Imagine source: Ben Fredericson
About a week ago I realised that what I've been feeling is more than just the usual ups and downs of adjusting to having a new baby. I had a break down and started feeling the urge to cut myself, which is an addiction I broke ten years ago and have only relapsed once in that time. I made a promise to my husband that I would never do that again, and that's a promise I intend to keep. Anyway, once I started feeling that extreme urge to hurt physically just to get the internal emotional pain OUT, I knew it was serious and not something I could keep trying to deal with on my own.That night I did some reading about baby blues vs. postpartum depression and found out baby blues are considered normal for the first three weeks postpartum. Anything past that may be postpartum depression. Postpartum depression usually shows up around 6-7 weeks and can last from 3-14 months. Then I took the Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale test and scored a 21 out of 30 for having postpartum depression (let's refer to that as PPD from now on so I don't have to keep typing it!), anything over a 10 is considered 'possible depression'.
So I 'came out' to a group of my online friends who pretty much unanimously expressed having felt concern for me and having wondered if I was suffering from PPD from the things I'd been saying. They encouraged me to speak with my husband about it which I did the next night. This week I tried two days to get in touch with a public health nurse to no avail, so ended up calling my midwife and speaking with her about it. She encouraged me to try get out of the house with the girls for 20 minutes a day and to get together with a friend who I didn't have to pretend with. She also said she'd tell the nurse that has taken me into her care along with the girls that I am having issues with PPD. I'm seeing her on Monday, so will have to get the guts to talk about it openly.
Acknowledging it has made it easier. I'm no longer pretending to myself that I'm ok. It helps me accept that what I am feeling isn't necessarily real, it's the depression. I have so much good in my life, two beautiful girls, a wonderful husband, a roof over our heads... but even on days when everything is perfect, I sometimes feel just terrible. There's a big black gloomy cloud over me with no reason to feel that way. I can acknowledge that, and I try work around it. My midwife told me to fake it until I make it. It doesn't feel like it right now, but I guess there is a point at which I will no longer feel this depression, so until then I can try functioning as if it's not there, while still acknowledging to myself that it is.
I feel a lot of shame which is ridiculous because if I was hearing this from someone else I would have nothing but compassion for them. When it's myself it's judgement. That's something to work on. My other worry is putting this truth out there, I'm afraid of the judgement from other people. The thing I need to remember is something one of my favorite Mum bloggers wrote recently:
"So: what other people think of me is none of my business. If I'm not spending all my mental energy wondering about what you think of me, I can figure out what I think of me."
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