A Woman’s Silent Pain
Are You Ready to Hear Her Out?
Eva can’t believe what she is seeing! She was told it would NEVER be like this again, yet here she is, staring right at the lie…the betrayal!
She begins sifting frantically through his remaining drawers. “It has to be here somewhere”, she whispered to herself, looking for more evidence or maybe hoping it wasn’t true. She was in sheer disbelief as she pulls another one out of the drawer and just holds it sobbing.
“How can he do this to me? How can he do this to our family? She looks over at her 2 month old baby and begins weeping heavily. “I can’t take this anymore”, she shouts out loud almost waking up the baby from her nap. Eva stares at her innocent little face and hopes that her daughter will NEVER have to endure the shame she was feeling right now.
She begins packing a bag to leave. How could she stay with someone who hurts her like this? Her family would understand, right? They’d help her get back on her feet and she and Evianna would be OK.
She hears keys in the door. She whirls around to see her husband standing there smiling! “Hey babe”, he sings as he walks over to kiss her. He notices her body language and the tears streaming down her face. “Don’t you ‘hey babe’ me” she can barely get out the words. “Baby what’s wrong”, he replies so suave she almost forgets why she’s mad. “Come here, it’s all right, just talk to me.” “Talk to you, I never want to talk to you EVER again.”
He walks up to her and opens his arms to hold her, she fights him a little, but she can’t resist his hugs. He knows what this is about. He can tell from his rummaged drawers what she has been up to and this was not the first time. “Baby look…”, he begins, but before he can apologize Eva holds the evidence up to his face and glares into his eyes, “where is the MATCH to this sock!”
This is a work of fiction, but not far from it really. Much of Eva’s reaction was my own during the first years of my marriage and after my pregnancies. Mood swings like this were not uncommon for me and my husband was a champion. I wasn’t diagnosed at the time, but we were later able to see that it all added up to Postpartum Depression. Although I tried to bring some levity to a serous issue, postpartum depression is real. Depression is real. Anxiety is real. Being part of the brain does not make any of them an obsolete illness. It is just as real as diabetes, yet many still suffer in silence, untreated.
It is also of note that baby blues and postpartum depression are not the same thing. Confusing the two can yield unintentional harm to new mothers AND babies. Pregnancies are rough all by themselves, now compound that with postpartum depression and you are left baffled by the actions a depressed mother when you don’t know the symptoms. Having a baby changes a woman chemically, so be kind and know the signs.
