So a little bit ago I had a baby. The having of this baby was mandatory; he couldn’t stay in there.
When you have just birthed a baby – when, by whatever means, you’ve gotten a child who was formerly in you out of you – you feel like you’ve really done something. And you have, an extraordinary something. It was a big task, and you’ve completed that task, and you really, really feel like you’re done. But here’s the thing: you are not done. From now on, you will never, ever be done.
So I gave birth to a human being. I held him close, astonished and enamored and relieved. I was almost done. The nurses took him, wiped him off, put antibiotics on his eyes. I gave birth to a placenta. I did not embrace the placenta, but I was even more relieved and even more done – labor complete. They would take my family and me to the recovery room, and we would go to bed, because it was bedtime, and I was done.
They took my family and me to the recovery room. The night nurse gave me a ten-minute lesson on how to pee with my broken parts and a five-minute lesson on how to keep a child alive until his eventual, inevitable acceptance into Harvard in 18ish years. Then we went to bed, because it was bedtime, and I was “done.”
Baby slept remarkably well that first night. We practiced nursing every 3-4 hours and tried to sleep the rest of the time. My brain woke me more than baby did.
In those couple of days in the hospital, we were overwhelmed and overtired, but overjoyed. The first day nurse scolded me for
Then we brought our bundle home, and the baby's life and fate and healing penis became the responsibility of solely my husband and me. And we'd known this was going to happen -- we had heard of babies before, had even read books about them, had even met some in real life. But this was not some anecdotal newborn; this was an actual newborn, who flopped and stretched and cried and pooped and needed and needed and needed.
The baby slept 18 hours a day and still consumed every minute of our time. He'd inherited my laziness -- he constantly needed us to feed him, clothe him, unclothe him, wash him, clothe him again, rock him, hold him, love him. And we still had to manage to feed, wash, clothe, and love ourselves.
I feel intense anxiety when I don't know what I'm doing, and I had no idea what I was doing. All day, every day, I had no idea what I was doing.
I felt I had made a terrible mistake, one I couldn't take back. I would never be my old self again. Neither would I ever be a mother.
I fell apart. I cried on and off for a fortnight, taking breaks to keep my beloved, terrifying newborn alive. I poured my fears into Google, which returned only cold, clinical -- if informative -- responses. I bellowed into the phone at other mothers, actual mothers, hoping for reassurance that I wasn't a monster or an idiot. And the general consensus seemed to be: "This is normal. You're not a monster-idiot -- we all are. At first."
So I didn't think I had postpartum depression. I had no bad feelings for or about my darling baby, just my circumstance. And I got through the early hard times by giving in, by learning, and by making room for the necessary and tremendous parenting and partnership of my husband.
As the books and mothers had told me, it got easier. Much easier. Over weeks and months things started falling into place -- breastfeeding, sleep, comfort, familiarity. There was always something to learn -- parenting is all curveballs and I was always picked last for gym-class baseball -- but with each lesson, the learning came more naturally. I wasn't lazy anymore. I wasn't not-a-mother anymore. I felt better. The baby and I were thick as thieves. We weren't done. We never would be. We were just starting.
It got harder, too. When baby forgot how to sleep on his own, he slept up against me. I didn't fully sleep for months. I had remained anxious and scattered and sometimes-sad. And then it was harder. We sleep trained at nine months. I don't really want to talk about it. Nothing bad happened. It was one of the worst weeks of my life.
It was then -- more than nine months after my life changed, that I realized I had postpartum depression. It was constant, but there were also troughs -- when I was especially sleep deprived, when I felt lost, when my hormones fluctuated.
Books hadn't prepared me to care for a baby, and brochures hadn't prepared me for postpartum depression. With a bulleted list on a slick trifold paper for a diagnostic tool, you'd swear I just had "baby blues": a milder, cuter, more alliterative condition than postpartum depression, the existence of which enables new moms everywhere to dismiss their own anguish as normal.
Five days into motherhood, at my son's first appointment at his pediatrician's office, a lactation consultant asked how I was. My eyes filled with tears. I'm terrified to be out of the house. And I'm terrified when I'm at home. And I feel tremendous guilt for feeling so terrified. But, since you ask, "I'm fine, thanks. It's just hard sometimes." She looked at me, with genuine compassion, and said, "That's to be expected. Just please tell me or your doctor if it gets too hard." She couldn't read my mind; I couldn't read my own mind.
My son is 18 months old today -- a giant -- and I still wouldn't say my depression has been managed. But I'm not done.
It helps that my baby, my family is the best thing in my life. It helps that I've gained confidence in the mother in me. It helps that I looked at myself, that I talked, that I listened. It helps that I have this
I still get sad for no reason. I lose focus from time to time. I mourn the parts of me that have gone dormant. However, the uncertainty is gone. The decision my husband and I made to build this life together -- our shared life and the distinct, amazing little human life -- was not only correct, but has been worth every rough moment. It's a start, anyway.
I'm super busy; I'm a mom. I'm also still myself -- so pretty lazy (still/again). It took me, per usual, between 6 and 12 months to write this blog entry.
And I'm not done.
