Postpartum Depression

"Postpartum Depression"

Dark pools between street lights.

Inky blackness seeps, clings.

Tar.

A dark sea.

I sink, curled, an embryo.

Blind, numb, panicked,

there are no stars.

If I swim in the wrong direction,

I'll drown.

I am rubble, strafed.

Small shards fall, snowy gray, ash.

Breathe.

I taste dead fire. My lungs are heavy.

Breathe.

I am shaking under the weight

of this new world.

This was very personal, emotionally-charged, and difficult for me to write. I'm terrified of posting this on my blog, where anyone can read it, because it is so close to my heart. In some ways it's really raw and painful, and more than a bit jumbled, but I'm writing this post because I feel I need to. It's been hanging over my head for months. I know that there are a vast number of discussions and posts on the subject of depression (especially lately – RIP Robin Williams), but I'm not talking about depression in general. I'm talking about my thoughts and feelings about my own experience and my personal depression.

Depression is a subject that is still, and probably always will be, generally misunderstood and difficult to acknowledge. Physical laws and their consequences are usually easy to recognize. It's the simple law of cause and effect. If you cut yourself with a knife, you're going to bleed. If you break a bone, it is going to need to be reset, cast, and given time to heal. If you bump into something hard enough, you'll bruise. You get the idea.

Diseases of the mind are harder to recognize and diagnose not only because we can't necessarily see the causes and effects, but because the same "disease" affects people in different ways, doesn't always present the same, and it is not something everyone has or will experience. 

If you had never been burned, how could you possibly know what it feels like? A friend could try to explain to you that while it hurts like heck, it doesn't act or feel or heal like a cut or any other kind of bodily injury. Maybe the closest description would be "it feels kind of like a slap, only a thousand times worse. And the sting takes days, not minutes, to fade." It's the same with depression. I think many, if not all, people experience sadness associated with grief, failure, guilt, or loss. These people have an abstract understanding that true depression feels like a deep sadness, but it's more than that.

I knew I might be a candidate for postpartum depression because I had been depressed before. I even warned Bran to be on the lookout for signs, because sometimes depression can be subtle. It turns out there was no need, because my postpartum depression was anything but subtle. It swallowed me up in a wave of suffocating darkness, and it was everything I could do just to make it through each second of the day.

In addition to depression, I also suffered from anxiety. I had frequent panic attacks coupled with bouts of hyperventilation. The timing seemed a bit unpredictable at first, but we soon figured out what my triggers were. I had a panic attack almost every morning when Brandon left for school. They occurred when I thought about being alone or about something bad happening to my baby. Sometimes thinking about my childbirth experience could set me off (looking back on it now, I think I had some post traumatic stress syndrome as well). Since Brandon was so busy with school and gone most of the time, we agreed, with our doctors, that it would be good for me to travel with Oliver to Utah to have the support of my family.

I woke up one morning at my parents' house and discovered that one of my little brothers had thrown up in the middle of the night. I holed myself up in my little room with Oliver and tried not to think about him being exposed to sickness. I tried to tell myself that it would be OK, but my mind kept spiralling into everything that could go wrong. A little voice kept telling me: it's your fault. If you weren't so messed up, if you weren't having these problems, you and Oliver would still be in Portland, not Utah. You wouldn't be exposing your baby to these germs. And then I couldn't get enough air. I tried to breathe faster to get more air into my lungs, and my breathing started becoming erratic and quick, and I then was hyperventilating.

I called Brandon in Portland and he tried to calm me down over the phone, telling me to go and get my parents, but my dad was leaving for work and my mom was sleeping with Ollie. I was supposed to be sleeping right then, but I couldn't calm down and couldn't get enough air. Brandon ended up calling my dad after he got off the phone with me, and he came down and sat with me, telling me it was going to be ok. He had me get in bed with my mom and she told me it was all going to be fine. In my head, I knew that it probably was, and that I was being completely irrational, but it still took awhile to calm myself down.

The thought of getting something to eat, even as simple as a bowl of cereal, was overwhelming. There were too many steps and it took too much time. I hated that I had to eat. I think I might have stopped eating altogether if there hadn't been family there making sure I was eating. Make-up? Didn't even cross my mind. Hair? Forget it. Clothes? Ha.  I looked (and felt) like something dragged out from under the mud-sludge of the river. I just didn't have the time or energy to care. I envied the mothers who showed up with their hair curled and their clothes perfect and smiles on their beaming faces two weeks after they had had their baby. I hated how they made motherhood look so easy and happy.

I would get all panicky when Oliver fell asleep because I knew I needed to be sleeping. Even when there weren't other things I needed and wanted to do (like eat), I couldn't sleep. I couldn't shut down my mind. The sun helped a little with both my depression and anxiety. My worst time of day was generally dusk.

Postpartum depression was different from any other depression I had ever experienced before. I wanted to stop feeling, stop thinking, stop breathing. I wanted to slip into sleep and never wake again because I could not imagine going through one more second of the soul-crushing pain and agony I felt. My entire world had gone black and I had never felt so alone, even though I was surrounded by family and friends.

I found this, from the first month or so of Oliver's life, scribbled on a random envelope:

I want to run away.

I want all this to end.

I am surrounded by darkness.

I am terrified of being alone.

I don't feel like I am going to come out of this.

I am a mom.

And I feel empty.

At first, I felt really disconnected from Oliver. I didn't feel any animosity or anger towards him, but I couldn't exactly say I felt love towards him either. It's more how you might feel towards a cute mewling potato –confusion, apprehension, and what on earth am I supposed to do with this thing?

I no longer found pleasure in things I had previously enjoyed; things as simple as reading a book or watching a movie no longer offered any diversion or entertainment. Everything I had known or liked, not only about my surroundings but about myself, had been wiped out. It was as if I had to relearn things that had been natural and instinctual before, like someone injured in an accident has to relearn the fundamentals of walking or moving or speaking. I had to rediscover who I was on top of trying to be a mother to an infant. An infant who was mentally, physically and emotionally draining any reserves I had. 

Smiling felt completely foreign, and sometimes, no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't force one onto my face. I had a lack of desire to live. I didn't want to go to any social functions or even see any of my friends. The thought of talking about how I was doing (or even worse, making small talk), was painful. I hated being a mom.

Towards the end of my depression, I was easily irritated, especially with my husband. The smallest, silliest things would set me off on a raging tirade which usually ended in tears (mine). I sometimes felt like I was acting out like a wild three-year-old child, but I was unable to stop myself. 

Depression was an awful, incredible pain that made it hard to think and focus. I just wanted to make it go away, but there was no recourse, no pain medication to dull the ache in my chest that made it painful to exist and hard to concentrate and made me want to burst into tears, even when I couldn't cry anymore. I would have given anything to turn that emotional and mental pain into physical pain so that I would at least know what to do about it, and how to make it stop.

With the help of my aunt, I came up with mantras that I would mentally repeat to myself over and over.

It will end.

I will be ok.

Oliver will be ok.

Brandon will be ok.

This will end.

And I would say them to myself over and over.

I am enough.

I am enough.

I am enough.

I cried, I hurt, I wished for numbness and sleep. I just wanted it to end, but I didn't think it ever would. I could only think about making it through the next second, the next minute, because a day was a thousand years.

We had a calendar magnet on the fridge – just one of those little ones you get for free off a phone book or somewhere. About two weeks after Oliver was born, I started marking a little black X with a sharpie over each day I had gotten through since his birth. It felt darkly satisfying to mark that first rash of black X's.  It was proof that I was actually moving forward, that I wasn't suspended, and that all those seconds I pushed myself through were adding up to something.

"Congratulations"

My baby's tiny unborn fingers

clung to the tangled red strings
leading to my heart.

I screamed as it
tore from within me,

the arteries still clenched in his little fist 

when he was born.

I stumbled about for days,

a headless hen,

not knowing I was dead.

I say congratulations

to the happy, pregnant face,

but I'm lying through my teeth.

I want to scream and tell them

about the true meaning of tiredness

of the death of the woman in front of me

consumed by a creature called mother.
But I lie instead.

She wouldn't understand. 

She thinks she does,

as I did, 

until it happened.

I remember crying in the shower, wishing and wishing, but trying so hard not to wish, that I had never decided to have a baby. I regretted inviting this small human being into the world and into my life, and allowing my body, my mind, my life, to become so irrevocably altered. I felt isolated and stuck, and I no longer recognized myself. I remember wondering if I hadn't just made the biggest mistake of my life. It felt like I was giving up everything I had or was for this baby. I was not ready – I never could have been ready. What had I done? What had I done?

Although my regrets turned out to be only temporary, I felt horrible for having them. I had a constant barrage of guilt and debilitating self-loathing. The same mental track ran over and over in my head: Everyone says that these are the best moments, the happiest. I shouldn't be this sad, I shouldn’t be this anxious, I should be enjoying my baby. I shouldn't wish that I had never gotten pregnant. I felt selfish, ungrateful, and like a complete failure.

With time and a lot of help, I was able to overcome these negative feelings. I saw a couple therapists, and they gave me some coping strategies. I took Zoloft in an attempt to help balance out whatever hormones had gone out of whack in my brain. My husband did everything he could to help. My family was always there for me, my parents and Aunt Sarah especially. I was enveloped by love and support and light to combat the dark, loneliness and despair within me. I learned you can't just remove the bad and leave an empty space – you have to replace it with the good.

I did survive the darkness, and I did survive my evolution into motherhood. I came out of my depression, and I feel pretty much myself again. Activities and things that seemed hopeless and unacheivable before, like wanting to read or enjoying intimacy with my husband, are now possible again. I am now completely in love and bonded with my precious son, and I am enjoying being a mother.

But I could not have done it alone. It took my family and friends and doctors and little pills and therapists. I was so blessed to have people in my life who saw my suffering, acknowledged it for what it was, didn’t blame me, and helped me through.

Though I wish I had never had to go through postpartum depression, I've developed relationships and gained new insights I wouldn't have otherwise. I've grown and changed, and I think I'm stronger. Still, I try not to think about what else life may have in store for me. I can imagine some experiences that would be worse than postpartum depression, but there aren't many and they are terrifying. 

"Woman Becomes Mother"

A red giant

contented, wise. 

Then, 
a soundless burst,

shattering into glittering shards,

flung into nothingness.

Collapsing fragments,

spinning tighter, pulling.

A star remade,
spiralling,

white-hot and burning,

burning brighter 
than I knew possible. 

P.S. I would love to hear your comments and experiences, but please refrain from posting "pitying" comments. That's not why I wrote this post. All poems were written by me. Thank you so much for reading!