But I Can Imagine Life Without Her

There’s this thing we do with unexpected blessings. We say, “Now, I bet you just can’t imagine life without her!”

But I can imagine life without her.

In that life I’m a more robust partner to my spouse. He doesn’t have to watch out to save me from despair. I don’t have to be relentlessly vigilant against the resentment that builds between partners as logistics take the place of deeper connections. In that life I can be left alone at home with the kids. Instead, we have a family rule that I can’t be left alone with the baby, or the baby and Boy Woww—the two youngest—because I’m likely to be lying on the floor catatonic when my husband returns, having tried to make dinner but instead been destroyed by whining, tugging at my clothing, screaming, and gnashing of teeth.

There’s a dark side to maternal mental health that we wash over with things like “But they just grow up so fast and in the blink of an eye they’re gone,” and, “Life just wouldn’t be the same without them.”

And we put things into extremes: either you’re a selfish mother who aborts a baby, or you are stalwart and your life is better for your gentleness and morality.

None of it is true.

Or maybe all of it is true. I’m increasingly holding two opposite beliefs and reckoning with the fact that both are true.

I would be the selfish mother to abort a fourth baby. It would destroy me, but I would do it to save myself, my marriage, and my family. Things I consider to be sacred. But at the same time, I chose life with this baby, and I wouldn’t wish her away even for a hillside full of horses and a kitchen overflowing with bacon and ginger.

I want her. She took my heart of stone and cracked it open. She was made in God’s image and her life is precious.

Being a mother defines who I am. I feel a deep sadness imagining a life with my spouse without children. But that doesn’t mean that motherhood hasn’t almost broken me.

We make hard decisions. We make mistakes. We try to survive. We have to stop pitting one group of women against another, when it’s all true. Given the right circumstances, we are always the other whom me judge.

The Winter Almost Broke Me, and the Spring May Not Be Long Enough #PPD

It’s been over two months since Valentine’s Day, and the daffodils are out and the cherry trees are in bloom, and my vegetable garden lures me with light-filled evenings and the promise of compost and earthworms.

But I’m still thinking about Valentine’s Day.

In early February we had an ice storm, which had followed on the heels of more snow than my neighbors had seen in 40 years.

That suburban blizzard was preceded by two other snowstorms. In the first, I’d been on my way home with the baby, and I had to stop to put the chains on the car. Later, a friend and I chained up her van and drove down to the school to pick up as many of our kids and neighbors that we could fit in the car. Buses didn’t get some kids home until 8 p.m. that night.

Through the course of the winter our family got the flu, sinus infections, strep throat, and never-ending colds. During my last visit to the pediatrician with an achy, lethargic sidekick, I’d laughed it off with wry humor—one of the only coping mechanisms I had left. “Well I feel bad for you,” our pediatrician said.

The storms and sicknesses had upended our routine the way a toddler explodes the contents of cabinets.

The things that kept me sane—acupuncture, meditation class, childcare, hiking, horseback riding, therapy, and work—were all canceled at the hands of weather and illnesses.

Sometime in there, just as we approached Valentine’s Day, my brain broke. It was around the time we had a meeting with a parent coach to discuss a plan for K-Pants’ explosive, anxiety-filled behavior at home. My husband and I had raced to the appointment after picking up the prescription for Boy Woww’s strep.

I had weathered eight weeks of snow days and holidays and illnesses. I’d done sledding play dates and worked at night. I became a pretty solid snow driver. But eight weeks without self-care left me dead inside, struggling to get out of bed, or communicate, or connect emotions to rational thinking.

Family is my priority. But family had eaten all the other priorities.

I heard some research recently that having a baby changes your brain for two years. The Fairy Pig is 22 months. I’ve had friends ask, sincerely, as if probing an alien for understanding, “So when does postpartum depression go away?”

I don’t know that two years is the magic line. In fact, I don’t know that there’s a magic line for anything. A friend who suffered from some dark days while parenting young children said to me recently that once that dark chasm opens up, you always know it.

I will always know it. But that doesn’t mean it will always own me.

Heading into the winter, I had been doing well, feeling like I had some great strategies. And the baby was becoming a toddler.

But then winter took it all away. The dark, cold days don’t always do that to me. But this winter in the Pacific Northwest seemed to spare no one.

As I sat at Valentine’s dinner eating chicken pho, I told my husband that I didn’t want to go back to the dark mental place winter brought on. For me, when all of the things that support me go away, the world starts to not make sense, and I realize I’m capable of crazy things. “We have to listen to all my signals and make sure that I don’t get there again,” I told my husband.

We decided that I couldn’t be the only parent to flex to absorb the changes in family routine that weather and illness bring. We strategized about how to protect my critical appointments.

When the camellias came out in January and February I tried to destroy them with my laser eyes. “You’ll die from the ice and snow,” I told them.

The tulips are overtaking the daffodils now. I’m beginning to believe that spring is here. But it’s May. And I’m still weak and exhausted from the winter, wondering if the summer will be long enough to sear through the ice that had frozen me solid.

I know that the older the baby gets and the more we are tested by new situations, the stronger I will get. But I have to write about the worst times, so that that thing doesn’t happen—the thing where ideas and dogma slowly turn personal experiences into moralistic nostalgia. I need to have somewhere to come to remember how deep and raw the wound of postpartum depression felt, so that it can hopefully, maybe, allow me to approach others with deep compassion even when the memories fade.

In the End, It Was Not the Summer of Postpartum Depression

I just finished cleaning the car from summer, taking out beach toys and swimsuits, dozens of granola bar wrappers and an air-dried Jack In The Box cheeseburger remnant. Now I’m prepping for muddy fields. I’m checking our umbrella count and fleece supplies. I’m washing the sand and caked-on peanut butter from picnic blankets.

One week ago we were here.

I took this piece of sea glass from the ocean’s dance.

I’ve been rubbing it softly between my fingers, and it takes me right back to the cool air of the coast blowing in off the infinite sea.

I had been worried about summer. Summer could have been a fire lookout far out in the forest in need of repairs—timber beams creaking, a stair on every case rotted, nails coming loose from the freeze and thaw cycle of postpartum depression.

Instead we enacted my get-into-nature plan. We bolstered the lookout with steel and replaced the old nails and the softened steps. We had a nanny with us four days a week; we kept the car ready for the beach at a moment’s notice; we didn’t coordinate much, we just went.

And I made sure I was never alone at the top of the tower.

We headed out from base camp and toward water wherever we could find it within a two-hour radius.

We didn’t do a single camp.

I look at our checklist and feel proud.

We captured summer and held it in our arms and rode on its back through the sand of what seemed like a thousand beaches.

I want to draw our treasure map again and mark all its special spots. I want to go out with passion and purpose.

But it’s time to focus on fall and school and soccer. Autumn feels crisp and dead to me: Its smell makes me nauseous.

I have to change the way my senses respond—to look for how routine can ground and nourish us. Somewhere in me fall’s small ember burns. I have hope for early bedtimes and good books and hot baths and getting my body stretched out and my muscles strong. I have soccer practices to help run, I have freelance work that’s exciting and scary.

Summer wasn’t drowned by postpartum depression. It’s time to find oxygen to blow into fall.

This Is What It Feels Like #ppd

I know. I’m talking about it again.

I just have to write about postpartum depression. The beautiful waves of amnesia are coming.They’re going to wear down the sharp edges of this difficult time. And when the sea glass of parenting young children is eroded to a luminescent, pocket-sized amulet, I’ll be left with hundreds of tender photos and a feeling of nostalgia that will fill my chest.

I will cherish that soft piece of glass: I love this fiery baby and her creative, independent brothers.

In thinking about the future, I’m finding I have a deep desire to make sure I remember that the postpartum depression was real, and that I wasn’t just a complainer with a penchant for hyperbole. No. I was an amazing mother who faced exhaustion and hopelessness, and who felt like raising a surprise baby shoved her soul against a brick wall and put a knife to its throat.

So I share these snippets with immense love and compassion toward my future self, who will say things to other parents like, “Someday when you look back, you will actually miss these moments,” and think that it’s kind and not callous. One or two of those parents might come here and realize that in that moment I simply forgot how hard it was.

This Is What It’s Like #ppd

1

I have a constant yearning for connection. I used to be an extrovert, but now I’ve swung to the other side. One morning, back in May, when I realized that my best friend was bringing her daughters with her to visit me, I started to shut down. I don’t like to be around kids right now, even though I love my best friend’s daughters almost like my own. They were my favorite girls until the Fairy Pig was born. Here they are picking flowers in my garden.

But these days I have to work myself up to talking to children, pausing for their constant interruptions, mollifying their basic needs. The baby had just gone down for a nap, and I felt like I could breathe for a few moments. I wasn’t prepared to have more kids around, even though my friend had surely told me they were coming and I had simply forgotten.

I sat in a chair in our living room and stared at the wall, swaying back and forth. I tried to call my friend back to cancel twice. My brain hits a wall and shuts down these days, making we want to cancel everything.

But my friend arrived, sent her girls outside to pick wild strawberries and build block houses, and then she hugged me and let me cry. After I stopped crying, she helped me clean my kitchen and sweep the floors. Then we sat down to a bottle of sparkling cider she had brought over because this whole morning was supposed to be a celebration for her.

2

About a month ago I went back to Baby Boot Camp to exercise—a place that makes me feel strong and energized during the day. Exercise is critical for my mental health, and I had gone to Baby Boot Camp for two years with K-Pants and Boy Woww.

At class, the Fairy Pig was fine, but other babies were crying. The crying short-circuited my brain and made my hands shake. I had to fight the urge to race to my car and leave. At the end of class toddlers were having meltdowns over toys and snacks. Most were fine, but all I could hear were the one or two who were loudly losing their marbles.

The crying and fussing and constant needs of other kids are too much for me right now. I can’t go back. I don’t think I could get my body to drive there.

3

On Friday afternoon my husband was off from work, and I pulled into the garage from an appointment. I was hungry and I needed to use the bathroom. I knew that he had put the kids down for naps, but the door from the garage into the house is very close to the baby’s room. She often wakes up when someone walks by her door. Not always. But enough that I’m paranoid, often hiding away in my room with my laptop and not leaving even if I need food or water.

Nap time used to be a time when I could count on an hour or two to feed myself, get some work done, and take some deep breaths. But last Friday I couldn’t work myself up to come inside from the garage. If I made it inside without the Fairy Pig waking up, she would surely wake up when I was using the bathroom, and if she didn’t wake up when I left the bathroom, she would surely wake up when I was making my lunch, and definitely by the time I sat down to eat.

It sucked the life out of me thinking about all the ways she would wake up and start crying and need things right away. So I sat in the garage for 45 minutes, until my husband found me and helped me make a step-by-step plan to come back inside.

***

These kinds of things happen pretty often right now. Normal situations that I could have rolled with before suddenly become overstimulating tangles of logistics and thwarted opportunities.

I love thinking of our family a few years from now, because I know this time of dreadful anxiety is related directly to baby-raising. And so I sit with the incongruous ideas: Now is hard. Later will be hard, but there won’t be a baby. You’ll forget everything and remember now as a magical time. I’m looking forward to it all.