep wounds. This is not where I want to be, better: flailing about in the ocean trying to avoid the current and praying for someone to save me. But treading water, exhausting though it may be, is always better than drowning. And I pray many, many times a day the words of St. Julian of Norwich, that “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.”