Drowning After Crowning
I’ve written about this before and it doesn’t get easier.
I’ve sat here at my desk night after night debating whether or not to go back and read what I wrote previously… like somehow I’d get the courage from a younger, more mentally ill me.
Yea, no. That’s pretty fuckin’ unlikely. So we’re going from memory and re-assessing things from where I sit today, mostly mentally sound.
Before I get started, I’d like to go ahead and just call out that while it is accurate that I never actually went through ‘crowning’ I most certainly went through ‘drowning.’ It’s called wordplay, mom, and Dejection After C-Section just doesn’t have the same ring to it.
Anyway, here’s the deal.
I’m going to talk through this in as much detail as I possibly can - not because I’m brave or strong, but because there is a chance that it might help someone. Maybe it will help someone realize they’re not okay, maybe it will help someone feel less alone, maybe it will help someone’s partner understand them more. Maybe it won’t do any of that and it’ll just feel good to get it out of my head.
I endured postpartum depression & anxiety.
Before my first child was born I never seriously considered that I would be at any higher risk than anyone else for perinatal mood disorders. It was never really addressed within any of the many doctor visits, the hospital classes, or the apps that I used to track my pregnancy - not in any real way, so it wasn’t a real concern.
It should have been, because that shit is real.
My family is #blessed with an array of mental health issues: depression, anxiety, addiction, OCD… As it turns out, I am a part of said family and have personally experienced a few of these issues in my pre-mom life.
Boom, right out the gate with the mother fuckin’ risk factors.
The deck continued to be stacked against me… against us, my husband and I. We spent most of the third-trimester in and out of hospitals and then hospice, watching my mother-in-law stay a step ahead of cancer and my father-in-law fight and eventually lose his life to cancer. He passed away the day before my daughter was due.
Enter another risk factor.
The excitement we had around introducing a new child to the world was kneaded deeply into our grief. One emotion could not come without the other. I felt unable to support my husband, he felt unable to support me, and we were at a complete loss on how we were supposed to be ready for baby.
While we struggled to accept that our kid would never meet one of their grandparents and worried about what would come next for my mother-in-law - I developed what I now recognize as a very concerning relationship with my own body. I blamed it. I blamed myself, I blamed my body and was so incredibly angry that it wouldn’t just ‘do what its supposed to.’
11 days after my father-in-law died, my daughter was born, and I think it’s pretty safe to say I was basically destined for depression.
I won’t go into horrible detail about the birth of my kid, because the wet hotdog contractions, the pencil sharpened nipple, and Barbara’s hair are deserving of their own post. (Thanks Stadol, for those wonderful high as fuck memories).
What is necessary to know about my birth experience in regards to my mental health is this: I never went into labor and had to be induced, my induction was pushed by a day due to room availability, and it ended in an unplanned C-section at 41 weeks and 3 days because my cervix failed to progress.
So let’s recap, prior to the exodus of child number one:
History of depression/anxiety
Low self-esteem (I really don’t feel like I need to explain this if you’ve read ANYTHING I’ve written, me thinks not so highly of me-self. Workin’ on it.)
History of PMS
Family history of mental illness
Recent stressful life events
By the time I was moved from post-op observation to my room in the maternity ward - I was already slipping away into my own darkness. I didn’t know it at the time, but in hindsight, I was so immediately lost from the moment I first held my daughter.
What caused it doesn’t matter so much as the fact that we should have seen it coming. We. Myself, my husband, my OB, my nurse practitioner, my family, my friends… anyone.
So, how’d you know?
I didn’t know. I had to be told.
Between the haze of birth and the grief of death - I had absolutely no idea that what I was experiencing for the first few weeks after birth was abnormal. I thought that I had baby blues - that this was how everyone felt and that my life would just be shitty for the rest of it, however long that may be.
I owe my awareness to video games and some really, really good friends.
My husband is an avid video game player. He plays frequently and with friends, always has. One evening in particular about 6 weeks after giving birth, my husband was playing games with his buddies (probably Destiny if I had to guess). I would imagine kiddo was cluster feeding at the time, because that was pretty much all I did in the evenings outside of crying… anyway…
I said something to my husband and one of his friends overheard it and asked if I was okay. I have no idea what I said, but our friend’s wife had gone through her own bout of depression after their first child and whatever it was made him worry for me.
Our friend brought his wife over the next day to talk to us about how I was feeling and what her experience was like. At one point I attempted to put my baby down for a nap and I remember her walking into the room and offering to help. When I said I would be okay, she didn’t accept that and gently took my baby from my arms and told me to go - I left the room sobbing. I’m crying now.
She did exactly what I needed her to do.
What did you do about it and how long did it last?
The next day I had an appointment with my OB and I answered the rapid fire postpartum depression questions the way every mom is terrified to: yes, I’m not okay.
I was prescribed Zoloft. I was told about local support groups. I was told I could seek out counseling/therapy. That was that, you know, because it’s that simple.
It wasn’t that simple.
I decided to start the medication right away - but there was a serious lack of follow up appointments. I thought the dosage I was on was fine because I felt a little better, but a little better was such an improvement from where I was that it was hard to recognize that it wasn’t the right dosage.
I stayed on that dose until I stopped taking the medicine over a year later.
A month or so after I started back at work I decided it was time to start talking with somebody about what I had been going though - the deaths surrounding the birth, the expectations my body couldn’t meet, all of the moods…
I saw a therapist weekly for months.
The first time I felt mentally capable of doing anything at the pace of my normal self was 7 full months after I had my kid. It was a Thursday in August 2017, I was sitting at my desk at work, and I literally felt my brain click back into place.
Within the 3 months after that brain alignment, my mother-in-law passed away and my father, who struggles with addiction, relapsed.
I honestly don’t know when it went away because the universe seemed to dog-pile us that year, but it did eventually fade. Thinking back, I’d say I felt like my normal self again in March of 2018.
What did it feel like?
2017 was easily the worst year of my life, I mean, at least so far. (There’s always room at the top right?)
This is the part of this post that I’ve been putting off.
Soooo… let’s go dark I guess. I’m going to list out the things I felt, the thoughts I had, and I’m going to be explicit - both in detail and language, because FUCK, this was such a difficult thing.
I always wished that I could find something I could really compare my worst to and feel validated or understood. I wanted in depth understanding of what symptoms really looked and felt like. Hopefully this can be that for someone. For anyone.
Pure. Rage. I had absolutely no ability to stifle my anger. I could go from singing a song to my infant to screaming at the top of my lungs a second later. I punched walls and I threw things. I scared myself, I scared my husband, and I scared my baby. I remember feeling the rage in my body, it made my heart race and my shoulders hot.
I cried constantly. I cried because I screamed. I cried because I was afraid. I cried because I felt inadequate. I cried because I didn’t know how to do anything. I cried because I felt out of control. I cried because I couldn’t believe I chose this. I cried because I missed my old life. I cried because I felt like I had made a mistake. I cried because someone, anyone would be better than me at this. I cried because crying was the only thing that made sense, and then I cried because I was crying so much.
Insomnia. After my c-section I couldn’t manage to fall asleep. I would nod off, but never for more than a second for the first day and that continued throughout my hospital stay. When I got home, I couldn’t sleep when baby slept, I couldn’t sleep when baby was awake. If I managed to fall asleep, the slightest movement, coo, breath… everything woke me up. If I woke up, I was awake, and if I was awake I was either crying or researching something incessantly.
Thoughts of harm toward baby. Please know that I have never hurt my child. Even in my darkest moment, baby was always set down and walked away from. I wanted to throw my baby against a wall. I pictured it frequently. I imagined smothering her with a pillow.
Guilt, shame. I felt immense guilt constantly for feeling how I felt, thinking the things I thought, and ashamed that I wasn’t the mom I should be. Ashamed that I wasn’t good enough for her, good enough for my husband.
I lost myself. I didn’t enjoy anything. I didn’t enjoy tv, I didn’t enjoy music, I didn’t enjoy writing. I once got a sparkle because I returned to work, only to find that I was terrible at that now too, and I didn’t enjoy being there either. It took me YEARS to find who I am, and it’s something I’m still working on.
Suicidal thoughts. Every day on my way to work at the intersection of Southern and McClintock I imagined driving into oncoming traffic for months. Every single day. I didn’t necessarily want to die, I just imagined being injured really badly. Enough to take me out of the picture so that my family could be okay, because I felt I was a burden to them.
Relationship ending. I fully believed that my husband should leave me. I constantly thought about the women that could be better for my family than I could and how they would handle things so much calmer than me. I pictured other women soothing my child to sleep and her not resisting or crying. There was no reality where I wasn’t the issue.
Fear of being alone with my baby. I wasn’t scared to be alone with my kid because I thought I would hurt her, I was scared because I felt I was unable to protect her or know what to do if something terrible happened. There was no reality where I was the expert. If my husband needed to be somewhere, I always had my mom come to stay with me because I was terrified to handle things by myself.
Obsessive, racing thoughts. My mind was a whirlwind of potential threats to my child. Is she breathing? I’m going to wake up and find her dead. Someone is going to break into my house and steal my baby. Someone is going to break into my house and sexually abuse my baby. Someone in my family is going to sexually abuse my baby. ANYONE can sexually abuse a baby. I’m going to forget a blanket in the crib and she’s going to suffocate. I’m going to forget she’s in the bathtub and she’s going to drown. The overwhelming sense of responsibility and mental images that came along with these thoughts were absolutely disturbing.
Unable to accept help. I needed help so badly, but I felt so deeply that I should know what to do and that I was supposed to be everything she needed that I often refused to let others do things for me.
Foggy, so fucking foggy. The most consistent thing was that my brain was foggy. To me, this meant that everything took about 5 times as long to process. The best way to explain this is to look to your far left and then turn your head and look to your far right. That whooshing between the two? - That didn’t exist. It was like clicks. I had to process every single thing that I saw between the two things I actually wanted to look at, and it happened incredibly slowly, like a fucking 56k internet connection in my brain. This is the feeling that went away when my brain clicked into place.
How did you decide to do it all again?
Reluctantly.
I knew that I wanted my kid to have a sibling, and I knew that I wanted all of that pregnancy/breastfeeding nonsense over with sooner than later. (Praise to you if you enjoy that part - it’s simply not for me). The first time I ever considered having a second child was when my first was about 10 months old.
My number one fear, outside of dying, (because dying during childbirth should always be number one), was a second bout of depression/anxiety.
What did you do differently this time?
Everything.
First and foremost I researched. I researched because I was absolutely devoted to not having the experience that I had after my first kid. I spent time learning about the postpartum period from an extremely mom-centric perspective rather then putting so much emphasis on my birth plan and baby.
That is absolutely not to say that focusing on a birth plan or baby is wrong. I devoted less time to my birth plan because I had learned that so much of it was out of my control and birth is truly just a moment. Motherhood is the rest. It’s everything else. The most critical thing for me was that I was okay - because if I am okay, everyone else will be fucking fine.
My research led me to a book by Dr. Oscar Serrallach called The Postnatal Depletion Cure. Is this book hyper-promoted by Gwyneth Paltrow and Goop? Yep. Is everything in this book useful? Nope. Of course not, but it presented me with information I hadn’t considered and I took from it what I felt would be useful for me.
My research also led me to find that Dr. Serrallach would be speaking at an event not too far from where I lived at the time. I bought a ticket and attended a few weeks after finding out I was pregnant with my second child.
At this event I sat in a sea of mothers, some with infants, some with older kids, some about-to-be. The gratitude in the air was palpable - whether they all believed every word or would apply every suggestion didn’t matter - the absolute stuggle of becoming a mother was being spoken out loud. I felt heard. I felt understood. I felt like there was something I could do to make things different for myself.
The event was sponsored by a company called Matrescence: 4th Trimester Planning & Support. I visited their website and knew that the workshop was something that I needed to do for myself - because with my first kid I planned for the party, but not for the clean up - and fuuuuuuck do these babies make a mess out of us.
I attended the workshop well before my due-date to give me more time than normal to make my 4th trimester plan, because we extra over here. Every weekend I attended I left feeling informed and determined to figure out what aspects I would incorporate into my own plan.
The workshop facilitators checked in with me frequently and made me realize that I was holding on to some emotions that I had not dealt with from my first birth. I scheduled time with a new therapist to talk through the guilt I felt around not being able to go into labor and having a C-section - and the choice I made to schedule another one.
I worked with my OB well before my birth and communicated that I needed extra postpartum check-ins scheduled to check on my mental state and a prescription for Zoloft filled and ready to go the day I delivered.
I stumbled into motherhood blindly with my first child - having read everything I could about pregnancy and birth and nothing about what comes next.
I marched into motherhood with fucking flood lights with my second child - I identified my needs, communicated that I’d need help, and I was damn ready for what came next.
If you or someone you know is currently struggling and unsure of where to look for help, please visit the Resources page for local programs/groups. PSI’s website is a great place to start. <3
