Except when I wasn’t.
The dark and vexing moments of mothering existed side by side with the moments of joy and fulfillment, but because they were not sanctioned and because they were invisible to others—except my husband, to whom my suffering was perhaps more obvious than it was to me—they took a slow and silent toll. A year into motherhood, I could no longer construe my negative moods as lapses; they had become the norm, and for the first time in my life, I had lost my footing. Though I wasn’t exactly sad, I was grouchy much of the time. I was withdrawn, socially and emotionally. I was chronically fatigued, even though I was sleeping much better than when our son was first born. I was irritable, doubtful, and skeptical, and I just wanted to be left alone.
Like many of the women I see in therapy, I had none of the risk factors for postpartum depression (PPD) and none of its classic symptoms. I had not been depressed prior to pregnancy, I had a lot of social support, I was not having trouble bonding with my son, I was not unable to find pleasure in life’s daily activities, I was not lethargic or unable to concentrate or fearful or anxious. Even as I recall the extent to which I was unhappy, I am aware that I was still quite capable of joy. I do not look at photographs of myself during my son’s first year and see a face of despair, and that’s not because I was wearing a mask of cheeriness the way many depressed people do. I see a young mother who was genuinely taking pleasure in her new role, sometimes even glowing with the joy of it. The change was in the balance, in the frequency with which I felt listless, angry, and numb compared to the frequency with which I felt energized, peaceful, and content. For me, the scales had always been tipped in favor of contentment, and this was no longer true. It was a painful realization. I came to it slowly, and only with much prompting by my husband, whose view was less clouded. He told me I was negative, hostile, and cold, and that he barely recognized me anymore. I hated him for holding up a mirror to me that way, the way our spouses so often do. But for the good of all three of us, somebody needed to acknowledge this new state of affairs. And it wasn’t going to be me.
It’s not that I had done a 180-degree turn from happy and kind to unhappy and mean. But I had come to inhabit a far more complex emotional world, and I moved among different mood states in a rapid, often unpredictable fashion. I see this now as really rather normal. I see that a transformation of enormous proportions was under way. It was not that the dark moods and the agitation defined me, but they existed alongside my more customary neutral and happy states. The problem was that they were so foreign to both my husband and me that we felt threatened by them. They were not consistent with earlier incarnations of me, and they were certainly not consistent with the picture we both had of how our lives, as parents, would be enriched. I coped mainly by ignoring and denying. And as is so often the case with whatever we try to ignore or deny, the darkness managed to grow ever more pronounced. I now find myself wondering, What if my darker moments hadn’t been so threatening? What if I had found a way, earlier on, to make sense of them? What if I had been able to recognize them as well within the range of normal for a woman adapting to motherhood, rather than as indications that I was somehow flawed? The dark moments felt like uninvited and unwelcome visitors, but what if I had known they were coming?
I didn’t know, because nobody talks about it.
I didn’t know, because I had navigated so many other major transitions without much internal upheaval; why should the transition to motherhood be any different?
I didn’t know, because I had navigated the early postpartum period—the first few months when moms are expected or “allowed” to have a little case of the blues—without a hint of the darkness that was to come later on. My colicky baby cried incessantly and I was physically taxed by him more than I ever could have imagined, but by all accounts I was coping well with having a difficult infant.
Not Postpartum Depression, but Postpartum Transformation
In one of the most important, honest books about childbirth and motherhood available to us, Misconceptions, author Naomi Wolf uses the term “postpartum grief.” She uses it almost in passing, but when I first read it, it stopped me in my tracks for all its accuracy and significance. Though Wolf uses the term to describe what depressed new mothers feel, I propose that we embrace it as an accurate label for the perfectly normal emotional state in which a new mother frequently finds herself, much like we view grief as the perfectly normal state that follows the death of a loved one. The term captures a core aspect of the transition to motherhood, but it is one that nobody likes to talk about. It captures the fundamental sense of loss associated with becoming a mother.
When my first child, Noah, was about six weeks old, I wrote the following in my journal:
Moments ago, I was sitting on the back stoop, drinking a beer and listening to the crickets. It’s an unusually hot late-summer evening. I’m sticky from the heat, exhausted from caring for my very fussy son all day, and the tension in my back muscles is fierce. As I sat staring at the moon during the first peaceful moment I’ve had all day, I found myself missing Life Before Noah. And then came the wave of guilt for feeling such a thing. Certainly, I am a guilt-prone person anyway, so the feeling is quite familiar. This, though, was different. More intense than any wave of guilt that’s ever washed over me before. What kind of person, what kind of mother, would long for the life she had before her child was born?
After sitting with this feeling of guilt for a minute, feeling disgusted with myself, it occurred to me that maybe it’s okay for me to feel this way. Why shouldn’t I miss all the things about my life that I cherished before Noah came along? I had a pretty wonderful thing going, and for the moment, much of that wonderful stuff has vanished. I trust that a lot of it will return, but honestly, it’s nowhere around right now and I miss it. The beer I was drinking tasted mighty fine, and I sure would’ve liked to have more than one. I can’t do that without tarnishing the breast milk that nourishes my baby. The quiet of the evening felt so cleansing, and I sure would’ve liked to spend the whole night out there enjoying it, instead of wearily grabbing just five minutes of it when the long battle to get Noah to sleep was over. Everything I hadn’t been able to get done all day was waiting for me inside, and I had to tackle it now that the baby was sleeping.
With the creation of a brand-new human being, there is so much emphasis on what is gained. New mothers bring home their little “bundles of joy” and all the gear that goes with them. A couple grows into a family. Diapers, toys, clothes, strollers, baby carriers, and high chairs fill the house. Visitors bearing casseroles and baby gifts appear at the door. The phone rings with inquiries and well wishes, and Facebook pages spill over with congratulatory posts. Feedings, diaper changes, cuddles, and naps fill the hours. All these additions to a woman’s life can obscure what is lost and what feels damaged, altered, broken, disrupted. Autonomy and personal freedom. Restful sleep. The familiar and predictable routine of life without a newborn. Confidence in one’s appearance, comfort in one’s own skin, a sense of oneself as feminine and sexual. A sense of connection to, and participation in, the outside world. Occupational identity. The time, and maybe even the interest, to be close to our mates.
Pregnant women are not sufficiently warned, if they are warned at all, about how a person so tiny can play havoc so enormous on the lifestyle they once knew. We speak in vague language like, “Oh, your life is about to change!” Everyone knows to expect a big change. Hardly anybody knows that that change can feel a lot like grief.
Every new mother mourns the loss of her personal freedom, more or less consciously and to varying degrees. Some women are acutely aware of their feelings and their longings and feel entitled to them; these are the luckiest among us, able to experience the joys and the pains of motherhood without self-scorn or denial. Others are aware but shame themselves for feeling what they feel, believing they are supposed to love every minute of motherhood or that they are selfish if they want just to be left alone for a while or that they should
never have had children if they’d rather return to work than stay home with them. Some may view the feelings as perfectly reasonable for other mothers to have, but they stir up harsh self-criticism about perceived weakness or failure when the feelings belong to them. Still others are vaguely depressed or anxious without much insight into why. All are experiencing a profound kind of loss that, as a culture, we have conspired to keep secret. Motherhood, so they say, is supposed to be about the addition of a bundle of joy, not the subtraction of anything important or significant.
It has been pointed out that one of the reasons so little has been written about what it is like to mother a new baby is that the time to reflect on this experience, let alone put those reflections into words, is an unavailable luxury when one shares a home with a newborn. Author Louise Erdrich writes that she responds to the needs of her new baby without even translating the baby’s cries into words; she “bypass[es] straight to action.”3 As she does so, she occupies some sort of Neverland: “My brain is a white blur. I lose track of what I’ve been doing, where I’ve been, who I am.”
I have a similar memory from my earliest days of motherhood. I was sitting on the couch in our living room, nursing my son and looking out the window, when I saw some people walk by. I had a sudden realization that the same old world was continuing to go on out there and I was no longer a part of it. That moment captures how drastic the change from non-mother to mother really can be. For me, this observation was not attached to any kind of emotion other than surprise. I was not (yet) sad or lonely or angry about existing in a separate dimension with my new baby. I did, however, lack the awareness that this pronounced sense of separation from the rest of the world was only temporary. I had the impression that this was the new, permanent state of affairs, much like I later had the impression—when my baby established himself as a truly terrible sleeper—that I would never again sleep.
And so the facets of loss in a new mother’s life are many. This is not to say that the average new mother is in an acute state of mourning, let alone in a state of full-fledged depression. Like I was, most new mothers are vacillating, constantly, between states of joy and other emotions so varied and complicated that, for now, we’ll just call them “non-joy.” The trouble begins when we judge the non-joy states. We see them as bad, wrong, and shameful. We view them as indicative of our competence at mothering or our suitability for the job (“I feel so overwhelmed. I’m just not cut out for this.”). We see them as unwelcome intruders on what is supposed to be the pleasurable, fulfilling stuff of motherhood.
The good news is that as a society, we are no longer silent on the topic of postpartum depression. Even in the decade or so since the words by Paula Nicolson quoted at the start of this chapter were published, the taboo against unhappiness in a new mother has begun to loosen its grip. Books like Brooke Shields’s Down Came the Rain, essays and candid disclosures in popular magazines by Chrissy Teigen and Adele, and other celebrity accounts of PPD have done much to normalize the experience of mood problems during and after pregnancy. New research identifying just how commonplace emotional problems are in new parents, and how many different forms they can take, is getting some much-needed publicity, and public health campaigns reflect our growing commitment to addressing women’s well-being in early motherhood. In many states, laws require pediatric and obstetric health care providers to screen for PPD at standard checkups, such as the baby’s one-week visit and the mother’s six-week checkup with her OB-GYN. It is no longer quite as shameful for a new mother to suffer debilitating depressive symptoms in the wake of giving birth. After all, she is undergoing tremendous hormonal changes as well as lifestyle changes, and either of these could leave even the most psychologically healthy woman susceptible to the “common cold” of mental illness, as depression is sometimes known.
However, overly simplistic explanations for PPD are part of a set of myths that continue to distort our view of what changes within a woman when she becomes a mother and what constitutes a “normal” transition into motherhood. Our improved awareness and acceptance of PPD has brought with it an unfortunate consequence: another false dichotomy that distorts our conceptualizations of motherhood, this one distinguishing between the small minority of women who suffer from PPD and the large majority of those who do not. If you are lucky enough to fall into the latter category, the assumption is that your newfound motherhood is generally not marked by darkness, agitation, loss, helplessness, or despair. It is assumed that your transition is a joyful one, maybe with some exhaustion on the side. This misconception of the difference between those struck with PPD and those who are not masks the complexity of the typical transition into motherhood, a transition that has the potential to rattle and rearrange a woman more than anything else she has faced before or will ever face again.
Where does this leave the large majority of new mothers, spared from clinically detectable or diagnosable postpartum depression but nonetheless suffering in various ways, often on an unpredictable timeline? The mothers who are fumbling, doubting, and hurting even as they smile, laugh, and genuinely treasure their new babies? The mothers who are wondering, sometimes with profound angst, who this person is in the mirror looking back at them even as they rejoice in their new role as nurturer? The ones who, grateful though they may be for their coparent, are distressed about varying degrees of anger or disinterest toward their partners and worried about what will become of their marriages? Their stories are the norm rather than the exception.
Yet these stories are so rarely told.
Anna came to me for therapy when her baby girl was five months old. I will never forget the look in her eyes as I greeted her in my waiting room that first day. A beautiful woman in her early thirties, with long brown wavy hair and a gorgeous curly-headed baby to match, she spoke to me before even opening her mouth. Her eyes said, “I’ve been putting on a brave face and I can’t do it anymore. Can I tell the truth to you?” Anna’s truth was that she felt utterly overwhelmed by daily life with her daughter, Gracie. She loved caring for her, and there was no shortage of joy in interacting with her—Anna wanted to be sure I understood that. But lurking beneath her pleasure in mothering was a pervasive sense of discontent. Each new day meant another opportunity to get “caught up on life,” as she put it; she wanted to get the bills paid, return her grandmother’s phone calls, clean the house, schedule that overdue lunch date with her coworkers who hadn’t seen her since the baby was born. But each evening brought the same familiar disappointment. All her hours were filled with the endless stuff of parenting an infant, and when the baby slept, Anna collapsed in exhaustion and stared out the window, thinking about all the things she should be doing. “I used to be so energetic,” she told me. “It makes me feel crazy to fall behind—to owe people emails, to see dirty dishes piled in the sink, to get phone calls about overdue bills. I keep waiting for things to get easier, but they don’t. I want my old life back.”
As soon as those words came out of her mouth—the wish for her pre-motherhood life—Anna began to cry. The emotion resided there, in the place where she couldn’t bear her own words because of what she feared they meant. “How can I even say that? I love my daughter. I would do anything for her. I can’t stand the thought of losing her. But sometimes when I look at her, all I can think about is who I used to be. I didn’t know what I was giving up to become her mother. I didn’t know how lost I would feel.”
It wasn’t long before the conversation turned to her marriage. Anna’s husband, Pete, had been the one to call me about the possibility of seeing his wife for therapy. “I think she’s either depressed or having anxiety attacks, or both,” he had said to me over the phone. “She told me she was open to seeing somebody, but that calling to set up the appointment was just one more task that would go undone. So I offered to make the call for her.” When I talked to Anna on the phone after that—to ensure that she did, indeed, want to set up an initial appointment with me and to transfer the control and responsibility to her�
��she told me she had agreed to let her husband make the call in hopes that maybe this would set the stage for him to be involved in therapy. “He thinks I have a problem, and I guess that’s true. But something’s not right with our marriage, and I wanted him to want to come with me.”
In that first session, Anna told me all about what “wasn’t right.” Anna and Pete argued far more than they used to. They often went their separate ways in the evenings after the baby was in bed; Anna would immediately go to bed herself, and Pete would stay up until midnight playing guitar or watching movies. They hadn’t had sex since their daughter was born. Pete had tried, many times, but Anna couldn’t muster enough interest or comfort in her own body to be sexual with him. Pete felt rejected and angry. Anna felt guilty for hurting him by rejecting his advances, but also angry and resentful about his interest in sex. “I have nothing to give him. I can’t even find the time or energy to take care of myself. When he inches closer to me in bed and tries to kiss me, it feels like just one more demand placed on me.”
Though it took a little longer to find a way to talk about it, eventually Anna also told me about a nagging, and sometimes seething, anger toward Pete for the way he seemed to be carrying on with life as usual since Gracie was born. “He comes home from work and immediately asks what he can do to help. He usually takes Gracie off my hands and plays with her while I make dinner, and it’s nice to have that time to myself in the kitchen. I know I should feel grateful. He’s a good dad. But his life is pretty much the same as it was before she was born. He goes to work, he goes to the gym on his lunch hour, he sleeps all night long while I’m up breastfeeding. He doesn’t even hear her cries, or if he does, he just moves her over to me and then rolls over and falls back asleep. Sometimes I lie there awake, nursing, thinking about what an asshole he is for being asleep. What is wrong with me?!”
To Have and to Hold Page 2