All tagged postpartum
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.
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.
![Taking a [Yellow] Page From History: Amanda's Story](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5bd92131e2ccd13cc86e230f/1557004290327-CAUWX7UGJQYOI9IF9O1R/amanda%2B2.jpg)
