"'I’m sorry, it sounds like you may just have the baby blues,' were the words that came out of the nurse’s mouth at my OB’s office when I called every day for a week begging for help at one-week postpartum."
"I have always been a hypochondriac with an obsessive fear of dying. I used to get blood work quarterly just to make sure I was OK. If you know anything about depression, you know obsessing over death is a major symptom. Covid knocked the wind out of me."
Going through PPD has been tremendously challenging. As has been raising a newborn. Doing it without my village makes those challenges feel overwhelmingly impossible.
Sometimes newfound motherhood finds you in a doctor’s office, checking your battle wounds from labor and painful delivery. And sometimes it finds you in the waiting room of an ER, clinging to the last bit of sanity you have left-begging for someone to hear you.
"Postpartum depression and anxiety hit me like a freight train. I couldn’t pull myself out from under it. I felt horrible for feeling the way I did because society tells new moms that motherhood shouldn’t be this way."
"I kept trying to quiet the thoughts by telling myself it wasn’t permanent, but it seemed almost impossible to believe. It was like an out of body experience."
"I kept begging the nurse to tell me that I was OK. I kept saying over and over again, “I don’t feel alive. Am I alive?” The nurse kept asking me if I knew that I was repeating that over and over again. I didn’t care though. I didn’t feel like I was in my body. I was so detached from reality and the world around me..."
"I packed a bag at one point so I could run away in the middle of the night. I told myself that they would be OK. He could find a wife that wasn’t such a burden and didn’t cry all the time. My daughter could have a mom that didn’t get angry at every little thing."
