“Is my life ruined because I had a baby?”
“When does having a baby get easier?”
“How do I know if I ruined my life if I had a baby?”
“Did I make a mistake in having a baby?”
“Is my career over because I had a baby?”
Like a Magic 8-Ball, I wanted Google to reveal some reassurance that could give me a sliver of hope.
So I kept typing, unhappy with the sparse and not-good-enough results that were popping up.
All the while, I was being quiet as a mouse, mentally willing my six-week-old daughter not to wake up because, when she did, inevitably she would start screaming and 98% of the time it felt like there was nothing we could do to soothe her.
My husband came back with the burgers, fries, and milkshakes, our baby miraculously stayed asleep through the opening and closing of the car door, and we started driving to and through Tilden Park, hoping the motion of the drive would keep her asleep and allow us to eat some food and just be normal for five minutes.
We hadn’t left the house for anything other than a pediatrician appointment and Thanksgiving at our friends since she was born, so the drive through a park that we’d frequented dozens of times pre-baby was supposed to be for fun.
To get out into the world again and be a happy little new family like we were “supposed” to be.
But our daughter woke up ten minutes into the drive and halfway into the burger, and she started howling and screaming again.
I felt defeated. Hopeless.
I started comforting my daughter, of course, but really what I wanted to do was more Googling to help get me through my painful thoughts and feelings.
Turning the car around and taking the drive back through the hills to our home as twilight settled, I remember looking out the car window, seeing the pretty, peaceful homes slip by my view, aching with longing and sadness and thinking:
“The person inside that home’s going to sleep tonight.”
“And that other person will sleep tonight, too.”
“That person probably doesn’t have a child so their life is great.”
“I have a baby and I’m never going to sleep again. My life is ruined.”
And that’s when I knew that what I was dealing with was more than The Baby Blues.
I began to suspect I had strayed into the land of Postpartum Depression and that I needed help.
Postpartum Depression is much different than “The Baby Blues”
I’ll share more about my story in a minute but first I want to provide just a little psychoeducation about what Postpartum Depression is and why it’s different than “The Baby Blues” so you can understand why I suspected I was dealing with it and how I got myself support.
