Potentially controversial statement: all births are traumas. I looked up the definition of trauma, however, and my thesis isn’t quite substantiated by the internet. The American Psychological Association defines trauma as, “…an emotional response to a terrible event like an accident, rape, or natural disaster. Immediately after the event, shock and denial are typical. Longer term reactions include unpredictable emotions, flashbacks, strained relationships, and even physical symptoms like headaches or nausea.” Births aren’t all terrible, I imagine most feel birth is miraculous, I personally fall in that camp. It’s also offensive to even throw birth into the same Venn Diagram as natural disasters or rape. And so, I’d like to amend my thesis, but, I’m lacking the appropriate word to replace “trauma.” Birth is maybe one of the most animalistic, biological events of modern humanity, and it wreaks seismic changes upon a woman physically and mentally. What do we call that if not trauma? And I’m not necessarily talking about the giving birth part, which can be wildly traumatic. I’m currently on beta blockers and yet a lump is developing in my throat as I recall my birthing experience. However, I’m more so talking about postpartum, a season whispered about with the somehow same level of embarrassment associated with menstruation and menopause. I’m so thankful I’m living in an era where these topics are becoming far more widely discussed and normalized. But postpartum still connotes trace amounts of shame for me. So this written account is helping me codify postpartum as a completely normal, non-embarrassing part of human life. I also want to pen this into existence as a life raft for anyone who has felt emotions and wants to feel less alone with them. 

I’ve always dealt with anxiety. Back when I was 7 and found myself tapping doorknobs a specific number of times or feeling so homesick I’d hyperventilate, I had no idea this was anxiety, I figured I had a unique affliction that made life overwhelming. Want to know what helped me discover I wasn’t uniquely afflicted? Reading. Reading books proved to me that I wasn’t alone. Reading validated my humanity, and it still does today. Thankfully, we are living in a time now where mental health is a much more commonplace and destigmatized topic. But the cuts of stigmatization run deep. 

I had a joyous and anxious pregnancy. I had some difficulty on my pregnancy journey. Once my daughter was born, I expected my anxiety to dissipate since most of my anxiety had been related to successfully birthing a healthy child. Wrong. So very wrong. After laboring for 23 hours, pushing for 2.5, and then ultimately enduring a C-section, I was drugged beyond comprehension and could barely keep my eyes open once Claire was out and cleaned off. I think I slept for about 2 hours, maybe, before that exhaustion and elation gave way to a new form of anxiety: postpartum anxiety. I remember I was having an anxiety dream in the early morning hours once we were in our hospital room with baby Claire, and I jolted awake, completely disregarded my incision and IV hook up and lunged for Claire’s hospital bassinet, desperately needing to check her breathing. I remember it was dark and my imagination played a cruel trick on me that she was bluish colored. I panickingly turned on the lights, again, getting up out of the hospital bed when I was strictly instructed not to do so, and awoke poor Alex who was finally getting a little bit of rest after a dramatic 48 hours. Claire was completely fine, a perfect peachy pink color, her tiny little swaddled chest rising and falling rhythmically. Relief washed over me, but as I hobbled back into the hospital bed, the pain from the surgery registering, I couldn’t go back to sleep. And so began my PPA. 

Those first few months were hard. I had never felt any greater purpose and yet I had never felt such crippling anxiety. If you’re privy to the modern motherhood community, you’ve probably heard the term “mental load” or “invisible load.” My understanding of the term is that it refers to all the invisible decisions someone has to make individually or actions someone takes on behalf of others that go unnoticed or happen solely to keep a household running.  The invisible load is exhausting, compounded by a newborn “sleep schedule,” or lack thereof, and it’s a recipe for extreme emotional fragility. Claire was an unpredictable, sparse sleeper as a newborn into infancy. I now recognize that what I think vastly influenced my PPA was the fact that my mind never had a rest during this stage. I’d be exhausted from the ceaseless invisible load: should I feed her now? Is it okay for her to sleep this long? What should I pack with us to take her to my parent’s house? When should we leave based on her sleeping patterns? Did she nurse enough? Why didn’t she nurse longer? Am I producing enough milk? Should I try a different swaddle? And then I could never depend on Claire giving me a predictable sleep pattern at night, sometimes she’d sleep 2 hours at a time, sometimes a stretch of 3-4 hours followed by increments that got shorter and shorter as morning dawned. I couldn’t shut off my mind, and because of the unpredictable rhythm of her sleep, I dealt with insomnia. Bottom line, I wasn’t sleeping which I of course know is extremely common for new parents. But I think the why for my lack of sleep was at the root of my PPA: there was never any end in sight for me in terms of my mind resting or getting a rest, nothing reliable at least. PPA mostly impacted my sleep, or lack thereof, but it also made taking my baby anywhere feel like an impossible feat, or me going anywhere without her also feel impossible. Claire rejected a bottle for the first 3 months of her life so that also made leaving her feel impossible for me. And, Claire had separation anxiety tendencies starting at 2 months. She’d scream and cry if anyone else held her. Most parents would probably relate when I say that hearing my baby cry causes a visceral physical reaction in my body. I start sweating, my mind goes blank, I clench my jaw, and I go into half survival mode half caregiver mode whenever Claire cries. 

So, I wasn’t sleeping and I was too afraid to go anywhere or do anything. I was a prisoner, a prisoner to my own fears and literally a prisoner to my home and to my baby. Nothing was my own: my body wasn’t my own and time was never mine. It was the perfect recipe for anxiety and depression.  I felt like I was plummeting down an endless hole and there were zero ledges to grasp onto along my fall.  The only person who brought me comfort was my mother.  I don’t want this to portray my husband as an unsupportive monster because I genuinely think he was going through his own version of Postpartum Depression at the time and he did not know what to do with me.  I don’t want to excuse partners who haven’t done the birthing from not being able to support their partner in the ways they need, but I will say that I’ve come to learn that the experience is different for the non-birthing partner.  It just is. They’re more removed by default. I think I am a fairly low maintenance person emotionally, so when I was crying at nearly the mention of my daughter’s name, my birth story, her feeding schedule, her sleeping schedule, I think my husband was so caught off guard by these reactions that he was stunted and tried to navigate me as he would want to be navigated.  My mother made me feel safe to be an emotional wreck and she was the only one who I felt tolerated my daughter’s colic with calm, confident conviction. My husband was just as new to this as I was, I needed someone who endured this wild test of sanity and lived to tell the tale. I also often learned small maternal behaviors from watching my mom with my newborn. She sang certain songs or repeated certain calming phrases rhythmically that would often settle Claire and settle me. Though it was a trying time, as I look back on it now, I recognize what a gift it has been to have my mother’s integral support and guidance along my own motherhood journey. Sure, as time progresses and I develop my own mothering style there are times when this doesn’t feel like a gift, but egos removed, it is. I also had one very close friend in particular who gave birth a few months before me to her second child, who I could turn to with any sort of mothering question or emotion. She would always make me feel like we were in this together and that no thought or question I had was ever off limits. She and I would troubleshoot our baby’s sleep schedules, and we still do this today. I am eternally grateful for her friendship. We first connected over losses, and then we had the opportunity to deepen our connection over our precious gains. I am lucky enough to say I have an army of loving friends, but to me, it was crucial to have this one friend with whom I could share the experience so rawly. 

I had my mom, I had so many loving and doting friends and family members, and I had this beautiful, healthy baby. Why did I still feel this constant plummeting and emotional unbalance? It felt like something was chemically not right inside me. I found myself looking at older parents who had grown children, pining for the peace they must feel knowing their children are self-sufficient humans who can feed themselves. Then I’d feel an aching guilt for wishing time would fast forward. It was a vicious and cruel cycle. I lost my appetite and obsessively read Facebook group posts about baby sleep. I took literal notes on Claire’s every move and especially her sleep habits, or lack thereof. I became a mad scientist in trying to determine the most effective recipe for getting Claire to sleep longer. 

After 2 months of this, I got myself help. I started seeing a therapist and a psychiatrist and they both explained to me that I was experiencing pretty classic symptoms of PPD and PPA. I got on medication for both the depression and for insomnia. I started noticing emotional stabilization after about 2 weeks on my medication, but honestly, sleep for me didn’t improve until Claire was about 6 months old, and I’d still and actually even now still, have off nights where my anxiety robs me of my ability to fall asleep. 

As for Claire and her sleep, she continued to give us unpredictable naps and nighttime sleep.  I know some parents go a full year or years even with enduring sleepless nights. I discovered that this wasn’t something I could tolerate, it was detrimental to my physical and emotional health. When Claire was 3.5 months old she hit the 4 month sleep regression where she woke every 45 minutes crying. Claire was not the type of baby where if she woke crying, we could go in and soothe her with a pacifier or by rubbing her back or belly. She needed to be held and rocked and put back to sleep by only me. Sometimes my mom was successful but this was rare and it was also rare that my mom was around in the middle of the night anyways. I was extremely reluctant to ever let Claire cry. I could withstand about 5 minutes of her crying before my entire body started sweating and my stomach would cramp up. So, sometimes I’d give her 5 minutes to see if she’d stop before I’d go in. I don’t think she ever did stop after 5 minutes, maybe once or twice. I remember always flirting with the idea, often on mornings after sleepless nights when I felt crazed and lonely, of trying “sleep training.” As I often do when anxious and indecisive, I polled friends and family and took to the internet obsessively. 

Finally, the night before we were due to leave for the beach on our first family vacation, something in me switched or snapped and I told Alex I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t go in every 45 minutes that entire night. I was ready to try sleep training. I consulted my one particular friend and she talked me through the entire process. There are different methods of sleep training and I knew the only one that would be effective for Claire would be me not intervening. So I went with the cry-it-out method but with set limits. The method I decided to adopt is sometimes referred to as the 3 day sleep solution: set time limits for the crying, don’t intervene until morning, and ideally it should take 3 days or less. My time limit was 25 minutes. If she cried longer than 25 minutes, I’d go in. I talked the plan over with my husband and, since the crying didn’t impact him as negatively as it did for me, he agreed to be the one to listen out and watch the monitor so I could put on noise canceling headphones and try not to hear it. I bawled for about 30 minutes as I felt so guilty for committing to letting her cry and then even guiltier that I wasn’t strong enough to hear it and would be drowning out the sound. I knew I was at a point where I had to put my own oxygen mask on first, and I knew I wasn’t going to be the mom I wanted to be if I had continued sleepless nights. I also felt that this couldn’t possibly be good for Claire, the lack of sleep. 

The first night I didn’t sleep, and I checked the monitor constantly, but I did keep the noise canceling headphones on and listened to sleep meditations. In the morning, Alex reported that the longest she cried was 28 minutes, 3 minutes past our limit, but not terribly. I went to get her from her crib and when I saw her happy, sweet face, I felt a wave of relief wash over me. She was fine and we could maybe do this. We may be able to sleep again. Enjoy life again. We left for the beach that day with my family. Luckily it was a big house so everyone else couldn’t really hear Claire’s crying, but the second night the longest she cried was 25 minutes and she gave her first 8 hour stretch of sleep. By night 3, there was no crying. I think this is when the next chapter of motherhood began for me. Though it was a mostly positive next chapter, the trauma of those sleepless days and nights manifested obsessive behaviors in me. I became anxious about her schedule, I kept the monitor on and couldn’t turn my eyes away from it (I still am like this by the way), and though I tried to come off as if I was cool with having a flexible routine, it sent me reeling if her sleep schedule was altered. 

I guilt spiral when I reflect on my anxiety being so wrapped up in Claire’s sleep. I shame myself quite often for harping on it- why do you care about her sleeping? You should be thinking about how wonderful it is when she’s awake! I think most mothers can relate to consistent plaguing guilt. In a single day of motherhood, I’d say two recurring emotions I feel are gratitude and guilt, sometimes in isolation of each other, sometimes simultaneously. I’ve come to accept occupying the space between two polarizing emotions. Sometimes I think about trying out a hypnotist in hopes of eradicating my inner mom critic, the one that often tries to rob me of truly ever relaxing. But then I think about how my inner mom critic might not be as damaging as it is exhausting. I think my inner mom critic has taught me to consciously love myself and value myself more. It propels me to live a more mindful life, one where I pause to remind myself that I do deserve joy. One where I give myself feedback and help myself reflect on why I might have certain reactions. I think my inner mom critic also motivates me to always strive to be a better mom to my girl. I think what I need to work on is recognizing that I can always be striving to be better, but that I can also always be enough for her. 

My husband and I want to have more than one child. We deeply value having siblings of our own and want to give that gift to our Claire. But of course, the thought of experiencing PPD and PPA again is daunting to say the least. It’s sort of downright terrifying and almost feels a little bit self destructive. But I do feel that if and when it presents itself, I know what tools and supports help me cope.  I’m much better at communicating through my anger, frustration, and sadness as a result of going through PPD and PPA. Penning this has also helped me distill the experience down to its core. 

Fortunately for me, I wasn’t swept away by the undertow of PPD for my child’s first year. Once I got the help I needed and some more reliable patterns of sleep, I was able to be present and enjoy every single moment with my baby. Like every pitfall or torture along the motherhood journey, this too, passed. And I can honestly say, I don’t think I’ve ever been happier. Which brings me to my final conclusion on all of this, that my period of darkness made the light feel all the more luminous and warm. I still try to stop and celebrate when I accomplish taking my daughter somewhere new entirely on my own. It might seem so insignificant to anyone else, but to me, as someone who once felt like that was impossible, it still feels like such a success. What is life if not a balance of opposites? It seems we can’t have one without the other. So, always an optimist, I suppose I’m grateful for my trauma.