The Myth of Motherhood:
Tolerating postpartum depression as a casualty of new parenting
In the fall of the year 2000, my first son was born. It had been an intentional, desired pregnancy. I had just celebrated my thirtieth birthday, was still reveling in life as a newlywed, and was pleased that our financial circumstances allowed me to leave a job that, while enjoyable, held no real sway over my outlook on life. My pregnancy was unremarkable: I gained just the right amount of weight — not too much, not too little — and all my vitals, checkups, and ultrasounds came back “normal.” There was nothing else to do except wait for the arrival of what would bring me (with only one sibling) and my husband (an only child) one step closer to our shared dream of a large family.
The birth, too, was uneventful. I labored without medication for a few hours, pushed for less than one, and then, with my kindly, elderly, male obstetrician guiding the head out of the birth canal, baby made three. I had been supported through a more-or-less traditional hospital birth by my husband, both of my parents, and a doula — all indicators of the extent of my privilege and resources. The doula’s bad breath notwithstanding, she was well worth her fee when she positioned herself as a mediator between me and my assigned labor nurse, who kept pushing an epidural on me because the other laboring mothers (presumably all receiving epidurals) were complaining about my unmedicated primal screams.
And then suddenly there I was: a mother. Although I had begun babysitting at an early age and had enjoyed the time I spent surrounding by babies and small children — second cousins, neighbors, family friends — I don’t recall ever consciously deciding that I wanted to have children. Rather, it was my default setting, and I believe it was for my husband, as well: get married, raise a family, the way Carly Simon croons she has always heard it should be.
I soon came to realize that the reality of having a newborn baby resembles nothing like the myth of a perfect family. Once our new family of three was settled in the postpartum hospital room, the nurses stopped in only to take my vitals, to refill my standard-issue plastic water bottle with ice and cold water. While they were there, they whisked away my soaked, industrial-strength maxi pads, gave me piles of fresh ones. They asked about my bowel movements, scanned my bulging hemorrhoids, reminded me to take my sitz baths at home. They said I could request a visit from a lactation consultant if desired. But for a woman who has just recently endured the unendurable, this level of attention left nary an impression. Being in a hospital in the U.S. is almost always a losing proposition even when it is the best place to be — subpar nutrition, subpar sleeping, and lack of authentic human interactions would stymie even the most committed patient. For me, someone who was in pain (torn vagina, the aforementioned hemorrhoids), sleep-deprived, and disoriented from suddenly having to care for a helpless newborn, what my nurses offered me was not enough.
When I arrived at home, my mother still along for the ride, my husband was clearly in love with our son. He swaddled him, burped him, soothed him to sleep after a nursing session. My obstetrician had consented to my “unusual” request to hold my son before allowing him to be whisked away to perform post birth medical interventions, and although I don’t remember much of those first minutes of his life, I can only assume that I held his naked body atop my naked chest, that the nurses covered us both in warm-from-the-dryer blankets, that my husband enveloped us in his arms while my parents and the hospital staff looked on, pleased with themselves and with the idyllic nature of the moment. But what I do remember quite clearly was what happened when our son was lifted off of my chest, when he was taken away to be measured, weighed, assessed, recorded. Still slimy and red on the scale, he cried, loudly, and my husband rushed to his side. When my husband knelt down to speak into our son’s ear, our son turned his head towards the voice. In the first days and weeks of J’s life, I would think of that moment, and of the look on my husband’s face when he realized that his son knew the sound of his father’s voice.
I don’t recall having any such moment. There certainly was no Hallmark, bolt-of-lightening kind of love for my son. He was just there, where he hadn’t been before, and while I yearned to do right by him, I was mostly terrified that I would not. Everything that my husband did effortlessly terrified me: bathing him, cleaning his stumpy umbilical cord, cutting his cellophane-thin fingernails. Because J cried whenever he had his diaper changed, I cried. Because J cried whenever he couldn’t latch, when my milk came in and engorged my once A-cup breasts to the size of pulpy cantaloupes, I cried. And when the call came from a nurse at the hospital, who had been put in charge, that day, of calling all the moms who had delivered their babies on the same day or in the same week as I delivered mine, I could see her sitting at a desk at the nurse’s station. I could see women in their compromising, patterned hospital gowns pushing their IV stands up and down the halls, their partners hovering hesitantly beside them. And I could see how this nurse with the chipper voice had a large stack of file folders in front of her. Her job, I would come to understand, was not, as she misrepresented it to be, “to see how I doing.” Rather, her job (and I blame here not the individual nurse but the system) was to move her files from “open” to “closed.” When she asked me if I had been crying, I admitted, impulsively, “Why, yes. Yes, I have been crying. Every day. In fact, I don’t do anything else but cry, I can’t seem to stop crying.” She was momentarily quiet, and when she spoke again, her chipper voice was nervous, almost desperate. “Oh! But surely it’s only the baby blues, right? Surely it’s nothing more serious than that?” And in that moment, I understood that I would be alone in my confusion and discomfort.
When, a few days later, I was asleep on the sofa after dinner, wearing nothing but one of my husband’s old flannel shirts and a pair of massive white knickers, and my mother woke me to feed J, I refused. “I’m too tired,” I said. “I can’t move,” I said, but she just stood there, poking me gently, waiting for me to get up, to take my baby, to nurse him willingly. And while I knew that she loved me, loved her grandson, and wanted only the very best for both of us, I also knew that she didn’t understand the depths of my fatigue.
When, in the days and weeks that followed, when well-intentioned, loving friends and family members stopped in to cuddle the baby, to comment on his big blue eyes, his long eyelashes, his thunder thighs, and they said things like, “Oh, well, so you’re up all night, that’s OK!” or, “When do you think you’ll be back at the gym?” or “Is he on a sleep schedule yet?” I knew that none of them wanted to acknowledge how stressed I was, how anxious, how wholly undesirous I was of the infant that slept in their arms.
With the help of a marriage therapist, a husband who stuck with me even when he didn’t know how to support me, a personal therapist in the form of my own sister, and a fellow new mother who became a true friend, I somehow made it through that first year. Together my sole friend and I found a few other friends, other new moms who were willing to acknowledge not only that motherhood is hard, because that no longer seems revolutionary to admit, but that motherhood, even when we are living it, is something that often brings out the worst in us. It brings out our demons and our insecurities, our cruelties and our dangerous emotions. And to those friends, I will be forever grateful.
My son will be recognized by society as an adult in a few short months. In the intervening years, I’ve had three more biological children, one adopted child, and one additional bout of postpartum depression, from which I believe I am still recovering, even though the onset was almost a decade ago. I take antidepressants. I see a psychiatrist regularly. I approach my husband and children with intentional compassion, but I also approach my own self with compassion, something I was never taught to do. I engage in intentional anti-bias practices because I realize the way our cultural narratives around worth and value have caused much damage to me. I am trying to understand how depleted I have been, how I have been running on fumes for as long as I have been a mother. I no longer consider whether or not I will ever recover from my past; rather, I am learning to live in new ways, in ways that prioritize honesty, rest, and mountains of self-care.
A few months ago, I visited with two friends, newly parental themselves, and met their lovesome three-month-old son. As they moved around our house on their visit, I recognized well the disconnected, discomfited looks on their faces and in their body language: not sure where to set the baby’s car seat, not sure whether to leave the baby in his seat or take him out, not sure where to set themselves. I gave them large glass tumblers of cold water. I asked the mother if she still had any physical pain. I offered them Rice Krispie treats that my daughter had made. At first they both demurred, citing a commitment to eating healthily, to cutting back on sugar, on processed carbs. And so I brought them, instead, a hefty ceramic bowl of red grapes, which were instantly devoured by these two exhausted, ambivalent, and flailing, yet wholly competent, educated, and intelligent, parents. And when I asked, again, if they might like to try a Rice Krispie treat, they both acquiesced. And I could see, in the way that they hungered, that even if they had eaten the whole pan of sugary-tacky goodness, our cultural adherence to misplaced and misconstrued notions of independence and resilience would prevent them from ever acknowledging the depth of their needs.
