''Postpartum depression' felt like the only words available to me as a new mom who was struggling, but they didn’t feel right either. I was furious at the lack of choices for how to be depressed.' -mollyknefel
at 35 weeks. We heard her cry after they yanked her out—she sounded exactly like Serafina—and they took her away to the NICU because she was early and small. Then my blood pressure spiked, things got scary, and they put me on a 24-hour I.V. drip to prevent seizures. I couldn’t see the baby until I was off the I.V. My husband had to go home because visiting hours were over. Within a few hours of giving birth, I was high as hell on pain medication and alone.
In a rage, I took the elevator with dads who had spent the night in their hospital rooms with their babies and complained about their lack of sleep. Instead, finally home from the hospital, I couldn’t stop crying and missing the cats. I kept thinking about how, when I got really sick before my daughter was born, I had a pretty strong feeling that, if it came down to it, I didn’t want to die so that she could survive. Between that and my easier love for Serafina, I was positive I wasn’t as good a mother as I always thought I’d be. And I still wasn’t talking to the baby.
Within a few weeks, the baby got big enough to start nursing full-time, and my ability to feel joy returned. I never got any kind ofFeeling like myself again so rapidly after my baby started really breastfeeding made me suspect that much of my sadness and rage was hormonal. It feels strangely dismissive, even though it shouldn’t. Like a teen rolling her eyes at her parents, my existential despair was mostly hormonal.
I started this essay with one newborn on my chest, and a year and a half later, I’m finishing it under a different one—a non-IVF pregnancy that surprised us when my first was seven months old. Despite everything, we were already in a hurry to have another, and we were stunned and thrilled and giddy, taking pictures of the three positive tests in a row.
My rage faded about six weeks after both babies were born, which tracks with what other moms have told me about the particularly intense, emotionally raw period that comes immediately postpartum. But the realization that I was capable ofI can’t go back to being a person who tries to avoid ever getting mad. But I still haven’t completely learned what to do with the feeling.
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