“That isn’t going to be me.” I knew all the signs. I’d read the research. I knew the possibilities. The words of my grad school professor kept bouncing around in my head. “The biggest predictor of Postpartum Depression is the number of hands that touch the baby in the first year of life. The more hands the better.” I quietly watched that number creep up in the first few weeks and months as friends and family came to visit the dark haired little potato that I’d grown and then pushed out of my body.
She was so small. When she curled up on my chest with her fluffy hair touching my chin, her tiny body didn’t reach the stretch marks on my pudding-soft belly. I thought it was just baby blues. I’d had a traumatic birth experience/hospital stay and my body was a wreck. She wasn’t transferring enough milk when we nursed so I was attached to a pump every three hours around the clock, and I wasn’t sleeping. “This is normal,” I told myself. “I’m still recovering.” But when the intense baby blues of the first couple weeks seemed to fade, they were replaced with deeper, more persistent feelings of despair. “I’ve made a huge mistake.” “I’ve ruined my life.” “Maybe I was never supposed to be a mother.” “She would be better off with someone else.” “She probably likes other people better anyway.” “I wonder how far away I could get before Jonathan tracked me down.” “I could empty the bank accounts and drive far, far away.” “Everyone would be better off if I just didn’t wake up tomorrow.” “I hope I don’t wake up.”
I feel a little sick as I write this. It’s one thing to have dark thoughts. It’s an entirely different thing to admit it and share those thoughts with other people. I never thought about hurting my baby, and I never had a plan to actually hurt myself. It was more like brief thoughts that would pop into my head while I was driving. “If I ran off the interstate into those woods going this speed, I probably wouldn’t even feel anything.” And let me just say before someone starts making calls, I’m fine now. This story has a happy “ending.”
All I ever wanted was to be a mom. My life plan consisted of 1. Find a great man, 2. Marry that man, 3. Have all the babies, 4. Be an awesome stay at home mom. I had accomplished 1 and 2, so naturally it was time to get started on number 3. The sleepy nugget in my arms was so wanted. I felt such a strong connection to her while she was in my womb. I would lovingly rub my belly and talk to her as I felt her stretch her little legs. I read Harry Potter to her (and consequently, to my husband) at night before we went to bed. I couldn’t wait to see what color hair she would have and who she would look like.
But the little baby in my arms felt like someone else’s. I fed her, bathed her, rocked her, cuddled her, read to her, sang to her (best I could manage through tears and my already horrible singing voice), and just stared at her. And I felt nothing. Just emptiness. I told myself over and over again that I loved her. I reminded myself that she was the same little baby I felt in my belly for all those months. But as much as I tried to force my heart to feel it, there was still a disconnect.
My husband and I decided to see a counselor. Something was wrong and I knew it. But despite the counseling sessions and moving to a new house with tons of natural light that I was totally in love with, I was still having dark thoughts and was generally just a mopey, numb mess. My husband and our counselor finally succeeded in convincing me to see my OB. Just in time too, because unbeknownst to me, my best friend had also realized something was wrong, even over text message from several hours away, and was communicating with my husband. They were planning to contact my parents and conduct some sort of intervention had I not relented. I knew what the doctor would say. She’d want me to take antidepressants. And I did NOT want to take antidepressants.
I have a weird distrust of pharmaceuticals. Doctors too, actually, but somewhat less so. I know that medicine is an incredible discovery that has fundamentally transformed our society and extended the length and quality of our lives. But I still don’t want to have to take it. Vitamins? Sure. Probiotics? Sign me up. But medicine? Especially ones for mental health? Hard pass. I could do this myself. I could fix myself. With time and patience and prayer, I would push through.
But I couldn’t. I cried in the exam room while the doctor explained to me that this was just a temporary thing – 6 months. “If you had a problem with your blood pressure, you’d take blood pressure medicine, right?” she said. “This is the same thing.” I waited a week to pick up the prescription for Zoloft and several more days before I actually took it. The night I decided that I just needed to take the stupid pill, my slightly exasperated but ever patient husband sat next to me on the couch while I cried so hard my whole body ached and my old t-shirt was soaked through with snot and tears.
But after a few weeks of taking a tiny pill every night before bed, something weird began to happen. Things didn’t seem quite as hopeless. I wasn’t crying as frequently. Then I got some great advice from a friend I met in grad school, Dr. Juliana Radomski. I knew she had exclusively pumped, so I Facebook messaged her with a few questions about weaning. The conversation turned to my being on an antidepressant for postpartum depression, and she graciously offered to help me since she’s a Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist (check out her website here). She agreed with my OB that I needed something to help get me out of the hole that I was in and that Zoloft could be my ladder, but she also gave me three things to do to help:
1. Try to get 10 to 15 minutes of sunlight every day.
2. Try to get 6 hours of sleep, preferably consecutively (LOL. This one was the hardest and didn’t happen until much later).
3. Try to do 10 minutes of hard exercise every day.
She also told me to write myself permission slips. I gave myself permission to cry, permission to not love everything about being a mom, and permission to need a break from my baby.
I’d been taking regular walks with my daughter in a stroller in our old neighborhood, but had slacked off since moving. But following Juliana’s advice, I committed to doing it more frequently for the sunlight. I downloaded an exercise app and started doing just small amounts at a time in my living room while my daughter lay on a blanket nearby looking at me somewhat quizzically. I didn’t feel like it, but I finally forced myself to go back to the gym and started doing group fitness classes again. With a freezer full of enough breastmilk to last a couple months, I finally quit pumping. (Side note: that freezer would die and take over 200 ounces of breastmilk with it. That was a BAD day. If I hadn’t already been taking Zoloft at that point, I would probably still be crying on the garage floor today.) Once my days stopped revolving entirely around being attached to the pump at specific times, my world felt a little bigger and a little brighter. I enjoyed playing with my daughter more. And slowly, I started to feel a little bit more like myself. I saw a post on our local Facebook mom group from another woman with a son about my daughter’s age looking for mom friends. I commented on her post. We met at the Sportsplex and walked the outdoor track with our babies in strollers. Soon other moms joined us and we established a regular playgroup. With other moms to talk to, I felt less isolated. I wasn’t out of the woods yet, but things felt like they were looking up.
Five and a half months after I started Zoloft, I called my OB’s office. I wanted to know how to safely get off it. And by my daughter’s first birthday, I was medicine free and feeling great. I finally felt all those feelings of love that people told me I would feel toward her. She really was amazing. And so cute! And look at her little toes and tiny leg rolls!
I know now that I should have gotten help sooner. It was pretty obvious to anyone who knew me that I wasn’t okay. And because of my stubbornness and embarrassment, I feel like I missed out on a lot of sweet time with my baby girl. When I look back at pictures from those first few months, I can see the pain in my eyes. I can also see how incredibly sweet and cuddly my daughter was, but in the moment, my thoughts were in such a dark place that I couldn’t enjoy what was right in front of me.
We want another baby. Preferably sooner rather than later. I’m terrified that I will sink back into that dark place. But I have to believe that the next time, I’ll recognize the darkness and take steps to escape it much more quickly.
