The Invisible Thief: What Postpartum Anxiety Stole From Me

And what I would tell myself if I could go back in time...

What My Postpartum Anxiety Stole From Me

I frantically swayed back and forth in the narrow, beige rocking chair as I begged my 5 week-old son, Jackson, to stop crying. I pleaded with him as the tears furiously dripped down the front of both our faces. His jaundiced skin had turned red and then purple from howling so hard, and the platinum fuzz atop his head was hot and clammy with sweat. He had choked on his own frustration and despair, unable to catch his breath, and I, his mother, had been unable to calm him. When he finally wore himself out after what felt like hours but was probably only 20 minutes, my first thought was, “Thank God.” My second was, “What the fuck did I just do to my life?”

I continued to softly whimper as I held my baby close to my chest, praying for dear life—mine and his—that my sniffles wouldn’t rouse him. My nerves were shot—an expression I never quite understood until I felt my skin and muscles contract so tightly around my bones it was as if I was in a semi-paralytic trance.

Overwhelm flooded through me. I was overwhelmed with fear—what if he choked again and I wasn’t there, didn’t hear it or couldn’t get him to start breathing again? Overwhelmed with desperation—what am I doing wrong and how could I possibly get better at this whole motherhood thing? Overwhelmed with longing—for a life before I was too terrified to sleep and jolted violently awake every time I finally succumbed to the perpetual exhaustion that plagued my system. And, perhaps above all else, overwhelmed with guilt that I felt any of these things. Wasn’t I supposed to be happy?

This was not the motherhood Instagram and Hallmark seemed to promise me as I surveyed the uniform photos of mommy and baby that dominated my screens—you know, the blissful image of the perfectly coiffed, smiling mother melting in joy as she sniffs her baby’s soft head. No, that was all bullshit, I decided. My baby’s scalp was covered in flaky shit I couldn’t identity, and the version of motherhood I was experiencing was some special form of hell reserved for ungrateful mothers who had likely been even more ungrateful children—a form of hell reserved, it seemed, specially for me.

The Beginning (Of What Felt Like the End)

Thus far, my postpartum experience had been less than idyllic. Minutes after expelling my baby from my uterus—a process that was far lengthier and more painful than I imagined and included a prolonged visit to the ring of fire—I began to hemorrhage. A fog filled my brain as my blood began to fill the room. I blacked in and out of consciousness from the excruciating agony my body and mind could no longer tolerate, the epidural having well worn off. When I finally stabilized, I was so weak I could barely hold a water bottle, never mind my 8 lb baby.

As the weeks went on, I fell down the rabbit hole into an unrelenting state of terror. My brain could not complete a single thought beyond the potential horrors that flooded my mind: visions of my child with a blanket wrapped around his face or falling to his death from the changing table as I reached for what felt like the 500th diaper of the day.

Granted, some of these fears were not completely unwarranted. My husband’s father had a son in the 80s who passed away at 9 months old from SIDS. But while I had always felt deeply saddened by the knowledge of this trauma, I had also felt relatively far removed from it. That is, until I had a baby of my own, at which point, I decided that SIDS was not inexplicable as the science would suggest but rather, genetic and inevitable without intervention.

This fear was not only not assuaged but also severely aggravated by an incident with our highly recommended baby nurse. About 4.5 weeks into our contract, a little instinct—or my raging anxiety, who knows—told me to go and check on my son. I found my baby nurse fast asleep, legs swung over the side of the bed with my baby swaddled, facedown, slid halfway down her lap. My heart stopped—another expression I didn’t fully understand until motherhood. I flipped him over to find him breathing but red and sweaty. It was all (further) downhill from there.

Desperate Measures

I started “sleeping” with a headphone in my ear, an audiobook playing loudly to ensure I stayed at least half awake at all times. I constantly checked Jackson’s breathing, sure that I would find that in the moments my body involuntarily shut down in dire of need of rest, his own little body would also shut down but without the possibility of revival.

I tried to remind myself that way less capable and competent people had babies that managed to survive. “I can do this!” I would tell myself, a crazed smile reminiscent of Joaquin Phoenix’s portrayal of the Joker flooding my face. But my irrational voice, filled with impatience and self-loathing, would quickly drown out any thought that might possibly champion my mothering capabilities.

I wondered if my baby would ever sleep, if I would ever sleep, how I would make it out of the house with that baby (did I even want to?), or if I would ever stop feeling like I was trash at this job that was supposed to come naturally.

In addition to stealing my physiological well-being and my confidence as a mother, my postpartum anxiety also stole something arguably way more valuable: time. It stole the time I had to enjoy and appreciate the novelties of motherhood and the everything wonderful that is my little boy.

What I Wish I'd Known

When you’re in the thick of newborn life, the phrase, “it gets better” feels useless. So while I can verify that this is, in fact, true—it does get better—that’s simply not what I needed to hear at the time.

Instead, I wish someone had told me to give myself some fucking grace—that not everything needs to happen right this second: you don’t have to know how to breastfeed in the hospital, lose the baby weight by 6 weeks postpartum, have your baby on a schedule immediately, or anything else for that matter. Despite what you may have been told about motherhood coming naturally, in reality, there is a pretty steep learning curve involved. Give yourself the time to adjust and the benefit of the doubt that you will, indeed, figure it out.

You know who else needs to be given some grace? Your baby. Babies don’t know how to exist in the world and, frankly, most adults aren’t even particularly adept at this. At the ripe age of 31, I still don’t know how to exist in the world. And while I did, eventually, figure out some stuff, it for damn sure was not in my first few weeks of life.

Next, you don’t have to love every moment of motherhood to be a good mom. In those moments where I felt like I was walking off the edge of sanity and into the deep-end of some totally irreversible depression, wondering if I had made some catastrophic error in becoming a mother, do you know what didn’t help? Feeling guilty for having any negative emotion towards motherhood in the first place.

After suffering an early miscarriage and surviving my hemorrhage, I knew how lucky I was to have a baby and to be alive to experience it. So why wasn’t I relishing in it? The answer is neither here nor there, because, candidly, wondering why I sucked wasn’t exactly making me less sucky.

After a long, very honest conversation with my sister-in-law, I realized that part of the problem was that I felt like I was not living up to society’s (deeply flawed and largely fictionalized) description of motherhood and, in turn, my own skewed expectations of the experience. But that idealized image isn’t real or, at least, not all the time and, certainly, not for everyone. Acknowledging that motherhood is hard and learning that other women, despite their Instagram feed, also struggle in their transition from selfhood to motherhood helped me realize that I could still love my baby—and be a wonderful mom—without loving every second.

Lastly, and perhaps the most important thing I wish someone had told me was to trust my mom gut. While learning the mechanics of motherhood is not as automatic as one might think, a mother’s instinct is. So often women defer to others believing that those with more experience must know better than we do. But while there are specific tips and tricks we can glean from others and expertise we would be well-advised to listen and adhere to, no one, and I mean no one, knows your baby or what your baby needs better than you do. If you think something is off, it is. Trust your gut.

Moving Forward

My path to overcoming my postpartum anxiety has included a grieving process—establishing and accepting the knowledge that while I cannot get that time back with my baby, I can stop hating myself for it too. I didn’t screw it up and I wasn’t a bad mother as I had previously thought: I was learning.

And perhaps the joy of motherhood is found not just in learning how to be there for your baby but also, in doing so, how to do the same for yourself.