My sweet baby wasn’t the only one who experienced my rage.
When my son was almost 18 months old I came very close to losing my marriage because my husband, by that point, was bearing the brunt of my anger and he’d had enough. He also knew more about my anger towards my son than I was aware of.
Hidden away, in a folder I don’t look at, I have an email from my husband in which he told me if I couldn’t get things under control he would leave and seek sole custody.
He’d have had every right to. And I wouldn’t have fought it, because I couldn’t have had even partial custody of my son and I knew it.
I had tried everything else. I had asked my husband to help me and when he said he felt like he couldn’t I felt abandoned.
I had gone instead to a counsellor, but it didn’t help.
I had enquired, casually, on several occasions at my doctor’s office, about medication. But I was so afraid of it. I was so afraid that even with my husband’s ultimatum it took me two months to finally get a prescription for antidepressants.
Once I got on medication things got a bit better. It took the edge off at least. But I was on a low dose and it didn’t do enough and I didn’t know enough to know I wasn’t better.
A year later, almost to the day, my husband and I had a rager of a fight precipitated by a tough time getting our son to sleep. We stood in our garage and yelled at each other. We screamed. And my husband is not a screamer.
I felt like he didn’t understand (and he didn’t but neither did I, though that’s a whole other post). I didn’t realize – couldn’t see – what the past 2 1/2 years had been like for him.
I thought that was it – the end of our marriage, the end of my family, the end of my experience as a mother.
I cried more that night than ever before in my life.
I thought I was going to have to walk away, so I stepped up to leave the garage. I had only taken a single step when he said it.
“I was in an abusive relationship for a year.” His voice full of anger, hurt, and fear.
I paused in what was both a split second and a whole lifetime, during which I went from wondering how I didn’t know this about him to realizing he meant me.
He meant me.
I walked out of the garage. I came very, very close to leaving the house and not coming back because I couldn’t imagine staying with someone who thought that about me. I had no idea what he was talking about, because I hadn’t seen it. All I could see was my own struggle.
There are large parts of the year prior I don’t remember at all. I have no recollection of how I treated him, but I have no doubt it was badly.
(Does he still think I was abusive? This question has been plaguing me for months. No, he says. We both went through something really awful but he knows it wasn’t intentional or something I could control.)
I don’t remember what happened in the month that followed either, but I know I started to think about everything differently.
In December I started seeing a counsellor who specializes in postpartum depression.
In January I started this blog.
In doing so, I was able to work through a lot of what I was feeling and reflect on things that I had put behind walls because they were too hard to deal with. And my husband got a better understanding of what I was feeling, some of which was easier for me to write than say out loud.
In March I started seeing a psychiatrist who changed my medication, noting that the dose I’d been on for over a year wasn’t even a therapeutic dose. It wasn’t enough to help me properly.
Following that medication change I went through what have been the hardest three months of my life so far, much of which has been documented here. I’ve finally dealt with my anger in a way that makes me able to almost be the mother I thought I would be. It took a very large breakdown and a leave of absence from work to do it though, and I still have things to work on.
But as best as I can describe it, that’s my experience with postpartum rage. Those who haven’t experienced it won’t understand. They may judge me and throw hateful comments at me. But I had to tell this story because it’s part of me. It’s true and it’s real. And those who have experienced it will understand, and will feel less alone.
Note: I’ve had to close comments on older posts due to the amount of spam coming through. I so appreciate your comments and am always happy to hear from you by email.
