Under a Cloud - Living with Postnatal Depression
Please don’t feel bad that you didn’t know I had postnatal depression. Neither did I. I worked it out last week, after suffering for approximately 2.5 years.
So I’ve been reading up about it. And so much has started to make sense. Why did I let the first 2.5 years as a mother as two feel as though they were lived under a cloud?
I felt guilty. Guilty that having two healthy kids should make me the happiest mother in the world when all I felt I was doing was complaining about how hard it was, that my son was sleeping badly, that he was so demanding when our daughter in comparison had been such an easy baby/toddler. Guilty because I was complaining about my kids when my good friend had lost her much desired second daughter to stillbirth.
I had mild PND after giving birth to K. It was mostly feeling like a hopeless mother who couldn’t handle anything without help, and who did not feel a major love for her daughter from the beginning. But I had help and company and the PND disappeared quickly leaving me only with a slight fear that I may hurt her when I knew I wouldn’t.
So I was prepared to face similar feelings after having my son two years later and wasn’t I thrilled when they failed to materialise?! I fell in love with him at once. My birth experience, despite being scary, was so satisfying mentally and physically that I felt almost on a high.
And then S suddenly fell ill. He passed out on a walk in a baby sling at 5 weeks old and was taken to hospital by ambulance. I was sure that he had suffered positional asphyxia but was told he was very ill. I couldn’t fathom how he could have gotten so ill. Within hours the local hospital in the place we were holidaying had him rushed to the ICU of the largest children’s hospital in our hometown, 2 hrs’ drive away. My husband and I drove so fast that we got there seconds after the ambulance despite stopping for petrol. The paramedics’ jaws dropped open when they saw us. S was crying loudly so I was sure he’d be ok.
But that night we left our son in ICU and went to our empty apartment (K was still at the holiday location with our nanny), forced to sleep next to our baby’s empty cot. I didn’t want to image “what if…” – if I did, I would surely fall apart. The next day we were told he would be ok but needed to stay in hospital for two weeks for treatment and I stayed there with him. It was a difficult time during which I fought feelings of self-hatred and a deep feeling of blame for what had happened. Had I put him in the sling wrong? Had I bathed him in too cold a room? Had I…?
(Pictured below: the kids just hours before S was hospitalised)
When we left the hospital my Mum came and spent three weeks with me. I felt I should see a psychologist but never ended up going. We talked about what had happened over and over, and most nights I had nightmares. Towards the end of my Mum’s stay I was feeling much better and went to bed early one night to try and make up for the bad nights of sleep I’d been having since the hospital. That night when I woke up to feed S at 1 am I had a text message from my good friend Gosia who was due to have a c-section the next morning. Her unborn 38-week baby girl had died.
I spent the night wide awake and in a complete state of shock. I didn’t want to wake my husband or my mother. I was unable to cry. I texted Gosia twice so that she wouldn’t feel alone. I decided there and then that I wouldn’t ever let her feel alone during this unthinkable ordeal.
The next morning I couldn’t get out of bed. I bawled for days. All I could irrationally think was “My sick son whom I had almost killed through carelessness has gotten better but my friend’s healthy unborn baby has died for no reason.” I felt guilty. Guilty that my bad luck had touched her. Guilty at the feeling of relief that they didn’t need me at the funeral. I couldn’t have been there. I couldn’t have faced seeing the coffin and my newly broken friends. I deleted Gosia from my mobile phone so that I wasn’t tempted to bother her during the first weeks of mourning. I let her know to call me when she needed me.
A month following the worst of their initial grief I became Gosia’s closest supporter. I felt her grief as something that had almost touched me weeks earlier. I started to research stillbirth on the Internet to try and support her as well as to understand it for myself.
I talked to many people about S’s illness and my friend’s loss in the hope of “getting it out”, but I never saw a professional. Later on I realised I must have had fallen into depression because of these events, but did not realise that it was PND and that it was not over yet.
I had plenty of good days, and some motivation. I did my Polish driver’s license and started translating work again, I started exercising and talked my husband into buying a holiday house which I took great pleasure in decorating. I loved being with the kids but was terribly anxious that something bad would happen to them. Also because I was alone much of the time (my husband being away for work most weekdays and not having many friends here), I spent too much time on my own bad thoughts. After weeks of doing well I would find myself reading about stillbirth experiences again. This was “safe” for me as stillbirth was not something that could affect me – I did not plan on having more children. And it gave me a much-needed outlet to cry. Whenever I read anything I would cry my heart out and feel a kind of relief. I was ashamed to admit to this as I felt guilty for reading about other people’s tragedies.
Discovering that “very bad things” can happen suddenly to seemingly healthy babies first- and then second-hand was more than I could deal with. But instead of seeking help I grew anxious and paranoid. My new discovery/fear had cast a shadow over mothering for me, a cloud from under which I have only just begun to emerge.
My paranoia was so acute that even as recently as August last year, when S (aged 2+) vomited, I had a panic attack. He suddenly started to cry loudly and then turned very pale. Then, as he began to gag, it looked like he had stopped breathing. I was mentally picturing calling an ambulance or even reviving him myself. After he threw up it took at least 15 min for me to stop shaking. And still I didn't realise I needed help.
“Everything changed after we had S,” my husband told me one day. “I ceased to exist for you.” That was the other problem I had been trying to ignore. The fact that our romantic life had all but disappeared. My husband’s absorbing and demanding job combined with S’s terrible sleeping (up a million times and mostly sleeping in bed with me as I was too exhausted to get out of bed so often) meant that O had practically moved into the study and its foldout sofabed on the few nights per week that he was at home. And when he was home I was angry and resentful that he didn’t get more involved with the kids, that he travelled far too much. That we had become separate entities – me + kids vs. him + work.
It is only now that I feel so much better that I have come to accept that this is how he works and I am ok with it. When he is home I don’t want to waste that time arguing but spend it together in an enjoyable way.
The breakthrough probably started with Gosia asking me why I am still so upset about her baby’s loss when she and her husband had come to terms with it and want to be happy again and look to the future. She couldn’t understand why I was continuing to read depressing things, and neither could I. But that conversation helped me – I realised that they, who had suffered the ultimate tragedy, were doing ok, and again I felt guilty and faulty that I wasn’t. But I slowly started to feel better.
(Pictured below: Happy days - my and Gosia's innocent debut into motherhood: our older daughters - K, left, and Helenka, aged approx. 4 months)
Soon I was feeling like a new person, and just couldn’t understand it. Why? What had changed? Not long afterwards I met some family friends at my mother in law’s place. They were commenting on how cute our kids are, especially the husband (my OBGYN) as they have three girls. “Shame you don’t want any more,” he said, “But the important thing is you have one of each” (WRONG – the important thing is they are both healthy, I thought). “What are you talking about?” said his wife, “She’s got her hands full. Isn’t it exhausting?” “It’s ok now the kids are a little bigger,” I said, “but the first years were so tough.” Their older two are also two years apart. “I know what you mean,” said Joanna, “I was actually depressed for years when my first two were small, and didn’t even realise it at the time.”
I have decided to go ahead and see a professional to help me tie up any loose ends. I am happy to have gotten through this difficult time, and grateful that it didn’t affect my ability to care for or express my love for my children. I am also hoping it was the reason I wasn’t able to lose as much weight as I wanted ;-) But most of all it just feels so good to be out from under that cloud!!
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