antenatal depression Archives

Grace in Small Things: #3

June 11, 2012 by Farewell Stranger ·

I sincerely hope so, and that it's exciting in a good way.

The weekend was not good, and this list was harder to make than the last two when I started it a couple of days ago. But here’s where it ended up.

Chocolate for breakfast.
Painting my nails, which makes me feel just a little bit less like a lazy slob.
Dinner out in my old hood and a nostalgic drive past my childhood home.
An evening walk with the dog in the sunshine. We both needed it.
Pickles.

Today was better.

Waging a battle against embitterment and taking part in Grace in Small Things.

Filed Under: Hello, Inspiration · Tagged With: antenatal depression, Grace in Small Things, lists, perspective

I sat on a tire swing at a playground the other day. As I rocked back and forth, I watched them – four other families we gather with every week so our kids can play soccer together. The parents sat on the grass at the end of the evening chatting while the kids let off their last bits of steam on the playground nearby. I just sat, the links of the chain wrestling the pieces of my spine for position. It was uncomfortable. My back, my pregnant belly, the tears stinging my eyes. It was all uncomfortable.

I’ve known these families for a long time, or the parents anyway. The children are new to me. And to Connor. “They’re not my best friends,” he said one day, hiding in a pine tree instead of joining in with the running and ball kicking.

I know, I thought. They’re not my best friends either.

They are friends, though – some of them formerly very good friends, others less well known but just the sort of people one would hope to get to know upon moving to a new city. But I looked at these formerly-very-good friends and thought, I don’t see myself in them anymore.

I don’t see myself in much of anything anymore. “You haven’t really been yourself since Connor was born,” my husband said to me one day as we talked to my (new) doctor about medication. No, I said. Is he right? I thought.

Haven’t I been?

I haven’t been.

Maybe others who have struggled will help me understand. Did I not recover? And what does that even mean? Does that not involve going back to who we were before? Is that how anything in life works when there was a before?

However it (in theory) works, I am not the same as before. At a fundamental level, I am a different person. At a DNA level, if that were possible, which it’s not, but for as changed as I feel it might as well be.

We went to my parents’ house a couple of weeks ago to sort through boxes in the basement. As we pulled out long-forgotten treasures and my siblings re-lived our school days I watched. I didn’t recognize the girl who lived through those times and those treasures with them, just as I didn’t recognize her in old friends at the park. I don’t know where she is anymore, and what’s worse, I don’t know what happened to her.

She’s just gone, apparently.

Last year I said farewell to the stranger in me, and I thought that would make things better. But what I didn’t notice at the time was that she seems to have taken the girl I used to be with her.

The girl I used to be is lost.

And there’s no milk carton for that.

Image credit: ~jjjohn~ on Flickr

Filed Under: Hard things, Postpartum depression · Tagged With: admissions, antenatal depression, depression, meltdown

The Power of Truth

April 26, 2012 by Farewell Stranger ·

It’s been five days since the antenatal depression light clicked on. Five sleeps. Five sunrise-sunsets. Five turns of the Earth. And everything actually feels okay in my world.

No matter what the situation, I always feel better once I recognize it. An anxiety attack is less end-of-the-world when I realize it’s a momentary and not entirely logical reaction to something (even if I don’t know what that something is). The stones at what looks like the fast-approaching bottom fall away to reveal solid ground beneath me. And I stop feeling like I don’t know what I’m going to do next.

I don’t know if it was the recognizing of it or the saying of it or the writing of it. But that truth took away some of the power this illness has and gave it back to me.

There’s always power in truth. Whether you admit it to yourself or the whole world, saying it helps dissipate the darkness. I know this, and yet I have to learn the lesson every time.

I’m not saying everything is better or that this won’t still be a battle at times, but I am feeling better. And, for now at least, I’m sleeping in my bed instead of hiding in it.

Thank you for all the comments and words of love – both here and elsewhere.

Image credit: auro on Flickr

Filed Under: Happy things, Pregnancy · Tagged With: antenatal depression, anxiety, community, gratitude, perspective, we're not alone

No Joy

April 25, 2012 by Farewell Stranger ·

I kept waiting for my first trimester to be over so I’d stop feeling sick and start experiencing the euphoric energy I’d felt the first time.

That energy never came; I only became more and more fatigued as the pregnancy progressed. I started to develop insomnia so bad that I’d only sleep two or three hours a night. The lack of sleep started to get to me; my moods fluctuated wildly, and I had to quit my part-time editing job due to complete apathy towards the work.

These are not my words, and yet this is my story. I just didn’t know it until I read it.

You may have gathered from yesterday’s post that things are slightly less than peachy here. I’ve been struggling for a while, but I thought it was just the natural progression of having moved away from family and friends and settling (or not) into whatever’s next. It was a new job and a longer commute and wondering where certain things are after our move. It was a pregnancy and a reduction in my med dose and a subsequent bump back up when that didn’t work. It was a small boy who’s almost four and all the challenges that come with that.

Except that’s not all it is.

The excerpt above is from a post called Robbed of the Joy of Pregnancy by Alexis Lesa on Postpartum Progress. Something lurking at the back of my brain took me to the antenatal depression tag on that site over the weekend, where I read one post and then another. And then I came to that one.

I know this is an issue for me. I just didn’t know it. It was an issue during my pregnancy with Connor too. I even did a Google search for antenatal depression, thought “huh” and then moved on. And was surprised when I got postpartum depression. (It’s okay – you can roll your eyes.)

The only thing in the above quote that I’m not experiencing is insomnia. I’m having the usual pregnancy-related trouble sleeping, but for the last few weeks I could happily have slept all the time. And, to be frank, some days I did. Wanting to stay in bed all the time is usually a huge light bulb for me, but I put a blanket over that light bulb and went back to sleep.

The thing is, though, that once I read that post the light burned bright again. I confessed to the problem to my #PPDChat group and a very dear (real life) friend of mine started looking up resources for me in this new city. She found a counsellor and a women’s mental health clinic and that was really all I needed to get me back on the right path.

Could I have searched those things out myself?

Yes.

No.

Yes, I’m on a first-name basis with Google. No, when the ground is coming up at me I don’t have the resources to find resources.

But I do have people who will do that for me, as long as I can muster up the courage to ask.