Confused, exhausted, angry, frustrated, purged of every tear possible to cry I finally understood how someone with kids could do that. How someone especially with kids could do that. How a mother could do that. How I could do that.
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If we just talked about it more, it wouldn’t be such a lonely journey.
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The hum of the white noise machine emitted by the baby monitor hisses to me: deathhhhhhhhh.
My eyes flicked up to the mirror and caught, to my horror, a glimpse of my new hairline. “Oh my God!” I gasped as I frantically pawed at my hair, as if I could find those absent hairs hiding somewhere just out of sight. “How long has it been like this?!” I shrieked to my husband.
Not only has my body not “bounced back”, it has completely and totally morphed into a body I don’t recognize at all.
My goal here - to riff on the immortal words of Justin Timberlake - is to bring normal back. I am going to break it all down, using my postpartum body. Any pang of self-consciousness is not enough to keep me from helping to break down this illusion. Join me in normalizing normal as I highlight some of the common changes that we, as women and mothers, experience in our postpartum bodies.
Depression is not something that I can fix by listening to a nice song. Depression is not something that I can just decide not to feel anymore. It is not a choice. It is not a decision. It is not a mindset. It is a mental illness. I cannot will it away any more than a diabetic can will away their insulin insufficiency.
“The holidays are rife with waste as consumerism runs rampant. And it’s not just all the stuff. It’s the stuff our stuff is wrapped in. It’s the packaging and bubble wrap and boxes and peanuts and tissue paper and wrapping paper covered in glitter and the ribbon and the plastic wrap and the twenty air puff things Amazon felt necessary to pad that super breakable blanket I ordered.”
We can give each other so much more than a molded hunk of plastic or a souped-up circuit board. What we need, now more than ever, is the gift of connection, of hope.
It was like Aslan’s breath was bringing me - this stone cold Stepford Mom - back to life, like Dorothy seeing the world awash in color after being thrashed about in a monochromatic twister. All of those feelings I had known to be possible, to be true, rushed back: how my heart can swell with such joy and love at the littlest coo, the tiniest twitch of a smile, drinking in the sweet smell of my baby.
Postpartum depression is not a normal physiological state. But it is common; so, so, so common. One in seven women, and one in ten men, have postpartum depression.
I mulled over this seemingly pretentious idea that I, who am not a teacher or picture-perfect Instagram mom or a labor and delivery nurse, was worthy to write a blog about this. But this compulsion to do something nagged at me: to start a conversation, to get out my story in the hopes that it could help one mom, or dad, or grandparent, or sister, or friend, or heck: me.
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