(Originally published on Motherless Mom, April 17, 2019)
My story begins during my pregnancy with my oldest. After a whirlwind engagement and marriage, the military moved my husband and I several states away from our family and friends and I got pregnant almost immediately. I did what I always do when moving and dove into the community I was landing in, this time by joining community pregnancy and baby groups left and right and researching anything and everything baby-related. Informed birth practices, breastfeeding, cloth-diapering: anything I could get my hands on!
My desire to know and learn more about pregnancy and childbirth was mixed with my natural activist inclination to do more; I became a regional coordinator for an educational advocacy group for informed birth choices. I studied for and earned my accreditation as a breastfeeding educator and peer counselor with an international non-profit organization. I was active, always doing things. I was never sad, never felt like I couldn’t leave my house. I was just as social and outgoing as I had always been and I loved being a mommy from the very first moment I held my sweet babe in my arms.
However.
There was something that was building in me that had started during my pregnancy and escalated quickly after I had my babe. It was something that I wasn’t completely aware of at the time but in retrospect, I now see how a lifetime of unresolved baggage and unhealthy coping mechanisms played their parts in the severity of my postpartum mood disorders.
My problem wasn’t depression; it was anger and anxiety. For this post, I’m going to focus on the anger. The anxiety and the bizarre OCD rituals I created to cope during this time could fill a book by themselves!
I had always “had a temper,” but I had never experienced anything remotely close to the anger I was feeling on an almost daily basis, mostly towards my understandably bewildered husband.
When our oldest turned 8 months old, my husband had to deploy to Afghanistan and was afraid to leave me alone with our babe. He insisted that I get help before he left. See, my anger wasn’t just “being upset” and venting. My anger was screaming mad, red in the face, profanities and vitriol, delivered until my voice was hoarse. My entire body would be on fire. He was right to be concerned.
I had just learned that what I was experiencing was classified under the then umbrella term “postpartum depression,” or PPD. I actually did not learn this from a health professional, but rather from another mom that told me about her experience with atypical, rage-presentation PPD. Her rock-bottom moment was her chucking a boiling pot of rice across her living room– the same room her children were in. Hearing this was my Aha! moment and I will be forever grateful to her for sharing her experience with me at the breastfeeding group that day. Thank you, M, wherever you are these days.
I began Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) with a remarkable therapist who had a blunt, no-nonsense approach that I really needed at the time. I learned important tools and information that I still use to this day. CBT has played a significant role in my healing journey from both my postpartum mood disorders and lots of the other baggage I’ve carted around throughout my life.
In those days, I knew things were tough for me, I just didn’t realize how tough. I was fortunate to have a life that afforded me the time and means to access good mental healthcare. Not everyone is so lucky, and I know this. As much of a struggle each day was, I still had help.
In truth, the most significant help I had in those days was the physical, hands-on help that I was so fortunate to have. I had a best friend that would drive across town (WITH HER NEWBORN BECAUSE SHE WAS/IS A BADASS LIKE THAT) to talk me down after getting texts from me like, “We’ve been up since 4 and I am LOSING it over here,” and I will never be able to repay her for that kindness and support. Then there was my mother-in-law, who is truly a living, breathing, angel-on-earth, who put her own life on hold as she flew across the country to come to stay with us until my husband came home from deployment. This kind of direct, physical support was more than just a kindness. It was our life raft and it kept us afloat.
After my husband came home and my mother-in-law left, we made baby #2. That’s when things began to really spiral out of control for me. I was still going to therapy each week, but I don’t really know how much I was gaining there. My memories here are foggy and my new “normal” was so stress-filled and chaotic that it’s hard for me to trust my own perceptions of this time. I had never really recovered fully from my PPD (and the postpartum anxiety and OCD I wasn’t even aware I had: stories for another time) and now the pregnancy hormones were bombarding me again and I was lost in myself.
I consider this to be the most shameful period of my life. My daily rage towards my tiny 2-year-old was 110% unacceptable. I don’t spank because I don’t believe in physical violence as a tool, but my words and demeanor were violence in and of themselves. They’ve left their scars, too. I had experiences during this period of time that continue to fill me with sorrow and shame when I think of how I was treating my sweet daughter. There were blowups over sunflower seeds spilled on the ground, excessive helicoptering at play-dates to “protect” her and so many rituals surrounding her safety and well-being that kept us both in a loop of near-insanity.
Even while all this was happening, I was still an active member of my community. I was still hosting play-dates and going on road trips to visit family. I was functioning well-enough on the surface that no one knew what was really happening underneath. Even I didn’t really know what was happening to me. I was truly lost in the fog.
I had convinced myself that once I had babe #2, my hormones would settle down and I would be fine with just the CBT again.
I was wrong. It took a brush with tragedy to make me see this.
About two weeks after I gave birth to babe #2, I finally hit my rock bottom.
I was at home alone with my girls, a 2-year-old and a 2-week-old. It was nap time and I was hoping to get them both to nap at the same time.
All was going well: The 2-year-old was asleep on the couch in her cozy nest of blankets and had a fan going beside her for white noise. I had just finished the long and careful process of transferring my sleeping newborn from my arms to the slingback cot when I turned around to see my 2-year-old in the doorway, right as her sweet little voice broke out into exuberant, joyful song.
This part of my story is very difficult to tell. Physically, as I type this, my pulse quickens, my heart aches, and my chest gets tight. I would like to never look back on this memory again, but I know I have to tell my story.
You know that phrase, “I saw red?” For me, it was more than just some euphemism for becoming angry suddenly.
On that day and in that moment 4 years ago, I saw red. I literally saw a dark crimson closing in on my periphery as I blacked out and then the next thing I knew, I was holding my 2-week-old in my arms. I have no memory of what happened between seeing red and that moment when I awoke, holding my 2-week-old in my arms. Absolutely none. One moment I was standing above her cot with her fast asleep below, the next I was holding her in my arms. This was black-out rage, and I will never know what I said or did in those lost moments.
My 2-year-old was still standing in the doorway, where I’d last seen her, but my fragile and vulnerable newborn was now in my arms, awake.
I was disoriented and confused. My nerves were on fire and there was a high-pitched ringing in my ears. I was horrified and terrified and just kept repeating, “oh my god, are you okay? Oh my god, oh my god, are you okay?” My body was simultaneously burning hot and freezing cold as I sat down on the edge of the bed and repeatedly looked my sweet baby over, head to toe, checking her eyes, in her ears, everywhere, her baby-soft skin and tiny vulnerable newborn body somehow unscathed. She seemed fine, nothing amiss, but I knew that what we had just experienced could’ve been a tragedy of epic proportions. I gathered my two babies in my arms as I sobbed and begged their forgiveness.
My hands still shaking, I went and dug the business card out of my purse that had been given to me by my therapist several months before. He wasn’t licensed to prescribe medication but had given me the card for a psychiatrist that could in case I might ever need to go that route.
This is where the second part of parenthood really began for me. Antidepressant medication gave me something I didn’t even know that I didn’t have.
I had operated with such an intense level of anxiety that coping with it by using various OCD behaviors and anger in my everyday interaction with my family was somehow our “normal,” but it has left its marks on everyone. My medication showed me what a healthy “normal” was. It gave me space to breathe and have a thoughtful response to normal kid behaviors like unspooling an entire roll of TP and stuffing it in the toilet rather than an explosive reaction where nasty words would fly out of my mouth like poison-tipped arrows aimed directly at my precious toddler.
Never again would I ever come anywhere near to my experience that day when I “saw red.”
I was so fortunate that I was in a position where I was able to make a phone call and get into a medical professional within just a few days and get treatment immediately. I know not everyone has the privilege of that kind of access to adequate and affordable healthcare, and it terrifies me to think of what may have become of us had I not been able to get the treatment I needed.
My situation was dangerous. I was a danger to my children and I didn’t even know it. I was in a thick haze of everyday anxiety and angst, and my therapy prior to having my second babe did help but it was only a stop-gap that kept me from spiraling out of control. I needed medication, but I had wasted a lot of time trying to avoid it and instead pursued a variety of at-home “natural” remedies like vitamin D supplementation, placenta encapsulation, working out, yoga, meditation, etc for my first two years as a mother. I have no doubt these helped stave off the extreme manifestations of my postpartum mood disorder, but they didn’t come anywhere near doing what Zoloft did for me.
When I look back now, 4 years later, I feel such sadness and guilt for all the time I wasted trying to avoid the treatment that would ultimately save our lives. I put my family through hell trying to avoid pharmaceutical medication because I was afraid of potential side-effects and maybe becoming “stuck” on medication and unable to get off. It’s hard for me to even believe this now because the actual side-effect of me NOT taking medication in those days was that I was dangerous to my children. I would gladly take all of the side-effects on the planet to keep my children safe!
Medication allowed me to have control over my postpartum mood disorder and to become the kind of mother I had always wanted to be. This doesn’t mean that I don’t still struggle with parenting because #ThisIshIsSoHard and they are 4 & 6 and I’m still on the learning curve here, but I am here for my children and my children are safe. That is priority #1 for me. Even now, 4 years later, I am still cleaning up the mess from the trauma that my children, specifically my oldest, have from their experience with my PPD.
If you are wondering if you should reach out for help with postpartum mood disorder, please, err on the side of caution. If not for yourself, do it for your family. I will never be able to adequately explain the guilt I live with over how long it took me to get proper treatment for my PPD. I didn’t have to put myself or my family through all that trauma. I didn’t have to put my babies in danger the way I did. I was so lucky that my rock-bottom gave me the wake-up call I needed without ending in tragedy, but I will always live with the knowledge of how dangerously close we came to it.
If sharing my story can convince even just one other person to reach out for the help they need in their postpartum journey, then this entire exercise will be well worth it.
All of the postpartum mood disorders discussed in Postpartum Funk are treatable. Every single one of them. The only dead end on this journey is the one where you don’t reach out for help. You are not alone in your travels, there are others on this journey with you.
Reach out for help, find your path, and keep on truckin’ on.
