There are a number of things about me that are scary. Like my inability to deal with heat. And my sense of humour. And my weird facial expressions.
Today I’m taking my scary self over to Jill’s place for a Scary Mommy guest post. It includes a shot of whiskey, so come and visit!
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Quick note about something that is not scary: my new design. Huge, huge thank you to Kate from Mommy Monologues for doing it for me. She’s a star, and an absolute sweetheart to work with.
Today I start back at work after a 4 1/2 month leave of absence. People keep asking me how I feel about this.
“Anxious,” was my answer two weeks ago.
Last week, after coming home from San Diego and still on my BlogHer ’11 high, my answer was a straightforward “ambivalent.”
Now I am neither.
I met with my boss last week and got caught up on things. A few things have changed but even I’m amazed at how much hasn’t.
The problem is, my whole world has changed. I don’t feel at all like the same person I was when I left and if you’ve been reading this blog at all since April you’ll understand why.
So how do I feel about going back to work tomorrow? I feel…lots of things.
I feel ready to get back to “normal” though normal to me is different than it was before.
I feel grateful I’ve had all this extra time with my son and therefore a little sad that I’m losing that.
I feel… Well, honestly, I feel that my job is less central to who I am now.
I work in communications, which is a field I love. I used to come home and spend the evening on Twitter (my other account), chatting to people and following links and devouring information about the latest communications-everything.
I haven’t done that for months, since well before I went on leave.
My last tweet on that account was 59 days ago. Each of the mere handful of tweets I’ve posted in the last few months were either in reply to someone, directed at people I know (family or co-workers), or because my team won an award and, hey, awards must be celebrated. Oh, and one that said, “Yes, I am MIA from Twitter. No, I’m not dead.” (To which I got several “whew” and “I wondered where you were!” responses. Yeah, I used to be fairly active.)
A year ago I couldn’t imagine not throwing my whole self into my job. I loved it, so it wasn’t a chore. But in some ways I think I did it because I felt I needed to. I wanted to keep up with what was happening. I wanted to feel like I was a legitimate member of the communications community. I also had grand ambitions and when I want something I tend to pursue it relentlessly (see also: this whole blogging thing).
So I’m going back to work a different person and a different professional. My days will be spent continuing to work hard at a job that affords me lots of opportunity to learn and be creative. But my nights will be spent here, because that’s the me I want to be.
Every MONDAY join us…
Write, post, link-up, share your story and your voice.
Be part of carrying the weight of confidence, empowerment and share our mission to empower, inspire, and remind women, parents and children that the time has come to celebrate ourselves!
How you have lived the Be Enough Me feeling this week?
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On another note: While I’m away today, I’m also guest posting for Zoie at TouchstoneZ. In response to her request to write about recovery, I’ve shared a bit more about my experience with postpartum rage and how I had to let it in before I could let it out. Come and visit me there, won’t you?
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.
This post has been sitting in draft for ages. If you count a blank page as a draft, that is.
It’s hard to know what to say. This is a very touchy topic and I’ll have to admit to some stuff that I’ve admitted to very few people. Plus it’s sort of buried because I’ve dealt with it – for the most part anyway – and I don’t want to dredge it back up again. And also because there are things I actually have no memory of.
I want to write about this, though. Postpartum rage is part of my experience. And it’s a term that ranks high in the list of search terms that bring people to my blog.
I wrote about it very briefly before but I didn’t really say much about it. Just that I experienced it and that it’s actually a common symptom of depression. A lot of moms experience it as part of PPD.
But the subject of rage and anger after having a baby is coming up more and more in conversations with people. So many moms I know are experiencing this. I can’t fix it for them, but I can let them know they’re not alone. So here goes.
Imagine a time you totally lost your temper. When you were so consumed by anger you felt it as a physical thing, adrenaline racing through your body and blocking out all rational thought. When your first instinct, as though it were primal, was to throw something so it would shatter into a thousand pieces and break whatever spell had overtaken you.
That’s what it felt like for me for much of my son’s first 2 1/2 years.
I was desperately sleep deprived. I had no patience. Anger was my constant companion.
It raised its ugly head when I had spent hours trying to get him to sleep only to have him immediately wake up screaming.
It brought me to tears when he woke up every half hour at night and I was so tired I wanted to die and had no idea how I was ever going to get through the night, never mind the next day.
It added to the exhaustion of trying to cope with and comfort a fussy baby.
It made me want to yell and scream. Sometimes I did.
It left me feeling without hope when he smiled and cooed and all I could think was that having a baby had been a mistake.
For months the inside of my head was screaming because I was so angry and I didn’t know what to do about it. I couldn’t throw the baby against the wall or out the window, though the physical urge to do so consumed me.
I spent many days worrying I would hit him and yet at the same time was sure I wouldn’t. Except (oh my god I’m going to admit it) one time I did. It was light – just a smack against his thigh on a really bad day when I had nothing left.
It made him cry.
I stood there in horror. And then I scooped him up and held him to me and cried with him.
Even then, I didn’t know what was wrong with me. And I didn’t ask for help because I was so scared to admit what was going on.
Having an infant is hard. I just kept waiting for it to get better, but – for me at least – that didn’t happen.
As my son got older and started to lack cooperation at the worst possible moment – writhing around in a poopy diaper, for instance – I found myself wanting to pin him to the table and force him, bodily, to lie still.
It simmered beneath the surface all the time, a bubbling pot of anger that threatened, every day, to spill over.
When I couldn’t take it I would summon my loudest inside-my-head voice and swear – at the universe, at his crying, at mine.
I swore at my inability to cope.
I swore at battling the same things, day after day after day.
I swore out loud some days, to myself, through my sobs, as my tears ran over my words and the guilt and misery and hopelessness that came with them.
I felt massively ripped off in my experience as a new mother. I still resent it. It still makes me cry.
When I went back to work when my son was 11 months old, I thought it would get better.
It didn’t.
To be continued...
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.
You spring from bed in the morning, awake, bright-eyed and ready to go. My eyelids feel like sandpaper. A glance between half-open eyes reveals the clock: 6:12 a.m. I roll over and wonder how long I can put you off, but I know it’s coming.
“Let’s go downstairs!”
As I stand I feel the effects of the night. We never planned to co-sleep but you don’t sleep without one of us there, so I’ve slept in your bed – balancing on the edge, muscles tensed so I don’t fall off on one side and don’t elbow you in the head on the other. I cherish your sleeping form on these nights – your quiet, soft breathing and your smallness – but I wake with the ache of not enough sleep in a bed you like to hog.
You get downstairs and are overwhelmed with the abundance of choices – breakfast? TV? Toys? What to do first? My first instinct is to get the kettle going so I can have a cup of tea.
“Do you want to play with me?” Asked over and over, this question leaves scars in my heart. The honest answer is sometimes no. I wish I wanted to play with you, but I’m tired. My brain is not awake. I want to drink my tea and read my email and enjoy the morning while you play next to me, but you’re not at the stage where playing alone is what you want.
The backyard beckons. I see you heading toward the sliding door and my heart sinks. Outside, to you, is an extension of your ecstasy – the sandbox, diggers, weeds to poke at and caterpillars to search for. I’m in my pajamas and it’s chilly and I’m not prepared to deal with sand before 7 a.m.
I love you, hard, with the fierceness of a mother who has created life. I love you, softly, with my heart full of the child you are and the person you are becoming.
When I’m not tired – when I’m in my mama zone – I can do it. I rejoice in the experience, seeing the world from your perspective. From down low as you search for leaves or sticks or crabs or shells, and from up high in that place of wonder as you discover something new.
But lately I’ve been tired and that makes all those good things elusive.
I don’t love you any less. In fact, I might love you more because I can’t give you what you need. It’s just that today I couldn’t do it.
