Reflections On My Postpartum Self

“Oh my god, I blinded her!” I shrieked. My hands shook as I held our four-month-old daughter Emma, trying to get a look at her face while she cried and cried. My husband, David, and I were hosting dinner for two dear friends, and Emma, who wasn’t exactly mobile but wasn’t exactly stationary anymore either, had moved in such a way that my engagement ring accidentally scratched her face. In my total panic, I thought I had scratched her eye and blinded her, and I completely lost it. I wanted to scream and scream and scream but stopped myself, barely, instead blurting out flustered worry after flustered worry while my husband and our friends tried to calm me down and get a closer look at Emma.

I could tell by the polite but shocked looks in my friends’ eyes that my reaction wasn’t a normal one, but I also couldn’t stop myself from continuing to flip out. In my panicked haze, I could still see how uncomfortable David looked, his brow furrowed, concern lacing the edges of his eyes, yet the more he tried to calm me down, the more self-conscious and flustered I became. Thankfully our friends are the type of compassionate people who let an embarrassing outburst like this go, much in the way we now let Emma’s irrational fury over not being able to watch Frozen 2 “this minute!” pass with little attention. Emma wasn’t in fact blind, and I hadn’t even scratched her eye but rather a tiny patch of her forehead above her eye. This moment was the turning point, the proverbial wake-up call I needed, to recognize something was wrong and that I needed help.

What I had been feeling for the past 16 weeks was not normal. David and I both often wondered if it was, and while it’s so hard to know as a new parent, (what really is normal right after you have a baby?), we had convinced each other that the rage fits were just my inner “Mama Bear” emerging, the extreme worry, (a ticker-tape of accidents befalling my baby), my maternal instincts in overdrive. We eventually recognized that the multi-dimensional mood-juice cocktail I had been riding ever since my daughter was born, even longer if we included the pregnancy itself, was not what many other women had experienced, at least not to the same degree.

I have always set high expectations for myself, and this whole motherhood adventure was no different. I joke about being an overachiever because I am one, and I turn to humor to cope. But the truth is that I approached becoming a mom the same way I approach any major milestone, work assignment or even seemingly innocuous board game: with a truly competitive fervor. Breastfeeding? Let’s produce all. the. milk. Sleep training? I read so many books  and then compared and contrasted the different recommendations until I developed an intense nap schedule that practically imprisoned me and my daughter in our wee apartment. Mommy and baby yoga? We tried that too… and then never went back again after Emma accidentally scratched her own cornea with her Velociraptor-like finger nail and screamed uncontrollably for the last 15 minutes of class while I apologized profusely. I fled the room while fighting back hot tears of embarrassment and then overzealously shushed the baby in the corridor as the murmur of mothers chanting “om” to their babies was drowned out by the sound of my own baby’s piercing wails. (I also promptly felt like a failure for not properly grooming my child’s fingernails to prevent said incident in the first place, followed by frantic Googling of whether she would get an infection from a fingernail scratch to the eye.)

I became more anxious, more constantly, than I ever thought possible. I encountered horrible and frighteningly graphic intrusive thoughts about devastating things happening to my baby, my husband or myself, or a combination of the three. I would throw myself into such a spiral of unfathomably deep self-loathing every time I didn’t always respond to my child with undying empathy, patience and outpourings of profuse love. I frequently found myself not liking my child - a thought that completely horrified me - and then I even more frequently disliked myself, which also horrified me and felt like the fitting punishment I deserved for being such a “bad mom.” I compared myself to other moms who seemed to have it all together and felt like a broken failure on the daily, sometimes even on the hour. I became fixated on my baby’s sleep schedule in a way that alarmed my husband, but he also became a little bit afraid of me, so he backed off and watched with deep concern as I did my best to channel Kurtz in Heart of Darkness. I came to know Shame and Guilt so intimately, it was like a never-ending tragic episode of Inside the Actors Studio, except it was in my mind, which made it “scary sad” rather than “interesting sad.” The achiever in me continued to set milestone after milestone, which only resulted in an impossibly tall tower of expectation I couldn’t possibly climb.

But the remarkable thing was that very few people realized anything was wrong because, on the outside, I was doing great. David and I went wine tasting a week after Emma was born. I was thriving at work when I went back after my leave. I continued to cook beautiful dinners most nights. I generally did my hair and wore “I’ve been outside of my house” clothes. David and I maintained a busy social schedule, hosting regularly, and we even traveled quite a bit, including a wonderful trip to France when Emma was three months old. Sleep training happened early and, miracle of all miracles, it worked. It wasn’t until much later that I recognized PPD is still largely portrayed as a one-dimensional experience - one flavor of sadness that casts women into a paralyzing shadow of shame - when the true story is that it’s much more nuanced, and often more high functioning, than the classic portrait of total despondence so often painted. Which is why it took so long to register that something was amiss.

Things got worse before they got better, but they did get better.  Two months after the “ring incident,” my doctor eventually diagnosed me with postpartum depression and anxiety, and while there was a palpable sense of relief that came after that, at having a label for what was happening and a “course of action,” the shame that swiftly followed endured for a long, long time. I still struggle with it every day, but thankfully I’m feeling more comfortable with the discomfort of it all, thanks to a lot of love and support from friends, family, a really solid therapist and the right dose of medication.

And over the years, I have begun to recognize that my story and my experiences are neither remarkable nor wildly unique because there are other moms out there feeling similar things. Of course there are! It sounds obvious when I write it now, but in the thick of it, in the shadows of those dark places my mind would go, and still sometimes visits, it was hard to imagine anyone else could be living this way too. I just didn’t know it because I never talked about it before. I have come to both understand and appreciate that the more I open up about what I went through, the more I’ll meet other women who have also had to navigate these same treacherous waters. And we’ll be able to look at one another and recognize ourselves.

If you or someone you know is struggling with postpartum mental health issues, Postpartum Support International offers local coordinators to help. You can also call their helpline at 1-800-944-4773.