So This Is What Depression Looks Like

When Owen was ten days old, my sister had arrived in town. Kelsey is a woman of many talents. She's ridiculously musically gifted: she can play three instruments, write songs, sing like an angel, and even wrote a song as a surprise gift for Dan and I's wedding. She paints. She is a bit of a prodigy in the advertising world, having worked for two of the largest ad agencies in the world all before age 25. She sees the world differently and her perspective is uplifting with a dash of humor. And all of these factors add up to her being a really fantastic photographer. So I knew I wanted her to take Owen's newborn photos. And I had a bunch of ideas pinned on Pinterest for family shots Dan, Owen and I could take together. But when our photoshoot day rolled around, I could barely walk and the idea of showering sounded like a long shot luxury. Putting on makeup and doing my hair? Laughable. But somehow I rallied. "The show must go on" mantra is well ingrained in my being. And so we started with shots of Owen in a sweet owl knit hat that one of his aunts had crocheted for him. And closeups of all of his sweet new features. His long fingers and curl of hair at the nape of his head. And then it was time for some family shots. I feel tired just thinking about the session. Sure, it's 6am while I'm writing this and the sky hasn't started to lighten yet but deep in my bones I feel the exhaustion I felt on that day. I just wanted to cry but I had put on some makeup so I was going to power through - I didn't want to risk messing up my makeup with tears and then needing to reapply my makeup again. Priorities, man.

We decided his nursery would be a good spot to take most of our pictures. And it was. The light was soft, coming in the window and the neutral grayish blue paint on the wall complemented the light. In the midst of the session, there was a moment where Dan is holding Owen in one arm and has his other arm around my shoulders and we are quietly whispering to each other about how miserable we are. "I'm so tired." "Me too." "When are we going to be done?" "I don't know." And my head is nestled into the crook of his neck and I'm leaning on him because I can't stand on my own easily and we are laughing quietly, slightly manically, at the absurdity of it all and I take a moment just to breathe and...click.  Magic.

It's a beautiful picture.

When I look at it, I can tell that I'm about to cry. And I can tell that if you didn't know better - and honestly, how would you? - you'd probably interpret that pre-cry, bottom-lip-up moment as a sweet one of a mother overjoyed with the new life sweetly sleeping in his father's arms. And so I decide at some point to post it on Facebook as my cover photo. The likes and the comments start pouring in. My most-liked picture to date! And among the comments is one from a guy I went to middle school with. And he says, "So this is what happiness looks like! Congrats!" And I laughed a cynical guffaw when I read that and then read it aloud to Dan. And we both were like, "If he only knew." We've got them all fooled, folks! Life is just a bowl of cherries over here.

A picture is worth a thousand words. And in this case, the words were all lies.

But we looked the part! The part of the tired yet grateful parents, soaking in the blissfulness of our new position in the world. We're presented with images over and over through television and movies and now through social media of how new parenthood is supposed to look. And there is always the moment of the deep sigh. The taking a moment to breathe in the new baby smell and revel in the sweetness. In my case, however, I took a deep sigh because sometimes I had to remind myself to actually breathe.  And the powdery, perfumed smell of his Pampers made me want to vomit. And I literally had to breathe through the pain of the surgery. And I had to breathe through the sadness I felt was consuming me. And I had to breathe through the confusion I was experiencing regarding the emotions I was experiencing. They were nothing like the emotions I had expected or hoped for. And my deep sigh that was a culmination of all of those reasons to breathe was captured in a photo and I posted it for the "world" to see. Because it looked pretty, even though I knew it was a lie. Probably even more so because I knew it was a lie. That picture made it seem like we were ok. That I was ok. That we were better than ok. That picture made us look like the pure essence of happiness.

Maybe if everyone thought I was happy, I'd start to feel like I was.

That's the real danger of social media, isn't it? We see the pretty moments that our friends, family, and celebrity fascinations decide to share. And we believe the pictures. And then we post our own in hopes that others will believe them too. And then we get sad looking at someone else's carefully curated "life" online and we wish it could be our life. And we look around at the normality of our own life and wonder why it isn't better. Round and round and round we go. Where it stops, nobody knows...