Member-only story
Post Natal Depression
The anxiety of many mothers after birth.
The cries of her two-year-old son cut through the silence, but she does not move. She hears him — the desperate wail of a child wanting his mother — but her body feels anchored to the mattress, heavy with an exhaustion no amount of sleep could fix. She squeezes her eyes shut. He will get him. Maybe he won’t. Perhaps it doesn’t matter.
A door creaks open. Footsteps. Now that the toddler is awake, his cries grow muffled as her husband lifts him. He whispers, shushing and pacing, repeating the same ritual they’ve performed for years. She should have felt relief. She should feel something. But she feels nothing.
Four years. That’s how long she’s been drowning in this fog. It started subtly — vulnerability that came too easily after the birth of their first, irritability that hardened into something colder. Then came the exhaustion. The slipping away of joy. The rage. And then, the second child.
A brother for the firstborn.
She’s not a fool. She knows she’s cruel sometimes. She sees the flinch in her husband’s eyes when she snaps at him over nothing—or what seems like nothing. And still, he genuflects to her illness, patient, but wary. She hears it in his voice when he asks if she’s okay. It’s never anything she can explain. Never.
