I Wanted to Run Away When My Baby Was Born
I convinced myself it was lack of sleep and stress making me feel this way
During the year following my son’s birth, I started making excuses to go to the grocery store, only to cry alone in the parking lot. At 14 months postpartum, I knew what I was feeling couldn’t be the baby blues anymore. There was something else causing this deep-seated depression inside of me. I struggled with motherhood and convinced myself I wasn’t meant to be a mom.
I made the homemade meals, played all the fun games, read bedtime stories and sang nursery songs to my toddler, hoping what I felt would disappear. My mind would eventually catch up with my body, at least I thought it would. With each day, I dreaded waking up and counted the hours until my husband was off work so we could do the handoff. On the inside, I secretly fantasized about leaving my husband and baby to catch a flight somewhere else, anywhere else.
But I loved my baby. I really loved my baby. Why did I feel this way?
Ignoring Professionals
I suspected I had postpartum depression (PPD) eight months after delivering my son. He was born two months premature in a London hospital. We had a rocky NICU stay, followed by an even rockier time post-discharge at home. I stayed by his side every moment I could in the hospital and even moved into the NICU to be closer to him. I’ve detailed our journey in another post titled Navigating Life After Premature Birth. My son’s life existed with so many difficulties. I struggled to keep up emotionally with the ebbs and flows of his medical needs.
A NICU nurse asked me when he was a month old if I knew about PPD. She told me she would have someone get in touch with me. That person never contacted me. I was thankful I didn’t have to have a conversation about how I felt because I felt so guilty for feeling anything at all. My son needed help, not me.
During my six-week perinatal check-up, the physician noted I hadn’t brought the baby with me and asked if we had been bonding. I responded by saying, “How can I bond with a baby I’ve become a nurse too?” She asked if I would call a phone number she wrote on a piece of paper to be evaluated for PPD. I agreed, but never called.
It was simply lack of sleep and stress from the baby’s NICU stay is what I told myself to convince my mind I didn’t need to speak to anyone. Even so, I panicked, and told my husband about the conversation I had with the physician, convinced someone was going to come and take the baby away. I didn’t know what PPD was or what it meant for my family. I assumed it meant doctors thought I wanted to harm myself, or even worse, the baby and that couldn’t be farther from the truth.
No one ever talked to me about PPD. Not really at least. It was brought up almost in passing during prenatal courses and I didn’t give it a second thought. My only exposure to it was in sensationalized news stories with horrific endings. In reality, I probably knew a lot of parents who suffered from it, but because of the shame and guilt associated with it, they never shared their stories with me. Even now, I am terrified of sharing my story.
PPD in Numbers
PPD is having “strong feelings of sadness, anxiety (worry) and tiredness that last for a long time after giving birth,” according to March of Dimes. PPD is not the fault of the mother and does not make a woman a bad parent. Many women suffer from PPD and in order for it to get better, it requires treatment. To put it into numbers, one in eight women suffer from PPD. Some analyses suggest it goes as high as one in five women, according to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention.
The lack of education provided to women during their prenatal and perinatal months continues to be an issue preventing women from seeking the help they need. This, combined with the stigma surrounding mental health, contributes to the millions of women who suffer in silence yearly. “Suicide accounts for about 20% of postpartum deaths and is the second most common cause of mortality in postpartum women,” according to a 2013 study posted in JAMA Psychiatry.
PPD is more frequently reported in women, but it can also occur in men. There is currently no established criteria for men who suffer from PPD.
The Moment I Knew Something Was Wrong
Our family, unable to move because of Covid, remained overseas without the support of extended family and a nearby pediatric hospital. When we could, after nearly eight months of trying to secure a visa and plane ticket for my Swedish husband, we moved back to the states. We immediately had our son seen at an amazing children’s hospital and were getting the answers we were so desperately seeking about his health. Yet, my depression seemed to get worse.
My husband, out of frustration one night, yelled this question at me, “What is wrong? Things are finally going good for us and you are still not happy. What is it, what is wrong?” That was the moment I knew I had PPD. I didn’t have an answer that made sense because there was no answer to his question. Truth be told, everything was going much better. We made an international move. We were living in a beautiful home close to family. Our son was being seen by specialists at one of the best children’s hospitals in the nation. We could finally let the air out of our chests and breathe. And yet, I couldn’t pick myself up off the floor.
With each medical appointment my son had, I became more and more depressed and semi convinced myself every time this wasn’t the life I had signed up for and I wasn’t cut out to be his mother.
For the next few months, I tried to stop those intrusive thoughts that told me my family was better off without me. No matter how much reason I gave myself to believe in myself, I just couldn’t stop falling down the rabbit hole that was PPD.
It’s described as the “thief that steals motherhood,’ in a study posted on Science Direct. I now relate to it as the feeling of having my mind kidnapped. I had no control over what was happening to me. The bright, energetic, always finding something positive about life person I was before having a baby disappeared. My brain wasn’t mine anymore, it belonged to PPD. It played tricks on me and told me my family was better off without me.
I knew I needed help. I was desperate to make things better, not just for myself, but for my family. I wanted my son to have a mother that enjoyed motherhood, one who enjoyed spending time with him and one who didn’t want to run away.
Finding Support
Once I knew I needed help, I was honest with my husband about what had been going on and that I suspected I was suffering from PPD. I told him I wanted to look into it and speak to someone to understand more about it. He was 100% on board and I think a bit relieved.
I looked up several therapists online, interviewed a few, and eventually found one I felt comfortable speaking with. We met once a week via video calls for several months.
I also joined my local PPD support group. This is where I came to realize how common PPD is and how so many other women, like me, were also suffering from it. Many of the things the other women said resonated with me and helped me feel more normal and less like a bad mother.
To get me out of the funk of wearing pyjamas every day and sitting at home sad, I incorporated daily walks into my routine with the goal of hitting 10,000 steps a day. I immediately noticed the extra energy these walks gave me and how good it felt to breathe fresh air and feel the sunshine on my skin. My toddler also enjoyed his mommy taking him out more and spending time with him at the park. It was a win for both of us.
I met with my primary care physician and told him what had been going on and that I believed I would benefit from medication to help me get through this rough patch. He agreed and for the first time in my life, I took antidepressants. We made a timeline for how long I thought I would be comfortable taking them and agreed to check in periodically.
It took about two weeks for the medicine to take effect and when it did, the difference it made in my mood was positively noticeable. But the medication didn’t fix everything. My daily crying stopped, yet I was still having negative thoughts about motherhood and not wanting to be a mother. I committed myself to stay in the PPD group and seek counselling for as long as it took me to feel like I was healing and able to cope on my own without it having an adverse effect on my family.
What Today Looks Like
For more than a year, I bottled up the trauma from my son’s premature birth and the stress and fear my husband and I were living under with a son that had special medical needs. When I started to speak about my family’s journey, I started to heal.
Slowly it felt like I was getting back to myself, not to the person I was before, but to a newer, stronger and changed version of myself. The emotional scars I carried couldn’t go unnoticed. I used them as my strength to share our journey publicly in the hopes it would help other people struggling with PPD, motherhood and prematurity. I smiled again and found happiness in my life.
It’s been more than eight months since I originally sought help and my reality today is far from the one I was living in recently. My son continues to have medical issues and scary medical appointments, but I no longer spiral out of control from them. I enjoy spending every day with him and feel so fortunate to be his mother and to be a mother at all. He is the light of my life and the reason for most of my smiles and laughs daily.
I have come out on the other side of PPD. My story has a happy ending, but this isn’t the same for every woman or family. I am just one woman who has gone through this, one of the millions. I survived. I can’t help but feel I was lucky enough to have resources available to me and a supportive family to help me through PPD. I know this isn’t the case for everyone.
