We have a president who wants to put man on Mars, use stem cells to help save lives in need, and someone has even devised a way to clone animals. So why on earth do so many new mothers continue to suffer from postpartum depression, something that seems so easy to eliminate if only modern medicine would make the effort. Okay, so maybe modern medicine is researching this illness as we speak, but with all of the technology in our country alone it just seems we could figure out why our brains and hormones short-circuit soon after childbirth.
Several of my friends have recently become mothers, for some it's not their first, but for others I worry about them because they are new mothers. For me, it was the hardest, darkest time of my life and I just didn't understand it, especially when other moms seemed to be happier than ever nuzzling their little angels. Even Babe was ecstatic to have Jay in his arms and I thought they were beautiful together.
My daughter was born at 10:28 p.m. so I figure my emotional stability left me when she did. I heard her cry, then quiet as her father spoke to her. A girl? "Wow," I thought, I always wanted a baby girl. Tears of joy streamed down my face and into my ears as I lay on the cold, hard table after my c-section. Soon after Babe brought her to me, wrapped like an 8-pound burrito with a little hat on her head, she looked like my grandmother. She was a pretty little thing, the pinkest lips, beautifully shaped eyes and pretty black hair. She was perfect, but somehow I wondered, Who signed me up for THIS?
Up to that point I had suffered, off and on, from depression for about three years so I had experienced the lows but this just didn't make sense to me. A perfect baby, a wonderful man to help me raise her and there I was her mother who wanted nothing more than for her to go to someone who could love her the way she deserved. My mom adored her, maybe she could take her home for awhile?
Our days at home together were filled with bottle-making, diaper changing and naps. I did everything I knew she needed fundamentally, beyond that we just coexisted. For her first two weeks my mom would come over during her lunch breaks to bathe Jay. I looked forward to that time. And when Babe went back to school and work I counted the minutes until he would walk through that door. As Jay got older she too was thrilled to see her daddy come home, she probably wondered why he would leave her alone with me.
As Jay got older, I wondered how long the effects postpartum depression could last because there were times when I just didn't feel like we had truly bonded the way other moms and babies seemed to. Now, nearly six years later, I adore my daughter and wouldn't change a single day we have shared together. But should she decide to have children, I pray she never has to suffer the way I did. No mother should ever look at her child and wonder why she thought having a baby was a good idea.
I regret feeling the way I did during the earliest days of my daughter's life, but I was too young and inexperienced to know that is was okay to talk to someone about my feelings. I thought I was a bad mother and no one had ever talked about feeling the way I did. Convinced my daughter would hate me because of my emotional detachment in her early months, I decided she would be my only child.
After some time I decided to give it another shot. It took a few years for me to get to that point, but after a ton of prayer for sanity postpartum I gave birth to Nas. I was thankful to know that I could truly enjoy a new baby the way a mother should.
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