PostPartum Life (part 2)
Disclaimer: I am not a medical professional, psychologist, or nurse. Please speak to your doctor or other resources if you have concerns about your own mental or physical health.
Trigger warning: topics of trauma, ptsd, ppd, shame, guilt
Hi again, and welcome to back to the #MomLife series. Today I will be writing about probably THE most vulnerable side of my pregnancy journey–my mental health. For Postpartum Life Part1, the physical aspects, click here. This blog started as a safe place for me to both process and share my mental health struggles. If you’re new here, you are welcome to check out my first few posts where I talk about my experience getting my diagnoses, accepting it, and learning to cope with a wide arrange of symptoms, behaviours and medications. If you have been following more recently, then you’re aware that I gave birth to my very first baby this past May and that I, like most new parents, are both happy and terrified about this new chapter! To make sure we are all on the same page before I dive in, I’d like to remind you that my official diagnosis includes: severe clinical depression, generalized anxiety, and borderline personality traits. My non-officially diagnoses include PTSD, vicarious trauma, and ED/OSFED and BDD behaviours. These were ALL present before I even was trying to get pregnant, so there ya have it!!!
In the beginning, she got pregnant..
So yes, I found out I was pregnant in September of 2019, and I was excited and nervous and scared and full of questions. I am a planner, I need schedules and I crave control, so this was going to be interesting for sure because pregnancy, delivery, and child-rearing is SUPER unpredictable and so I knew I would have to embrace chaos (like water would embrace oil pretty much…). Since I knew already that my mental health would be a challenge, I was very proactive in taking care of myself, asking questions, and taking as good health of my body as I could in order to reduce the amount of stuff that could cause me trouble. I notified my family doctor (GP), my psychiatrist, and my counselor about the pregnancy, and I gave my OBGYN a rundown of aaaall my lovely mental issues so that EVERYONE was on the same page. From day 1 basically I was reading about postpartum depression, and I made sure there was no secrecy about my current mental health state and what concerns I had moving forward. I have been on antidepressants for almost 4 years now, and I know what works for me, and I am pretty aware of what my triggers are, what are my coping mechanisms, and what are the red flags.
My first order of business was to figure out if I would be allowed to continue to take my medication, because I was at a very good point in my life where my mental health illnesses were stable and I could function basically normally, whatever that is lol, but now I was about to get hit by the hormone locomotive. I was basically bracing for impact. My doctor said that, ideally, I wouldve tried to lower my dosage gradually because they do want to try to keep exposure of the baby (especially first trimester) to antidepresants as low as possible. Well because we got pregnant right away (yes I know super lucky!) I did not have much time to reduce my dose so it was pretty agressive. We worked down from 30mg to about 10mg in a couple of weeks, but by the time I reached the 10mg I was NOT ok. The darkness returned, I was having scary thoughts again and I was having a very hard time regulating my emotions and thoughts. At the same time, I started having severe nausea (which ended up staying until week 39), so not a good place for me. My doctor, counselors, and psychiatrists all recommended I increased my dose again to 20mg for my own wellbeing. This is when the guilt tripping seed was planted. From here on out, I would continuously feel angry at myself, guilty, frustrated with the reality that I needed to take medication. I didn’t know it yet, but there is this thing called ‘mom guilt’ that is absolutely merciless and relentless. More on that later..
At 4 weeks pregnant, I was starting to feel my mind “falling off its track”, meaning that the stability I had worked soooo hard to maintain for the past few years was now shattering. Please keep in mind, however, that when I say I wasn’t doing well that DOES NOT mean I was crying all over the place, raging, trying to kill myself, nothing like that at all. Unbeknownst to many, we mentally ill folk can function quite “normally” without people noticing, we’re veeryy good at hiding our problems and just putting on a brave face. It was easier to conceal my emotional distress than my physical symptoms. Around week 6 the insane nausea began, and let’s just say I had to keep a puke bucket in my office. I ended up going on medical leave due to my physical illness so that was fun (nooooooot). As I progressed on my pregnancy I mostly got worse physically. The mental aspect was very tough too, but it wasn’t really anything new. It was just a lot harder to manage when half the time my head was in the toiler or a trashcan. When your physically ill for SO long, your mental health suffers too. I couldn’t really eat or exercise or anything. Then we got hit by COVID so that was fun. I’ll write a separate post just about pregnancy and birth during COVID cus that shit is crazy too!
So now let’s move on to the fun part: I gave birth! Well, the doctors cut my baby out of me but you get the idea. I was so scared of possibly having to deal with postpartum depression (PPD). I prepared myself for the high probability that I would indeed experience it, because my depression never really paused or anything when I got pregnant so why should it stop after birth, right? I wasn’t prepared for HOW it would manifest, but I guess that was silly of me. I knew already that depression, and mental illness in general, is a unique experience for everyone, so why wouldn’t PPD be the same way? A couple of weeks before I went into labour, I started taking the PPD screening test, which I wrote about earlier in my journey. This was for my own knowledge so that I could have an idea of where my mental state was at BEFORE birth, cus then I could have a sort of ‘base line’ for what was common for me and what wasn’t. I’m happy to say that in terms of the screening, my results have been pretty much consistent with before birth. Meaning, I was equally upset/vulnerable/triggered before having my baby and after. I had some really bad weeks beforehand, and had some bad ones after the birth of my son. That doesn’t mean that nothing changed, or that this experience will be the same for others, it’s just my own. So what did PPD look like for me???
Alright, so first things first. Remember I told you about my guilt about being on antidepressants? Well that came back with a force of vengeance I never experienced in my life. Turns out that one of the side effects of staying on antidepressants through delivery is withdrawal, not me, but the baby can actually experience withdrawal. This is because some of the antidepressant does get to your baby, and though there was nothing wrong with my baby, once he left my body then his own system is like “uhhh wtf something is missing here”. The actual amount transmitted is not very high, but again, this was something that had to be weighed against the risk of me NOT being on my antidepressant (which for me could result in death). So, yeah, as much as I wish I could have been off them, it could literally mean I might’ve not survived, and in my specific case, trust me, I would NOT had survived without them. What does withdrawal in babies look like, then? The doctors and nurses said it could manifest as tremors in the baby, and that it should go away in 2-3 days. My little baby did have some tremors those first few days, at first I didn’t know what it was but when we asked the nurses and they spoke to us about the withdrawal, my heart sunk. I can’t even describe in words the pain and heartbreak I felt. It was as if someone had ripped my heart out of my chest and then dosed me in gasoline and set me ablaze and then stapled me to a wall of nails. I couldn’t stop crying. I hated myself, HATED. I was so mad at myself for having taken the antidepressants, for having depression, for being broken, for being a bad mom. Despite the nurses, doctors, and even my husband all reassuring me that the baby was perfectly fine, that the tremors weren’t painful or that he would be perfectly ok, I couldn’t stop hating myself. They reassured me that I did the right thing by staying on the medications and that I had to take care of myself in order to take care of him. I understood it all logically, but I still could not accept it. I just saw myself as a broken, shitty mom. This mindset lasted a while, even after my baby stopped having his tremors. Later on, the doctors told us that the tremors they observed were likely just normal baby shakes, not even antidepressant related, but it didn’t matter. The mom guilt had set on, and it made itself at home.
Being at the hospital was very tiring, too. We couldn’t have any visitors thanks to the pandemic, so it was just the two of us. In a way it was nice cus we were SO tired. But I also really missed my family. My mom was supposed to fly up from Mexico to stay with us for a few months and help us with baby. When the pandemic hit and the Canada borders shutdown, I knew it would be a very difficult journey for me. I cried for days after the announcement came, I knew it would be a massive struggle for me. And it was, it still is. But life goes on and we had to just push through and make do with the cards we were dealt. We finally were allowed to go home and I was SO excited to feel my own bed again. Funnily enough, I didn’t get much sleep once I got home hahaha. Make way for extreme exhaustion.
As a new parent, there is nothing that can really prepare you for that. I had experienced exhaustion before, but this is a whole new realm of torture. That first month we were lucky to get 3-4 hours of sleep in a day, day in and day out. Breastfeeding was so painful at the beginning, even after the nurses observed me and told me my latch was “perfect”, that I was “a natural”, that my technique was great and my baby was a great eater. I STILL had pain, I would cry while breastfeeding. My baby is also very fussy, so he would literally fight me, kick me, and pull away so it made it very difficult for me to feed him. About 5 days into it, I decided to just start pumping so we could use bottles cus I just couldn’t do the breastfeeding anymore. This is when mom guilt chimed in again: “Look at you failing again, you can’t even feed your baby without breaking down, way to go a**hole”. I felt like shit, again, first the meds now this. I still breastfed my baby but also pumped often so he could have bottles. The doctor said after his first visit that he wasn’t putting on enough weight, so he recommended that we used the bottles 2/3 of the time and the breast 1/3. This method worked and baby started putting on weight again,but still, the voice in my head kept saying “way to fuc*ing go, you can’t feed your baby right and now he is losing weight. You’re a terrible mother”.
With the exhaustion comes fighting with your partner, or at least it did for me. The first month of baby’s life my husband had to return to work, so I was alone with baby and two dogs from roughly 8am to 4pm 5 days a week, plus I would do the nightshift because my hubby had to work the next morning, right? So from Sunday to Thursay morning I was running on barely any sleep. Don’t get me wrong, my hubby helped me as much as he could once he was home, but when you’re recovering from a c-section you’re supposed to rest as much as possible right? HAH! If only. So not only am I in pain from the surgery, I’m also exhausted, and then I am resenting my partner for being able to sleep and being able to go outside and see the world and and and and. I would be so jealous that HE didn’t have to stay home with the baby, that HE didn’t have to be attached to the baby 24/7, that HE just had a different role. I would count down the minutes for him to get home so I could pass him my baby so I could go pee, or eat, or shower, or sleep. And then, you guessed it, mom guilt came back yet again. First it was “You’re a shit wife, why are you resenting your husband? Why are you mad at him? Why are you frustrated?”, then it was “What a terrible mom, you can’t wait to pass off your baby? Don’t you love him? Aren’t you supposed to love being with him every second? What kind of mom are you??? Do you even deserve to be a mom?” I can’t tell you how many nights I spent just crying while holding my baby, wishing I could just take a break, wishing he would sleep so I could sleep, wishing I could have more help with me (the COVID royally effed up our plans…). And when you’re tired you become impatient, and when you’re impatient you are more prone to getting mad and then before you know it you’re yelling at your husband/wife because they have a headache but you have been putting up with excruciating pain for weeks and somehow it’s their fault that the dishwasher isn’t empty. Apparently postpartum rage is also a thing, here’s an article on it (you’re welcome):
” Postpartum depression brings with it a lot of guilt and feelings of self-loathing or worthlessness. Mothers with postpartum depression tend to bottle up a lot of these unpleasant feelings. All of those bottled up emotions can, and will, eventually come out, often in the form of anger and rage”-Runningtriangles.com
Ok, deep breaths. Even writing this post is difficult for me. Revisiting all of those moments, it’s almost like remembering pieces of a nightmare. And yes, I still am struggling with mom guilt. I still question if I am doing a good job, if showing signs of needing or wanting a break are a bad thing, if prioritizing my needs is a sign of weakness somehow. I think for most of us we’re so used to this glorified image of motherhood, that when we experience the tough parts and when we feel the not so great emotions we immediately assume WE are broken, something must be wrong with US. I’m still learning how to navigate all of this, and thanks for my support network, my counseling, the resources I’ve found, and speaking to other moms, I know now that a lot of what I have experienced and continue to experience is in fact normal, and if not normal then at least it is not a sign that I am necessarily a bad mom. Oh and did I mention the weeks of intense mood swings and emotions after you give birth? Holy mother of baby yoda. That part was wild!!!!!!!!! And I also didn’t know if they were super intense because of all my mental illnesses or if that was normal. I recently found this wonderful article by the NY times that speaks a bit about these intense emotions and mostly the scary thoughts that plague new parents—strongly suggest new parents to read it!. I vividly remember being in the shower, one second I’m all happy thinking how amazing it is to have a little baby the next I am balling my eyes out, crouched on the shower floor, thinking about how my baby could just die randomly and how devastated I would be and how my world would end. Geeeeeeeeeeeeez.
Great, so what have we learned from all this? Does this mean having babies suck?? Absolutely NOT!!! LOL I am still so madly in love with my baby, I have felt amazing love and connection and adoration for this little bundle of life. I don’t regret getting pregnant or anything of that sort. I am grateful for him, for him being healthy, and for me getting through the labour/c section with very minor health issues. I also have an incredibly supportive husband, family, and friends. I know for a fact that the stupid COVID pandemic made my already difficult pregnancy much, much tougher to work through, and it also completely derailed our babyshower plans, our visits, and it meant no one could come visit in the hospital nor could we do our prenatal classes. There is A LOT going on this year, everywhere in the world. I try to focus on the good things we do have going for us, and I also recognize I am still in a very privileged position compared to thousands of moms out there. I have access to healthcare, I have a home, I have EI, I have a loving partner, my baby is healthy, I have clean running water and food. I mean, things could be worse, so please don’t think I am blind to those good things in my life. The purpose of this entry was to discuss the not-so-glorious side of motherhood particularly for someone that already had a lot of mental health issues, and a very not-fun pregnancy. For many women pregnancy is a much more enjoyable journey, and they birth stories are sources of happiness and excitement, and breastfeeding is this amazing sacred thing they get to cherish with their baby. But if that is not the case for you, that’s OK too. I will be writing an entry on breastfeeding alone here soon, cus there is a lot I have to say about that, but I think I’ve taken plenty of your time already.
As always, thank you for reading and tagging along. If you know a momma or parent-to-be that may benefit from reading this, please share with them. I am on a mission to reach as many new parents as possible and also to let other moms know that it’s ok if they’re struggling emotionally or physically with their babies. This is a tough gig you guys, the hardest thing I have had to do so far in my life, but also seeing those little eyes light up and that smile is just….it’s the best.
Alright, stay safe out there in this mad mad world. Spread love <3
