It Goes On....

Bill and I have been having a lot of long talks lately because I have found myself thinking more and more about why I'm here, how I got to this place, and where I am going to go from here. My life was stopped in its tracks and given a fork in the road, but the choice of which way to go was made for me. Bill says I have a every right to be mad about the hand I have been dealt. But I feel that is just wasted energy. I've always been a worrier, since I was very young. My mother cursed the day I could read the "no parking" sign and basically panicked myself into a meltdown because I was convinced a cop was going to haul us away. As I have gotten older, it's only become worse. I can no longer fly on planes without tremendous panic (in my defense, a plane I was on lost engine power and had to make an emergency landing....it's hard to come back from that!). I fear the first day of school still even though I am the teacher. I worry about my sisters driving back and forth to Maryland. My anxiety hit an all-time high though once Sam was born. The joy of his birth was taken from me when he was whisked away to the NICU minutes after his delivery. The shaky shelf I had built for myself to stand on, suddenly crumbled beneath me. I held it together in the hospital as best I could. However, several times I let the cracks show. The nurses watched as tears streamed down my cheeks at some point each day. Bill held me on those moments I was in our hospital room, trying to pump for my baby that was rooms away, and I would rake back sobs. I know having a child brings forth all sorts of anxiety, even to the most well-prepared and stable of people. But this was like nothing I had experienced. I would shut my eyes to get the much-needed sleep I had been deprived of, only to have my mind turn on me. I would dream of death, dying, to me, my baby, my parents. My OCD went into overdrive to compensate. If I prayed enough, nothing would happen. I would cycle through prayers while these absurd, awful thoughts would press their way into my prayers. I would be saying a "Hail Mary" and picture my father dropping dead from smoking. Halfway through an "Our Father" there would be a little coffin floating through the blackness of my mind. Immediately I my body would react, my insides would wrench and I would heave within at these thoughts. Sitting amongst the stark white walls of the hospital room we were calling home for the week, my eyes would open wide and I would hit the wall I was staring at, all in an attempt to rid myself of the awful thoughts. Nothing helped though, I was shuffling through the days in my pajamas, convinced that once we got home things would change. They didn't.
Some of you are probably asking yourselves right now, "Why didn't she get help?" If there is one thing you should be taking away from my blog, it's that I'm an open book. My pregnancy was no different. I fought with my midwife about going back on anti-depressants, which I had abruptly stopped taking once I peed on the stick. I thought I could hack it without the meds (even though I had been on them for years at this point). Poor Bill. I would sit down to dinner with a smile on my face and by the end of the meal be crying and angry at him for no apparent reason. I was a mess. But for some reason, I needed everyone's approval to go back on my meds. I inquired with friends, family, doctors about taking drugs while pregnant. I'm not going to lie. People were harsh. For the first time in my life, I was ashamed that I needed help. Many people told me how they were afraid to even take Tylenol while pregnant, let alone an anti-depressant. So I was left to think of myself as weak and selfish. How dare I want to quiet the nagging anxious voices in my head, God was blessing me with a child after all. How could I not just take this pregnancy in stride and do what was good for the baby? So you see, even though I was honest with myself and some others, I was relegated to sitting in the "bad mommy" chair for a time-out. I guess mommy guilt can start as soon as conception. My midwives ( who I screamed about in my car one day and called "the kiwi-eating, elliptical machine bitch who was nothing like me" and the other one who wrote in my chart "Patient admits to eating lots of doughnuts) always got this look on their faces like "how dare you" when I mentioned going back on the drugs. But my doctor, god bless her, appreciated my honesty and talked to me frankly about going back on them in my third trimester to avoid the very thing that was happening to me now. But because she was the lone wolf in a pack of people who had no problem sharing their opinions about how awful a person I would be if I started "using" again, I refrained from meds until my 37th week.
By then it was too little too late. My doctor met with me in the hospital and because of Sam's traumatic birth, upped my dosage. If you know anything about anti-depressants though, they take time to kick-in. So it wasn't like I was taking a magic happy pill and light would return to my eyes that day. No, it would be weeks before anything would change. And now, I wasn't just dealing with depressive thoughts, but anxiety too.
Again, I thought the safety and comfort of my own four walls of my house would return a sense of normalcy to my life. I would be able to shut my eyes and actually sleep. I would be able to hold my baby and not have the vivid image of him not breathing flash before my eyes. I was taking my medication and I had faith that my energy would return and my happy, sarcastic self would be back. I didn't bounce back though.
I wouldn't sleep in our bedroom at first. I had to "sleep" on the couch with my hand in the baby's bassinet. I put sleep in quotes because I was often staying up until 3 in the morning just to ensure he was breathing. This did wonders for my sleep-deprived mind. If and when I did fall asleep, from sheer exhaustion, I would wake with a start and touch Sam and make him move so I knew he was alive and my nightmares had not become a reality.
So this was motherhood, I remember thinking to myself. I started thinking about friends who had more than one child and wondered aloud that they must be most stable women in the world. Surely anyone who had felt the way I was feeling would NEVER enter into this childbearing thing again. The cracks in my foundation were starting to show, but I was doing everything I could to manage them and patch them up so no one knew. Again, I was blessed, how dare I be feeling this way. I would wear pajamas all day until right before Bill was coming home. From 2 pm on, I would work like a madwoman to make sure everything looked authentic and real as a happy mom would. I'd do all the dishes, fold all the laundry, give Sam a bath, put him in clean clothes, throw on my own maternity clothes and some make-up and wait for Bill. I wanted to make sure I was still fooling him, maybe then I could fool myself. I would show him everything I had done and he would praise my efforts, but then I would basically force the baby upon him. Sam, being a little peanut still, was like a foreign object to Bill. Most fathers have a hard time with newborns because there is really nothing to relate to or interact with and we, as a society, talk about how normal this is. Yet this same society expects moms to birth a baby, try and breastfeed, live without sleep and hit the ground running within 6 weeks of their birth. I can only imagine what I would have been like had I had to take a normal maternity leave! But that's a whole other blog entry.
I would snap at Bill when he got home that he needed to take the baby. He had the luxury of working all day afterall in the Syracuse City Schools mind you, and I had been trapped at home all day with a squawking infant. He would ask to go change the laundry and I would roll my eyes. So slowly, my gig was up. I gave up on breastfeeding after two weeks. I just couldn't keep it up. I would pump every two hours, the baby would eat every three, go to sleep for an hour and I was pumping again. Not to mention he had been formula fed at first in the hospital because of his condition and you try sticking a breast nipple in the mouth of a child who had a free-flow bottle nipple for days. It ain't happening, I don't care WHAT the breastfeeding Nazis tell you. And mentally, where I was at at this point, a screaming, inconsolable infant was not going to do much for my cause. I was unraveling.
At this point, I could tell you that Bravo was my favorite channel because they didn't show infomercials until around 4 a.m. I had become a zombie that was no fun to be around. My parents came over daily to help, but they just added to my concern. One night I physically sat and watched my father breathe as he held Sam and convinced myself he was going have a heart attack that night. My mom knew something was up, but she wasn't immune to my craziness either. At least when she came over, I felt I could actually go to sleep for a few hours because I trusted her implicitly with Sam. I told myself Bill couldn't handle the baby. Only I could watch him to the extent that I felt was wise and only I knew what to constantly watch out for. I screamed at Bill if he walked out of the room on "his watch." I was becoming unbearable to live with and when he was home on the weekends, I eventually would succumb to sleep for hours. I had twisted my mind into thinking that if I slept during the daylight hours, nothing could go wrong. That theory shot the bed when Sam was diagnosed with pyloric stenosis.
At this point I remember thinking, the breakdown is about to happen. I literally laid on the fold out couch in the hospital room and said to God, "Alright, let me make it through this hospital stint and then I can have my mental breakdown." The horrible, mind-numbing thoughts creeped back in. I envisioned us in the waiting room and the doctor coming out and telling us horrible news. I would shake my head vigorously, even smack myself, to make the thought go away. But it inevitably came back in just another form. I began my praying ritual, pinched my eyes closed and begged to have happy thoughts. Let me see Sam's birthday parties, his first day of school, anything! My mind had become this dark, dismal scary place that even I was afraid to inhabit, so I was welcoming the thought of a breakdown. At least then, I thought, I can get some sleep, have some time to myself, end this nightmare. But guess what? As much as I planned for the breakdown and devised a plan of sending me away.....it didn't happen.
One of my favorite quotes is by Robert Frost, "Everything I learned about life I can sum up in three words. It goes on." Go on it does. Things may stop us in our tracks, or our hand may be forced and pushed down a path we didn't choose, but it doesn't stop, if only for seconds. I learned from the birth of my son that I am never in complete control and life is anything but predictable. My honesty didn't save me from postpartum depression. I had to get in the trenches and fight an uphill battle against it, and there were times I didn't think I would win. Those were dark times and scary as hell. I liken it to PTSD. I was shell-shocked by childbirth. But I had come out the other side, only because I fought it head-on. I told my doctor what I was feeling. I confided in the friends I knew would get it. I confessed of my thoughts to a close few. Those who reached out to me in those dark early days and told me "You're not alone, it's not as easy as people make it out to be." They are my heroes. My doctor encouraged my returning to a therapist, a place where I could say the thoughts out loud and not be afraid of judgment. I fought my way back, and I eventually got to a place where my thoughts weren't so bad, I could sleep, I could live and be a mommy. It may have only been for a short while, because then my cancer diagnosis took me out at the knees again. But I will never forget my doctor saying that sometimes going through the hard times shows us just how strong we are and that makes going through the fire a little easier the next time.
I shared my postpartum journey in hopes of helping someone, somewhere feel they are not alone. Hell, I was prepared for it, knew I was susceptible to it, and still got hit by that train. But I wasn't derailed. At times I felt like I was hanging from the caboose, but I never fell off. Everyone has the fight in them and can survive even the toughest of times.
I marveled to my husband tonight about how well we have handled the hand we have been dealt. He lost his job, we moved, the baby went through sickness and now the big "C." People tell us to hang in there, we always land on our feet. Truth is, we have to land on our feet. Worrying, spewing anger, that's not going to get us anywhere. We only have each other and we are in charge of how we play this hand we have been dealt. I know, with Bill in my corner, we will never fold. In fact, I would bet on us. All of these "bad times" have led us to here and shown us just how much fight we have in us. So even though I may not have picked the path I am walking down, I can be sure of this. My armor is on and it is weathered from several battles. Those battles are now scars that remind me just how far I have come. When I look at Sam, I know I have what it takes. I know, I've got this.