Babies are the worst: My PPD Journey

Sitting in traffic at Third and Formosa, trying to get to the light at La Brea so I could turn left. I don't remember where I was going. I don't remember if Owen was with me. But I do remember seeing a woman walking west along the sidewalk, pushing a stroller and juggling the toddler in her arms. She was trying to fix the blanket that had been shielding the baby in the stroller from the sun. She was slightly off balance and the attempt was not effortless. And I mumbled to myself, full of disdain and pity, "Babies are the worst." And I meant it. They ruined your life. Your ability to function. And I didn't bat an eye at my assessment. Now that I've received treatment and feel back to my "normal" self, I reflect upon that bitterness that pretty much oozed from my pores and it absolutely feels like I'm looking at a different person. All my life, I've been a baby magnet. I loved babies and babies loved me. There was  a baby in the room? Gimme. I wanted to hold and snuggle and coo. And on more occasions than I can count, babies would reach for me. Babies of strangers, babies of friends, babies of family. Gimme. So it was extra shocking and a true wake up call when I met my cousin's daughter at Owen's first Christmas.

Little Piper was born six months after Owen and was all of four months old when the holidays rolled around. First baby for my cousin Tatum and first grandbaby for my Aunt Lindi, my mom's sister. We always celebrate Christmas Eve with my mom's side of the family and there was an extra buzz of excitement since this would be a "first" for so many. I had started seeing my therapist at this point and was planning on talking to my parents on this trip about that decision. There was a lot going on. We were looking to move from Los Angeles to the Jacksonville area, I was finally emerging from my cocoon of denial regarding my depression and now it was Christmas, the most anticipated and stress-inducing holiday of the year. There were a lot of balls in the air. Would everyone get there in time in order to eat and get to church on time? It's our family tradition for my mom to make her famous lasagna on Christmas Eve. Dan doesn't eat pasta. Chicken parmesan is usually whipped together for him. My cousin was bringing a friend who didn't eat meat. A meatless sauce was whipped up for her. My uncle and his wife were coming for the first time in maybe fifteen years. And there were two babies experiencing their first Christmas. And two sets of parents experiencing their first as parents. And two sets of grandparents experiencing their children being parents and themselves being grandparents for the first time.

Owen was trying to walk (and would end up being an official walker a few weeks later) so he needed constant supervision. Postpartum depression does wonders for your anxiety levels, in my experience. So I was on edge even more than usual. And my parents house was far from baby proofed. Everything was a trap - from the holiday decorations to the entertainment center which was just at his pull up level to the dock leading to the canal with no barriers in the backyard. No amount of wine was going to help ease the hyper-alert-jittery-mania I was experiencing. I imagine my eyes darting quickly side to side, assessing the dangers Owen could find and yet I'm sure that to the outside world, I seemed fine. Everything was bubbling under the surface, like an underwater volcano. And the slightest shift in my tectonic plates would cause the inevitable eruption.

And that shift was sparked by a sweet, tiny baby girl.

When I looked at her, I couldn't remember Owen being that small. Ever. But the way her fingers moved felt familiar. The alien-ish pointing and flexing, constantly moving and grasping and intertwining together and apart. And the gurgles and coos and sighs and little cries sounded familiar. And all this familiarity was not a positive association. I wanted to run away. I wanted to walk out the door and not look back. I could feel my breath catching when I looked at her. But I played the part of supportive and excited cousin. "She's so sweet!" I exclaimed. And I gave her my finger to hold. And I remarked on her tiny feet and soft skin. And then, oh no, gotta go, Owen is gonna pull over that wooden reindeer. I avoided as much as I could by playing the part of attentive mother. And then in a moment when my defenses were down and I had gone to show Tatum where she could give Piper a diaper change in the bedroom where we were staying, I paused to chat and fished for how Tatum was really feeling. "It's hard, isn't it?" I asked. "Yeah," she replied as she changed her daughter. "But she's so great. And such an easy baby." And she was being truthful. Which made me even sadder. And then the moment I had been dreading arrived while I was wallowing in my self-pity. Tatum had finished changing Piper and she asked completely innocuously, "Do you want to hold her?"

NO, my inner self screamed. I wanted nothing to do with her and her sweet little hands and sweet little squeals and her sweet little drools. I felt a tightness in my chest and I was having difficulty breathing. I had gone down too deep and the pressure was squeezing me on all sides, inside and out. But the show must go on.

"Sure," I smiled. And suddenly I was holding her. And what had always felt like the most natural thing in my life - a baby in my arms - felt the most foreign. She felt like a sack of sugar and I had no connection at all. I kept up conversation about what I don't know and then she started to fuss and, phew, I had found my out so I handed her back to her mother.

Holy shit. This was way worse than I ever realized.

My therapist had suggested before I left for the holidays that I might consider going on depression medication. But that seemed ridiculous to me. I wasn't currently depressed. I just wanted to talk to someone about the month immediately following Owen's birth because I felt like I might have some "unresolved issues" regarding how it all went down. I wasn't going to start meds. She said that was fine but to just think about it and we could talk about it more when I got back. "In fact, "she suggested, "why don't you go ahead and make an appointment with the psychiatrist and then if you wanted to cancel before it arrived at least you'd be scheduled in? Even if she ends up prescribing you something, you don't have to take it," she reminded me.

It was standing in my parents back hallway, fighting back tears and swallowing my volcano that I realized I would not be canceling my appointment.

* * * * *

A few weeks after getting back to LA, I had my first appointment with a psychiatrist. She agreed that I would benefit from medication. And for the first time, I agreed. The way it was described to me was that the normal connections in my brain that allowed for a normal emotional life had been worn down and were no longer connecting. The medication would help to rebuild those connections. A few weeks after starting on a low dose, I was driving home after having brunch with two of my girlfriends. We had a fun meal together, catching up on the news in each other's lives. Owen had been well-behaved and happy at the restaurant. It was another beautiful day and I was excited to get home to spend the rest of it with Dan. And as I slowed to a stop at a four-way intersection, I felt myself start to smile. And a light switched on. I felt happy. For the first time in nearly a year, I felt an old familiar emotion: Happiness.

There were more ups and downs. The lowest dose was not enough. We had to make adjustments and I continued with therapy. But eventually, we found the right balance. I was so worried before taking medication that it would give me a false sense of contentment. That I would feel 'better' but it would just be another mask. Instead I found that it gave me myself back. Depression had hidden that self deep below the lies it tells. But I was still in there. I was just waiting for a lifeline to help me back to the surface. 

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.

* * * * *

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.

* * *

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.

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...

The Hardest Cry

Something was wrong immediately after birth. They cut me open, took Owen out and I didn't want to look at him. I didn't care. I was so so tired both physically and mentally that I just wanted to close my eyes and sleep forever. But that wasn't the movie version of how I was supposed to feel. I was supposed to look at him and feel the most beautiful, powerful love I'd ever experienced. A love beyond understanding. Angels singing, announcing that true love had arrived. The doctors swept Owen away to be examined and cleared medically first thing anyway. I feel like they may have held him up for me to see but I also may have imagined that since. Because I don't remember the first time I saw him. I do remember the first time I held him. Because I put on a show. They brought him over and as I held him, I laughed and smiled and did the things that I had seen in movies and tv and figured what was expected of me. I stared at his all-knowing eyes and thought, Why don't I feel anything?, as I continued to coo my hellos. I didn't feel anything emotionally and there was the physical aspect as well. Because I had been shaking so badly before the surgery, I literally couldn't feel my arms. As I'm sitting here in my lavender-painted studio at my desk (which is really my old dining room table from my LA apartment) I am associating a heavy feeling with the first time I held Owen. As in, my arms were totally asleep. You know when a limb falls asleep and you can poke it and it feels like a hunk of meat, unattached yet attached to yourself? That's the feeling I have about that first encounter. Owen's seven pounds felt like a seventy pound weight on my chest. My mind and my body were, quite literally, numb.

Once the doctors and nurses had cleaned us both up, it was time to transfer us to the recovery room. They propped this ginoromous weight of a baby on my chest and nestled him in the crook of my arm. I felt panic. He was going to slide out of my dead arms on the way down the hall. There was no way I'd be able to hold him and keep him safe during the transfer. So as the nurses are arranging my arms and him in them, I say, "Can't Dan hold him?" And the nurses exchanged a concerned look. One said, "You don't want to hold your baby?" Her tone was clearly worried. Which pissed me off!! Don't shower me with pity and concern, lady. It's not that I don't want to hold him - I don't want to kill him! I snapped back, "Of course I do! But my arms are asleep. I'm afraid I'll drop him." The exchanged look of concern happened again. How dare they?! The other said, "You won't drop him. Don't worry." I felt dismissed. Don't worry?? I wanted to scream, "You don't know that!!! You don't know anything!!! And stop looking at me like something is wrong with me because I don't want to hurt my baby! Or have anything to do with him!" But instead I shut down, swallowed my sobs and let the heaviness of it all lay on my chest, along with my sweet baby, as they pushed me to the recovery room. I was too tired to do anything else.

It was when we were laying in the recovery room that the sobs stopped being swallowed. And the tears stopped being faked. I was trying to breastfeed for the first time and he wasn't really able to latch on and I thought maybe if I sang it would relax us both. And I'm not sure where Dan was because my memory is not with him in it. I'm pretty sure he was standing right by us but I didn't see him. Instead it was just me and Owen and I started to sing, "Hush little baby don't say a word, Mama's gonna buy you a mockingbird..." and my voice cracked. Suddenly I was crying and I couldn't stop. I tried to keep singing through the tears and I am certain I sounded like a lunatic. The enormity of singing to my baby for the first time was too much for me to handle. Maybe that sounds like a typical reaction, that singing to your baby to help calm him for the first time is a big event. And feeling emotional about it is nothing to be concerned about. But these weren't tears of joy. There was an immense sorrow that was starting to creep into the corners of my heart. The water was starting to seep under the door. I was in complete denial that I had a baby all of the sudden. I couldn't reconcile the version of actual events with my imagined version of how it was all "supposed" to happen. So the fact that I was singing to my baby for the first time didn't compute. And why did I pick this song? Is this what I really wanted to sing for the first time to Owen? No. Did I actually have a "first song" picked out? No. But he was crying and I wanted him to hush. And I wanted to eat. Oh my god why won't they just let me eat?

That is when the tears started.

***

But it was on our way home from the hospital when they reached their peak of hysteria. And it started as I was being wheeled out. Rolling down the incredibly long maternity ward hallway I started sobbing. This is not how anything was supposed to go. There were women there with family and friends. People waiting in the visitors room outside the maternity ward doors. We had no one. And I suddenly realized what a mistake that was. And what were we doing leaving with a baby? I wasn't ready. I had made a mistake by having a baby. I was trying to smile. I was trying not to cry as hard as I was crying. But I was gasping for air. The nurse didn't say anything. She didn't ask if I was ok. But that didn't matter because even if she had, I would have said that I was and blamed it on hormones. Once we were in the car, I stopped trying to control the crying. I sat in the backseat next to Owen and was a hysterical mess. Dan asked what was wrong. And I didn't know. I couldn't explain it. But I was experiencing the deepest level of grief that I had ever felt. So Dan just let me cry.

When we walked in the door to our apartment, I collapsed.

I wasn't ready. When we left for the hospital on Friday night, I did not think for a second that we would be returning on Tuesday with a baby. I wanted to labor at home, go for walks around the neighborhood, stopping and holding on to Dan as a contraction would pass. I wanted to bounce on my exercise ball and breathe through the pain. And it's astounding looking back now how important that narrative was to me. Becoming a mother was a journey and I had a way that I wanted to the story to go. And the way that it actually did go was miles away from my plan.

To be continued...continued: My PPD Journey

Here's a post that I've had sitting in the queue as a draft since November 2013. I wrote it knowing that I needed help, which you'll see, but at the time I thought I just needed to process the birth experience and the weeks immediately following it. I didn't know yet how deep those scars had gone.

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Getting Help 11/14/13, 10am It's been 8 1/2 months since Owen was born. And just now, for the first time, I picked up the phone and called a therapist. I have stress sweat just from leaving a message. And I'm in the land of therapy...everyone I know has a therapist and still there is a stigma attached in my brain. I've never asked for help like this before. I've always powered through. And it's taken me the better part of a year to finally make this call.  How many women don't make the call? After Owen was born, I couldn't stop crying. And yet at the same time, I felt completely numb. Where was the bliss I was supposed to feel after becoming a mom? Where was the overwhelming love? In retrospect, I get it. I experienced a physical trauma that my mind and body needed to heal from. Pushing for seven hours and ending up with a c-section anyway was not the way I had envisioned any of this going down. I was on no sleep and there was no sleep in sight. I had had major abdominal surgery and I'm allergic to most painkillers. The ones they could give me made me feel worse so I stuck with Tyenol. TYENOL ONLY AFTER SURGERY.  Can you imagine? All while trying to nurse and care for a new person. I couldn't care for myself. Who was I to expect that I could care for him? But this is all retrospect. In the moment, I felt guilt, anger, fear, pain, anxiety...the list goes on. And now, 8 1/2 months later, I still feel residual guilt and waves of sadness that come out of seemingly nowhere. So I'm finally getting help so that I can get past this.  Because for the most part now, I love being Owen's mom. And one day I'd like to give him a sibling. But there is no way I can even think about it until I address the scars I acquired when I brought him into the world. One of the most frustrating things about dealing with the aftershocks of childbirth has been the lack of support I've been able to find. I called my obgyn to see if she recommended any therapists that specialize in postpartum issues. Her nurse called me back and said I had to call the number on my insurance card. Well no shit. I'd already done research online through my insurance provider. Eleven pages came up with psychologists that are covered. Eleven. It'd be nice to have that list narrowed down a bit, especially since it's difficult to find reviews or personal websites for any of these therapists. A month or so ago, I finally felt strong enough to read Brooke Shields' book Down Came the Rain about her struggle with postpartum depression. I had definitely heard of it but the idea of reading about anyone else's experience just seemed to depress me more. But it'd been half a year since Owen came along, so I felt like I could read it objectively. But you know what? I checked it out from the library and scurried around like a little mouse, afraid someone might see me looking for it. And when I couldn't find it, I finally asked the librarian and she took me to where it was, picked it up and read the subtitle aloud. My embarrassment was then off the charts. I had O in his stroller so I clearly was getting this book for myself. She then asked me if I had heard of a postpartum support group that a friend of her's had started in LA. I looked up the name of it when I got home but can't remember it now. Reading Brooke's book made me realize that I should talk to someone. I was reading passages aloud to my husband because it felt like I could have written it myself. I had such similar experiences and emotions and I finally realized that I wasn't alone. That I shouldn't be so ashamed. And that I couldn't just push those experiences out of my mind because I was feeling better now. They keep bubbling up unexpectedly and I need to learn how to cope with them.

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I wrote in my last post that the story of my postpartum depression and experience was "to be continued." I'm planning on sharing bits of my book here as I continue to work on it because:

1. I'm at a standstill. I have a bunch written and I'm not sure where to go from here. I probably need an editor to steer me in the write right direction. But lacking that, I figured I could start sharing here and maybe find a shape.

2. I don't want me being stuck to hinder the whole purpose of writing this book which is:
I want the line of communication to be opened. Even if just little pieces of it resonate with you - whether you're going through it now or you went through something similar in your own journey or you know someone who faced struggles - I just want women to know you're not alone. There are such beautiful pieces going around now that are helping to open up the dialogue on the realities of motherhood. And I'm ready to share what I went through.

So this is going to continue "to be continued..."

Until next time...