Early Dismissal & Death Wishes: My PPD Journey

I've combined two excerpts below because in my book, they will be chapters that are together. And I feel like the content of each inform the other. Talking about suicide or suicidal thoughts is not something I do lightly. And I am here, able to talk about it, because I sought help and went on medication. If you are feeling anything similar or worse, you are not alone. And you don't have to be. That's depression's great lie: It makes you feel like no one can possibly understand. But if I've learned anything from sharing my story, it's that THAT FEELING IS UNIVERSAL. Feeling alone is the biggest lie depression tells.

If anything here strikes a chord, please visit SuicidePreventionLifeline.org or call your doctor. Don't wait.

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Early Dismissal

In high school on early dismissal days, there was a period of time where my mom would take us to Taco Bell after picking us up. That was our treat for lunch on the way home. I'd get a soft taco supreme, no tomatoes, and cinnamon twists. Every. Time. And though I pretty much avoid that place now that I'm older and wiser (cough cough), I'll occasionally slip in for a walk down memory lane and get my same order, even though I don't mind tomatoes on my tacos now.

What does Taco Bell have to do with postpartum depression? Not much. But sometimes I like to detour to help avoid truths. And I started thinking about how we dismiss the signs of PPD in the early weeks after pregnancy and this 'early dismissal' took me down an unexpected road of nostalgia. I still dig Cinnamon Twists...the poor man's churro.

I expected to feel a roller-coaster of emotions after delivery. The books tell you, your friends tell you, the doctors tell you. Your hormones are straight up cray cray after having a bay bay. "Baby Blues" is a common term tossed around (also, a yummy BBQ joint in LA). So I fully expected to start crying for no reason or to miss being pregnant or to feel incredibly high with love only to come crashing down to Sadville in the next moment. I even had a Twitter exchange a few weeks before delivery with the writer/creator of my new favorite sitcom at the time. She is a friend of a friend and I knew that she had worked throughout her pregnancy as she created/wrote/showrunned her first network show. And I was astounded by that. I couldn't imagine being pregnant for the first time and producing a show at that level. So I sent her kudos via the great equalizing medium of social media. We went back and forth for a few 140 characters about her show and being a new mom and then I mentioned how I was due soon and she sent back, "...The first couple weeks are VERY HARD, but it gets easier and easier. And don't worry if you feel sad - hormones!"

For some reason those few words from a complete stranger rattled around in my brain constantly during those first couple of VERY HARD weeks. I dismissed everything I was experiencing as 'typical hormone issues.' When I talked on the phone with my best friend, the first night I was in the hospital after delivering, I literally couldn't speak without crying. Tears were streaming down my face and I was sobbing out any words I spoke. And I remember apologizing, "I'm...sorry...I...can't...stop...crying...Hormones..." She remembers that conversation too. It was a little unsettling but also, yeah, she admitted "hormones" made sense. When I had my hardest cry on the way home from the hospital, I chalked it up to those crazy hormones doing their thang. When I sat in our bedroom, in my green rocker/recliner, unable to sit up without assistance, heaving sobbing whenever I had the chance to be alone. Hormones. This would all go away as soon as I could my hormones to even out. If only I could breastfeed. That was supposed to help equalize things, wasn't it? Or did it just help my uterus contract? I couldn't remember. Either way, breastfeeding wasn't going to help me feel better anytime soon since Owen couldn't latch on well because of the "stress and trauma" of his birth and I didn't seem to be producing milk, no matter how diligently I pumped and ate oat bars and drank Mother's Milk Tea. All of that I swept aside as I wallowed in my sadness because my hormones we're causing all of my problems and eventually I'd "snap out of it."

Have you seen this cartoon by Robot Hugs about if we treated physical diseases the way that we treat mental illnesses?

Yep. I was absolutely treating myself with the 'snap out of it' mantra. But that was the tricky thing. I knew something was wrong. I knew that the sadness and the numbness and the anxiety and the frustration were all extreme and unlike anything I had experienced before but I also had never birthed a child before. And if everyone was saying that "baby blues" are inevitable then I just needed to fight through the inevitable.

The only problem was, I didn't feel like fighting.

I didn't feel like being there at all.

Not just being in the bedroom, struggling to recover from surgery. Not just in the apartment, struggling to be a mother.

I didn't want to be anywhere. I didn't want to exist. And if I died, that wouldn't be so bad.

In fact, being dead sounded like a lovely break.

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Death Wishes

"Did you ever want to kill yourself?"

That's a question you hear a lot when people find out you were depressed. I think part of the reason postpartum depression is such a taboo subject, in that women don't want to admit they have it and they don't want people to know about it even if they admit it quietly to their spouses, family or doctor, is because of the horror stories that postpartum psychosis can produce. And those stories are the ones that the general public hears. We live in a world where click-bait headlines are the norm and news runs on television and online and on apps on our phones and memes on our social media twenty-four hours a day and seven days a week. "News" programs literally have to scream at us to get our attention and so what do we hear about? The worst of the worst cases. Remember that mom of six who drowned all her children in the bathtub? Or that woman who drove her car, with her two children fastened in the backseat, off of a bridge? Or the one who thought the President was trying to harm her so she drove her car toward the White House, over barricades, until she was shot to death while her infant daughter sat in her car seat in the back of the car? What about the woman who left a note, apologizing because she knew she had ruined her child's life by accidentally dropping him at some point. So in order to prevent the child's lifetime of struggle she jumped out of a window, while holding him. Her baby survived because her body provided a cushion from the fall. She did not. I remember hearing about the woman who drowned her children in the bathtub when I was in high school. I remember the outrage surrounding the story and the public sentiment being, "How could someone be such a monster?" There was even a profile in People magazine, if I recall correctly. And the common denominator with all of these stories is that they mother suffered from postpartum depression. At least, that is what the media broad-stroked them with. They tossed around the idea that being depressed led to these actions and, yes, it may have started that way. But postpartum psychosis and postpartum depression are very different diagnoses. Very different realities. Who wants to hear about that though? The nuanced differences - both quiet and loud? Who has the time to write about it or read about it? Not the media. They're too afraid that you've already left their article to click over to the latest celebrity nude scandal. So they use the broad term of "postpartum depression" because most of their readership has at least heard of that before and they don't have to get into explaining it further. And then those of us that are quietly suffering from postpartum depression - actual postpartum depression, which comes in many forms, one of which can be quiet and unsuspecting - keep our heads down and power through because we don't want to be associate with these extreme cases.

Case-in-point: I used an attention grabbing selection of two words for this chapter. Death Wishes is an actual terminology in psychology and it's something I dealt with in my early stages of depression. You're paying attention now, aren't you?

"In classical Freudian psychoanalytic theory, the death drive (German: Todestrieb) is the drive towards death, self-destruction and the return to the inorganic: "the hypothesis of a death instinct, the task of which is to lead organic life back into the inanimate state"" - Wikipedia

If I could have stood up on my own, I wonder if I would have actually left. Walked out the door "to get milk" as the cliche goes and never came back. I certainly fantasized about it. The idea of leaving my apartment and creating an alternate world where I wasn't Meagan anymore and I certainly wasn't a mother anymore. I'd live a quiet existence, under the radar, secret shame of my secret past bubbling under the surface. People would wonder what my story was - where I came from, who my family was - but they would never know. Because I would never tell. I'd be in some out of the way small town, living in a trailer and quietly waiting tables at the local diner. I'd be good at my job, no nonsense and efficient so people wouldn't complain but I wouldn't be the waitress you'd make chit chat with. Friendly enough but not someone that anyone was close to. I'd wonder how Dan and Owen were doing, maybe. But mostly I'd shut my mind to that world so I didn't have to deal with the pain. A total break with reality. Almost like a split personality. I'd convince myself that the other world that I had left, never existed in the first place. And maybe then I'd be some form of happy in life again. If I didn't exist, as I was, maybe then I could be happy. Speaking of not existing, if I was in some sort of car accident, that didn't seem like the worst thing. If my car ran off the road and I hit a tree and I could still get out of the car...I wouldn't. I'd just let myself go.

So did I want to kill myself? Not in the conventional sense of wanting to slit my wrists or hanging myself or finding a gun or taking a bunch of pills or jumping off of a building. But if I happened to find myself in a situation where my life was in danger? That didn't seem like such a bad thing. I wasn't going to actually put myself in danger...but I thought about how that seemed like a relief.

It makes me feel so unbelievably sad to think that I could have let myself slip away. I had lost my urge to fight. And I'm a fighter. When I was fifteen I had a severe allergic reaction to over-the-counter painkillers I was taking to battle menstrual cramps and a sore throat. I went into anaphylactic shock at school. I had already gone to the nurse's office because I was breaking out into hives and we were taking an exam, so I thought, "Sweet. I get to get out of it." She called my mom to come pick me up and I went back to my classroom to get my backpack. As I walked back to the office I started to see black spots. I made it to the nurse, told her what I was seeing and she said, "Ok, sweetie, come lie down over here." That was the last thing I heard. The next thing I knew I was on the ground and she was shouting, "Call 9-1-1! Call 9-1-1!" I started to come through and said, "I need to go to the bathroom." And then I collapsed again. By now my mom and my then six-year-old sister, had arrived. I was on the ground and I could hear them but I couldn't see them. They told me later that my eyes were open the whole time. I was temporarily blind. By the time the paramedics arrived, my pulse was so low, they couldn't find it manually. They hooked me up to a machine and found it: 70 over 40. I was having trouble breathing so they inserted oxygen tubes into my nose, put me on a gurney and wheeled me out to the ambulance. As luck would have it, my dad happened to be driving by my school when my mom had come to pick me up. She had called him to come get my sister so that she wouldn't be late to school. Needless to say, neither of them took her to school that day. My principal volunteered to get her to school so that my parents could follow the ambulance to the hospital. I knew they were in my dad's car, behind us, while I was shut in the ambulance. And then my throat completely closed. And I knew that was it. I was going to die. They threw an oxygen mask on me and pumped me full of Benadryl and epinephrin and...suddenly I could breathe again. I started to stabilize. Lying in my hospital bed, I couldn't stop scratching myself because of the epinephrine and I couldn't keep my eyes open because of the Benadryl. My doctor thought I was sleeping and I heard him say to the nurse, "She's lucky. I've seen cases this bad where they don't come out of it." I decided then and there that every moment was a gift. That life can be gone in an instant and I'm going to fight for every moment. I wasn't going to live with regrets. I was going to pursue my dreams and follow my passions because it can all be gone without notice and there wasn't any time to waste.

Fifteen years later and I was in a fight for my life again...but I had lost the will to fight on.