Life in the Dark: How I realized I was suffering from a postpartum mood disorder
My husband is a high school band director. We're pretty used to marching season being a season of survival mode in our house. Starting in late July, he's busier than usual with after school practices, Friday night football games, pep rallies, parades, and once October rolls around, Saturday marching contests. This means that I hold down the fort at home on my own a lot during this season. All the laundry, grocery shopping, appointments, and general wellness things fall on me. It's tough, especially because I'm also working full time. Well, this year, I have two babies to keep track of. It's a whole new level of busy.
I'm usually the type of person that's always on-the-go. I'm always planning for or working on something. I wouldn't say I'm type A, but I do like to have something going on to keep myself feeling productive. Well, because of this, I usually have a hard time realizing when I'm stressed. More often than not, the only way I ever know if I'm spread too thin or under too much pressure was when I have a serious breakdown moment.
I remember feeling somewhat spread thin last year during marching season. The band had advanced in the rankings a few times and that meant that Stephen was away even more with further rounds of marching contests. I had longer hours at work because of an extra after school teaching commitment I took on. I was in my second trimester of pregnancy with Ryan and I just felt like I couldn't handle being Zachary's sole caretaker and playmate every weekend. It felt like all I did was keep him fed, entertained, and cared for or otherwise I was waiting for Stephen to come home so I could sleep. I didn't hang out with other people, I didn't really enjoy any hobbies, and I just felt kind of deflated and lost. I wondered if it was possible to go through depression that was pregnancy related, but once things got really difficult for me, it suddenly seemed that football season was done. Marching contests had finished. It was Christmas and everyone was cheerful and life felt manageable again. To be honest, I kind of just forgot that I ever felt unhappy.
I started suspecting that something was wrong again early in the summer when I spent more money than I actually had on a couple of woven wraps. I saw them and thought they were so useful and they'd definitely make keeping up with Zachary easier since I could easily walk around holding Ryan and have my hands free. So I bought one. Then I bought another. Then I had buyer's remorse and sold one. Then I found one in a "better" pattern, so I bought that one. The pattern continued and I had 6 different carriers at one point and I had one baby. And also, we're supposed to be living frugally in hopes of paying off our student loan debt. How did any of this make sense? I became so impulsive with my purchases. Why? Why did I NEED all these things to make me happy? What was I chasing after? Because having that many baby carriers certainly did not mean my husband was around more. It didn't make me any less stressed. In fact, in made me MORE stressed because I felt enormous amount of financial pressure because of the money I had spent. This is just one of the many things that I obsessed over. My anxiety was through the roof and I didn't even realize it.
Maybe a week before the school year started, I really hit my breaking point. I was looking for a new full-time sitter for the boys and gearing up to go back to our hectic fall season of work and marching season and remembering how absolutely awful I felt last year when Stephen was gone all the time and I just felt like I needed an outlet. My whole childhood, we had lots of pets. Dogs, cats, birds, gerbils, rabbits, an aquarium. We were basically a zoo. Well, somehow I decided that if we only had a dog, we'd have a reason to spend more time outside on the weekends. In my mind, the dog and the toddler could run around with each other an get energy out while I sat and took care of Ryan or got a meal cooked or laundry started. I always felt so guilty when Zac would say, "Mama! Run! Follow me!" and I was so bone-deep exhausted that I couldn't. I thought having a dog to chase around would be the perfect companion. So, I convinced my husband and myself that a dog would solve all of our problems. I bargained with God. "God, if I sell two of these woven wraps, I'm taking it as a sign that you want us to get a dog." Ironically, two wraps sold the very next day. So I went out and found us a sweet little beagle puppy. Yes. A puppy. Not just any dog, but a 10 week old, doesn't like to be by herself, tiny baby dog.
I think it only took about a day for me to realize that I had lost all control of my senses and that I needed someone to step in and help me clean up the mess that I made. It took a lot of courage for me to sit down with my husband and tell him I couldn't handle my life anymore, that I thought I actually had a mental health problem and that I needed to talk to someone. I worried anxiously about every parenting decision I ever made because I felt like I couldn't trust myself to make sound decisions anymore. I hated myself for doing this. I was so worried that Stephen would start to resent me for being so up and down all the time. I was so stressed out about handling Stephen's work hours during marching season. I stopped caring about a lot of the things that used to be important to me. I was easily frustrated. Even my spiritual life had become dry. I was not myself.
The whole ordeal made me slow down and think about what my kids REALLY needed. Do they care about stuff? Or do they need a mom that is level-headed and in control of her emotions? The answer was pretty clear to me. We found a great new home for the puppy, and it broke my heart to watch my sweet boy say "buh-byeee!" but it was what I needed to make an appointment with a counselor.
A postpartum mood disorder looks different for everyone. It looks like spending hundreds of dollars on "stuff" you don't need because you've convinced yourself it'll make this season of life easier and then absolutely HATING yourself for being so impulsive. It looks like losing your cool and not being able to bring yourself back to a functional state for DAYS all because the toddler woke up the baby and we were running late. It's spending hours a day thinking up tiny, elaborate scenarios to obsess over, worry about, or plan for because for some reason, your brain will not slow down. It's worring about these imaginary scenarios so much that you get a headache or an upset stomach. It's desperately wanting to take 2 hours away to actually try on clothes at the mall because you realistically need new clothes, but feeling crippling guilt about not being home. It's guilt so crippling that you walk into the first store, try on one outfit, take a look at your mom bod and decide it's not worth it because you don't look like you anymore anyway. It's sitting in your car in the parking lot and crying because you don't know how you got this way. You wish you could just go lay in bed undisturbed until this season of life passes, and then you feel crippling guilt AGAIN for not wanting to just soak in every precious minute of your kid's baby years. It's resenting your husband because he doesn't have to feel this way and then feeling guilty because this is hard on him too. It's fractured relationships. It's loneliness. And it's exhausting. Thankfully, there are so many different ways to cope with postpartum issues, and they don't last forever. I remind myself of that often. This too shall pass. And God is with us even in our suffering.
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