My last post was the first post I had written in six weeks. I would like to use the excuse of parenting a newborn, saying that I just haven't had time to write in between the demands of a new baby. But that excuse would be a lie. The truth is that while I have had time to write, I have chosen not to, because I have felt like I have absolutely nothing good to say.
I haven't had the energy to write about how much my son has changed since the baby's birth and how he makes me feel like I'm perpetually failing at being a mother simply because I have to split my attention between two children. I haven't had the guts to write about how frustrated I am with my marriage and how I'm angry at my husband all the time. I've been too ashamed to write about how much I have been struggling with weight loss and my self confidence since giving birth. And I don't even know how to write about how much I have been missing my mom.
Enter, stage left: depression.
I have been living with clinical depression and separation anxiety for many years. Since I was a teenager. But I was not formally diagnosed with either until I began therapy at the age of twenty. Over the past few years, dealing with the separation anxiety has been easier than the depression, considering the anxiety can be fought pretty easily by simply not allowing myself to be alone too much. Depression, on the other hand, comes and goes in waves, and somewhere in the past six weeks I have found myself head under one of those waves.
Is it postpartum depression? I don't know. Maybe. Honestly it is hard to know the difference or distinguish between postpartum depression and the same depression I have dealt with off and on for so long. I guess I will leave that up to a psychologist to determine (I finally made an appointment yesterday). Both my husband and my brother spent the first few weeks after Kennedy's birth frequently checking up on my emotional state, as I'm guessing they were both worried about postpartum depression taking a hold of me. But I felt fine. I didn't feel overwhelmed. The lack of sleep was hard, but it got easier. And frankly, I felt so good just not being pregnant anymore that I thought I didn't have anything to worry about.
Fast forward six or eight weeks, when I first started realizing that I didn't feel that fine anymore. And now another six weeks have passed and I feel far from fine. I'm not sleeping well. I can't seem to make myself clean the house no matter how much the mess is bothering me. I don't like being home. I'm spending too much money in an attempt to stay out of the house and distract myself. I keep buying new clothes, hoping they will help me feel better about myself, but still end up in yoga pants and t-shirts everyday because I feel too discouraged about my appearance to even care. I crave sugar all the time, I emotionally eat to make myself feel better, and then I feel guilty afterward. It's a vicious cycle.
Things with the baby are actually pretty great. Breastfeeding is much easier than it used to be, she sleeps through the night four or five times a week, and I do not feel overwhelmed by her needs. Frankly, the baby is the easy part right now, and I generally feel more joy holding her than I do any other time of the day. It's all the other stuff that I'm struggling with right now. And while there are a few legitimate problems going on in those areas, I am fully aware that the realities of chronic depression are exaggerating all of these things and making them much worse than they need to be.
So I'm going back to therapy. In the past I have always been able to work my way through things with therapy and prayer (avoiding medications), so the good news is that I am hopeful things will get better. I will overcome this wave, just as I have always done in the past, and I will become stronger because of it. My marriage will become stronger. My relationship with both of my children will become stronger. And at some point, I will be able to remind myself that living with depression is not the end of the world - it is just a small part of my life. I know that it does not define me. If anything, it makes me a more compassionate and grateful person. And it teaches me. It always teaches me.
But it is not easy. And that's the hard part.
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