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0 By Ashley Michaud
I recently read an article about a new mom who lost her battle with postpartum depression. I thought about how sad it was, shared it on social media, and moved on with my day.
But that is part of the problem, isn’t it? We read heartbreaking stories like this. We react to them on social media, and feel like we have somehow participated in the conversation and have moved toward breaking the stigma. Don’t get me wrong, that is a great first step, but we need to go further. We need to get real and vulnerable.
Postpartum anxiety
For me, my struggles have been more with postpartum anxiety than depression. Perhaps because I have struggled with and learned to manage depression throughout my teenage and adult life, I was watching for, and even expecting, depression. I knew to watch for issues with bonding with my baby. But I wasn’t really ready for the drastic change to my life that having a baby really is. Change, no matter how good, is hard!
Little A came into my world and rocked it from the bottom up. His delivery was complicated and ended in a failed forceps delivery and an emergency c-section. I didn’t get to hold him until about 8 hours later. From that first moment I held him and he found his way to nurse I was amazed by the love and protectiveness I felt for him, as well as by the amazingly capable being that he is.
Responsibility
The first couple of nights were spent in the hospital, and the security of the call button let me sleep a bit. Once we got home, things got real. I don’t think that I have ever been so scared in my entire life! The huge responsibility that I faced finally settled on me. The isolation and loneliness of that responsibility started to press in all around me. Not because there was no one to help me but because, really, in the end, it is my responsibility. This new life relied on my body to sustain him for 38 weeks and then continued to get all nourishment from me.
Stop to think about that for a second; that is utterly amazing and completely terrifying!
We started to settle into a routine after the first three months (or the fourth trimester as I have heard it quite accurately referred to). That gave me time to start thinking and worrying and obsessing. I started thinking about how I wanted to parent little A, what environment I wanted to create for him. I found amazing resources and ideas that aligned so well to my fundamental belief that babies and children are amazingly capable beings worthy of the same dignity and respect as adults.
Worrying!
I also realized that as a world we try but regularly fall short of this. And I started to worry about how to mold this sort of environment for little A. I also started to worry about how to exist within a world that often dismisses emotions, and prioritizes physical/education development over emotional development. And then I started to worry about how the world, family, and friend would respond to my beliefs and how I would be judged.
I quickly realized that others regularly interpret your decisions, especially around parenting, as judgements on their own decisions. As a human race we have a tendency to make everything about us. I was amazed by how much I trusted little A and myself and how little I began to trust the rest of the world.
Opinions and options
In today’s world of social media and access to so much information there is an added layer to navigate. There are unending opinions and options. There are expectations (often self-imposed or even imagined) of how much or how little to share. Everyone wants to see pictures of your little ones, but maybe you are posting too much, are people muting me on their feeds…?
You also see all the other moms, how quickly they have ‘bounced back’. (Don’t get me started on that, I don’t actually think that we are supposed to ‘bounce back’.) How happy their child is, what milestone their child has hit, how clean their house is, how fancy their nursery is, etc, etc, etc.
What we so often don’t see, and purposefully hide from each other, is actually what we all need to see. The screaming baby that cannot be consoled, the dirty hair that has not been brushed in a week, the pile of laundry and stack of dishes, the tears rolling down your face during the unending cluster-feeding. We need to see the struggles to reconcile your beautiful new life with your wonderful old life and how sometimes they just don’t fit together any more.
Exhaustion and anxiety
We need to see the moments when you think, I miss my old self. We need to see the fear and the self-doubt. And we need to admit when we are having a hard day, when we are reaching our breaking point. These are part of life, they are also moments (sometimes days) that pass.
I had this idea that I would get a bunch of other projects accomplished during my maternity leave. Instead, my already over-active brain went into over-drive! There were so many ‘unoccupied’ hours of nursing and holding a sleeping child when my brain took me down every rabbit hole imaginable.
The constant exhaustion certainly did not help things either. My postpartum anxiety just grew and grew. I have always been uncomfortable in crowds of people but it started to become terrifying. I would get home from trips to the grocery store and would be so angry for seemingly no reason. I did not realize that anxiety could manifest as anger.
What if?
Everyone tells you that if there is anything they can do to help, just ask. The problem is, or at least it was for me, that I often didn’t know that I was overwhelmed or that I needed help until I hit a breaking point. My fear of rejection grew disproportionally to the point that asking for help was just as terrifying as whatever the problem was.
What if they won’t help me? What if they don’t understand what I need? What if I cannot express what I need? What if they think it is silly? What if they get mad at me? What if they think that what I need is me criticizing or judging them? What if they think that I am weak or broken? What if they think that I am a terrible mother? What if they think I am too broken to be a mother? These thoughts spiralled and spiralled.
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Terrifying and transformative
For me, the postpartum emotions and changes continue to be with me every day. I had the mistaken idea that I needed to watch out for ‘baby blues’ and bonding issues, but that if they did come about they would just be part of the ‘having a newborn’ phase. My experience has been so different. For me motherhood has been amazing! I have found a strength of character that I did not know I had. I have developed a much deeper understanding of myself and a profound insight into life that shapes my every day. I have also found this change hard to reconcile with my old life.
I am not the same person that I was before little A came along. My expectations of myself and the world have changed. All of these internal changes are not always reflected in your environment. You may feel yourself change, but the world does not always change with you. That is where so much of my postpartum anxiety lives: in the shadows between who I was and who I am, what I perceive the world expects of me and what I have to give. For me, motherhood is utterly terrifying and transformative.
Here is the thing – not every day is riddled with anxiety. In fact there are more moments that are free of it than not. There are more moments of joy and awe than of fear. As humans, we are so pain adverse that we put a disproportionate emphasis on the experiences we want to avoid. They can so easily consume us. We can get stuck living in fear of the next time we will be afraid.
‘Just emotions and thoughts’
One of the most transformative parts of my postpartum experience has been to try to recognize this. To label my emotions and thoughts as just those: emotions and thoughts. I am learning to step away from them and to observe them for what they are rather than getting pulled in. By adopting a respectful parenting style in which I try to hold space for little A as he experiences and reacts to the world, I am learning to do the same for myself.
Rather than taking his behaviour personally or seeing it as something that must be immediately corrected or fixed, I am learning to see that he is communicating with me. His emotions are his, and I need to allow them, in whatever their form. They are not meant to make me uncomfortable; in fact they are not about me at all. The perspective that this slight distance has given me has been absolutely remarkable!
You are not alone
You are not alone! We all experience this change in our lives differently. There is no shame in talking about it. You do not have to hide your postpartum anxiety, fear, depression, etc. behind a smile. We will all experience it and process it in our own way. Just please know that you are not alone. I want to tell you that whatever you are going through is normal, but I won’t, because I think that is part of the problem. We hold this idea of ‘normal’ as a holy grail. I am not convinced that there is such a thing as ‘normal’. If you are experiencing any sort of postpartum struggles, that is your reality. If you are not, that is your reality.
We each have to live our own reality. Sometimes our reality is amazing, sometimes mundane, and sometimes downright terrible. But I believe that it becomes just a little bit more manageable if we see it and live it as our own rather than comparing it to someone else’s. We are all in this together.
Know that what you are doing as a mother (or father) is amazing and transformative! It truly is the hardest, most rewarding work you will ever do. Let’s check in with each other from time to time, hold space for each other, and love each other as fiercely as we do our little ones!
UNITED STATES
UNITED KINGDOM
