[Disclaimer: This is a long post, and not especially eloquent. But I’m stuck and this is what’s in my head and it needed to come out. So read if you wish, but this is mostly me thinking out loud. (And I know this is my blog and I don’t need to justify what I post here, but I’m going to anyway.)]
I started blogging just over a year ago – March 20, 2010. It wasn’t this blog, it was another one about my work in communications. And I didn’t celebrate that one-year milestone because… Well, frankly, because I didn’t notice. But I wouldn’t have anyway because the blog has been sitting there stagnant since November. I started to tell my story – here – because I need to, and don’t seem to be able to do both. To be both.
I’ve been thinking about a post from that blog from last June. I really like it, but it didn’t fit at all with that blog. It was a more personal post that was actually about my experience with postpartum depression, though most who read it wouldn’t have known that. Here’s a long excerpt).
Finding light in the darkness
So I have this kid. He just turned two and he’s totally amazing.
The thing is, he’s not a good sleeper. Well, better now, but for almost two years he tortured us. He also happens to be a very, um, busy kid who was fussy for a few months when he was really little and who appears to have forever altered my brain chemistry. Gotta love babies.
I knew before I had a kid that the sleep thing would be a big challenge for me. I had no idea how big. I mean, really, no idea. It was awful. But I deal, as parents have done for centuries. And sometimes I find the funniest little silver linings.
We’ve been trying for a while to get him to go to sleep at bedtime on his own. We transitioned from him falling asleep on us to falling asleep while he could touch us to sitting by his bed while he drifted off. Then it was near the door. Then when I was in Detroit in May my miracle-worker husband somehow managed a great leap forward in 3 days and got this dear child to go to sleep while sitting outside his bedroom.
And then we went on vacation. He slept well on the road – astonishingly well, actually. But he was used to sleeping in the same room as us and now he needs a bit more help to go to sleep again. That’s okay. We’ll work through this again.
So I’m sitting here tonight in his dark room… There’s something about sitting in the dark. I never do it except when I’m in his room. And I’ve spent, oh, years, sitting in the dark in his room (well, two anyway, but it seems like many more). It’s summer, and there are cracks of light from the door and the window, but otherwise it’s totally dark. We’ve got a white noise machine in his room (which he will probably become totally dependent on, but, hey, you do what you have to do and it seems to help. He can pay for the counselling later when he can’t sleep without it.).
All of this seems to block out everything else and allow me to think. It’s different in the dark. I’ve been on vacation for two and a half weeks, and am due back at work on Monday. I’m ready to go back, I think, but I’m well aware that I’m going back with the same determination everyone who returns from vacation takes with them and that seems to vanish as soon as the log-on process is complete.
In reading through blog posts tonight I found some things that address exactly those challenges [I face at work]. This shouldn’t seem mind-blowing but for some reason as I sit here in the dark it’s like I can feel the me I’ve lost in recent months.
I’ve been quiet on this blog recently, partly because I’ve had some life stuff going on. It’s also partly because I’m trying to figure out how I want to express myself here. There are some blogs that I read religiously and the authors are just, as far as I
can tell, totally 100% themselves. And to me that seems natural, but I need to figure out how or if I can do that here in a way that is comfortable for me and appropriate for my job.
So why tell you this story?
No reason, really. Except there’s light in my darkness, and I wanted to share it with you.
That post was written after my second major meltdown – I went on vacation thinking I may very well not return to work. By the time I got back, I was all right(ish) and I think I needed to write about it.
I was aware at the time that the post didn’t fit with that blog, but I posted it anyway. That post is the most “me” I ever was on that blog. Not that the rest of it was artificial – I shared my thoughts about my field of work and enjoyed the discussions that resulted – but I think I was trying to create something, to carve a niche for myself in a way that never really worked for me.
I finally went back tonight and posted a hiatus message on the blog because, for one, I felt sad leaving it just sitting there. But mainly because I was worried that someone I had encountered in my professional life would come across it and think I was the lamest blogger ever.
I would ultimately like to get to a point where I can merge these two pieces of my whole self. I love my job (most days) and I think I’m on the right career path. And with this blog I’ve finally opened up about my PPD, even going so far as to post a link to it on my personal Facebook page. But I still feel like my outside self (my professional self, my day-to-day self) and my other self (my mom-with-PPD-self who wonders who I’m going to be when this is over) are completely separate, almost fractured, parts of me.
In this blog, I appear to be just a struggling mom. But I’m more than that. I have a director-level job and I lead a team of really smart, creative people and we’re doing good work. I have the opportunity to speak about my work at events across both Canada and the US, and I get amazing feedback and really useful connections from doing that. But you’d never know it from what I’ve shared here over the last couple of months, and the people I meet doing those things would mostly never guess there’s this whole other part of my life that consumes me.
Last weekend I went on the radio and told my story, and I shared the link to this blog with people I know. And then I got stuck. Having done that, I’m no longer a (semi)anonymous blogger. Now I’m Robin and I’m writing about something very personal. The kind of topic that turns a friendly “How are you doing?” into a head-tilted “How are you doing?”
I feel like postpartum depression took away the real me. I’ve spent months and months trying to find her again, only to realize she’s not coming back. And I’m now mostly okay with that. This experience with PPD is a part of me. A part of my past and certainly a part of my present, and therefore my story, but a part of my future as well. I need to find who I am going to be as a result, because I’m different than I was before. Others might not see it, but I feel it (although I’m still sorting out how, exactly, I’m different and what that means).
One thing I think it means is that I don’t want to be fractured anymore. As one step towards that I’m leaving my old blog on hiatus while I work on finding my new path here and working on having that be okay.
The podcast of the Real Parenting radio show on postpartum depression (featuring moi!) is now available if you’d like to have a listen. The first half hour is the host’s interview with a psychologist and researcher, and the second half is a panel with another mom and me discussing our experiences with PPD.
