Part one: Walking in the Dark

I wanted to write this before now but it felt too raw, too vulnerable, too much. I wanted to write in the midst of it, but I find I can never do that. I can’t write when I’m in the murky middle of my circumstances because it feels too exposed and ugly. I have to wrap my own mind around it before I can share. I have to get some distance from it before I can tell you about it. So here we are with some distance and I want to tell you now. This is my postpartum story — the one about bits of anxiety and sadness and the scary thoughts that had a stranglehold on my heart.

I want to start by saying, if you’ve just had a baby and you’re feeling like maybe your mind has gone haywire, you’re not alone. It’s okay to feel this way. It won’t last forever. Your body is a hurricane storm of hormones and emotions, flinging out thoughts like shrapnel in the wind. They feel uncontrollable. They feel all consuming. But they will not last forever. And as I learned in the book I read most recently, you have a choice. But we’ll get to that.

I wanted to be a mom as long as I can remember – I’ve told you this in writing. So you’d think that upon the birth of my child – FINALLY! My own child! – I would have been elated. And I really was — it was all very exciting and so surreal. When a day you’ve dreamed about forever finally comes, it’s here in your grasp, it’s like you’re looking around the room to see if anyone else knows it’s happening. Like, “Hey, do you see this!? They’re letting me take this baby home! It’s mine!” It’s weird and wonderful and makes you momentarily question if you’re even old enough for such a responsibility. A whole new person in my care? What? When do the real grown-ups show up?

Nixon was born early(-er than I thought he would be), my milk didn’t come in for five days, he was very jaundice and on a bili light at home for 24 hours a day and at the doctor every single day for the first two weeks of his life. He was having his heel poked for blood draws on all of those days. I was supposed to be triple feeding him and weighing him before and after he ate. And also, did I mention the major event that is c-section and recovery? I was so painfully (or blissfully?) naive before and would think, “Oh, she had a baby,” like it was the simplest thing. Oh my gosh. Having a baby is A WHOLE THING. I actually felt like I was going to split open or rip a stitch every time I would cough or laugh or sneeze. Ask Aaron. I specifically asked him NOT to be funny.

Sweet boy glowing on his bili light.

So those early days were certainly a lot more than just having a baby and simply taking him home two days later like I thought we would. And I’m not saying that other people don’t have it worse. Babies are born every day with more issues than these, but for this first time mom, it felt overwhelming. Add to this complete exhaustion. This would all be a lot on a normal amount of sleep but we weren’t sleeping! Nixon was awake every single hour of the night for weeks. I’m not trying to make it sound worse than it was, but I’m trying to remember it as accurately as possible. I was very (very, very, very) tired. So that’s the backdrop for where I was and what I was dealing with in the early days.

I started praying against postpartum depression when I was six months pregnant. Knowing my own propensity for anxiety and bouts of mild depression in my life prior to Nixon, I just asked God to not even let it be part of my story. I asked him to spare me. And yet, I can tell you now, after coming out of the fog, that he did not. And perhaps it’s so I could come here on the other side and tell you about it.

It started with mild anxiety in the week or so after Nixon was born. This wasn’t initially alarming to me because I felt the same way after my miscarriage in 2018. Anxiety swept over me as my hormones leveled out again after I lost that baby but it went away after a month or so. But with Nixon it lingered longer. I couldn’t let anyone else take care of him even though I desperately needed a break because I was so concerned about him. Thoughts flooded my mind constantly like, Is he eating enough? Is he sick? What if I drop him? What if he dies? Did I miss the chance to connect with him because I didn’t get immediate skin-to-skin when he was born? Were we cooking him on that jaundice light? I still have nightmares about that last one — I would wake up in the night and his little body felt so hot so I would lay awake with his body against mine, waiting for him to feel cool again. (Part of his jaundice care meant taking his temperature every few hours and writing it down. He was never actually overheating temperature-wise, but I felt terrible.)

As someone who values efficiency and order, I prided myself on having my house cleaned up and everything in its place and dinner made when Aaron got home from work, so the fact that none fo those things got done in the early weeks weighed on me. I put ENORMOUS pressure on myself to easily have a baby and get back to my normal life — to just fit him in to my daily agenda and to do so very breezily. When that absolutely did not happen (because it’s outrageously unrealistic) I felt like a failure who just couldn’t balance everything.

And those anxious thoughts continued as the weeks of no sleep wore on, only they seemed to be getting worse. It was always in the dark of night, after a particularly frustrating day, when Nixon didn’t nap well and I didn’t get things done around the house and Aaron and I didn’t have a chance to connect, that’s when the lies would start pouring in. Or I would sit on social media while he nursed reading about all the ways you should simply “watch for sleepy cues” and the baby would practically put themselves to sleep or how everyone was “so in love” with baby from day one, that’s when I’d have horrible thoughts. I would sit in his room, rocking back and forth, back and forth, thinking things like,

“You shouldn’t be a mom. You don’t know what you’re doing.”
“Moving to Nebraska and having a baby was a mistake.”
“How could you not feel so in love with your child?”
“There is something wrong with you.”

On top of these thoughts I was worried about taking him anywhere because I was afraid he was going to cry. I thought he would start to cry in the middle of a store and I wouldn’t know what to do. I was worried I wouldn’t have his diaper bag packed right and not have the things I needed for him. I was concerned about taking him to my own six-week checkup because I didn’t want him to cry and make me look incompetent. I felt like I would be embarrassed by not being able to calm him and people would look at me like, “Why doesn’t she know how to take care of her baby?” And of course if I was a “real mom” who loved her child, I would know what to do.

One month old

Instagram and social media did not help. I might say you should avoid social media altogether as a new mom. Moms posted pictures of their five week old sleeping through the night and how they were so in love with their baby. I couldn’t get Nixon to sleep longer than three hours, let alone through the whole night. I did what I call the “night dance.” This is the dance of waking up, feeding, rocking, shushing, putting back to bed, and hoping to sleep for twenty minutes before it started over again. This night dance was always a mystery because when I laid down, I had no idea just how much half-sleep I would get before cries pulled me back awake. It honestly caused another side of anxiety where I just dreaded going to bed because I didn’t know what the night would hold.

So I wanted to post pictures of Nixon and tell you how much I loved him, but I didn’t feel like I loved him. I loved my son the moment he was born because of who he is – he’s my son. He came out of my own body. But I looked at him and felt like he could be anyone else’s baby. (I feel so bad about this now I can hardly tell you about it. But it’s truth.) I was taking care of him day and night but I didn’t feel very connected to him – not like I wanted to – not like I knew I could. I cried one day after my mom and sister left my house and told Aaron, “I feel like they love him more than I do.” I told my friend one time, “I guess I just feel like this is a long babysitting job that never ends.” So the love I had for him wasn’t a feeling. I felt like he took a lot of work. I felt like he cried a lot. I felt like he turned my world upside down. I felt like I was barely surviving. But I didn’t feel like I loved him. Love was a choice in those days. It was an action word more than a feeling. But I felt bad that it wasn’t feeling also.

These feelings of non-connection lasted for months. I wanted to connect with Nixon. I wanted to feel so in love with him — that heart-bursting, soul-busting, mushy, gushy love that makes you feel like you could spontaneously combust at the sight of them. I didn’t want to keep ruminating over these crazy thoughts. I knew in my head that these things weren’t true. I could tell myself they weren’t true, but I still felt them. So I stumbled through the early months of having a baby. I felt like a bad mom and a bad wife. As someone who strives to do all things well, I felt like I was doing nothing well, and instead just feeling absolutely crazy — so very unlike myself. I didn’t recognize my body or my own mind. I prayed and prayed and prayed but the feelings of anxiety and sadness persisted.

And it’s not like they were debilitating. I still took care of myself and my child. I was taking care of our home. It could have been much worse and for some, it is. But not feeling like yourself for months on end — feeling like you’re walking around in the dark and you can’t find the light switch during a time you know is supposed to be happy and exciting — is isolating. People kept telling me, “Soak it up!! It goes fast! You’ll miss it!” which just caused me to feel worse because I knew I wasn’t doing it “right.” I wasn’t gloriously soaking. I was doing something more akin to drowning. It felt like trying to navigate through dense fog.

I had plenty of friends and family around to support me, but I didn’t tell anyone I felt this way. I figured everyone else just knew more than me about being a mom because I hadn’t heard anyone say they felt this way. I knew postpartum hormones were wild but by month three I was beginning to believe that maybe this was just my life now and feeling this way was the new normal so I better get used to it. I figured other people didn’t feel this way at all and something was wrong with me. And that’s the biggest lie the devil wants all of us to believe every day of our lives: that we are alone.

Thankfully, by God’s mercy, I came to find that none of this was true.

More to come…