Dark Hours

Hi there! It's been awhile since I've posted anything, so if you're still reading my blog, you deserve a prize. Not that I can really give you anything, since all my time and energy goes into taking care of a baby and myself.

So. The real reason I've been out of commission here is that I was dealing with some really severe post-partum depression. It's a lot more common than most people realize, but that doesn't make it any less difficult. It's a horrible feeling to wonder if you love your child enough, or at all. But it's terrifying to realize that you think about hurting that child, and more so to realize in the darkest, most difficult moments that if you don't put her down right now, you will do something you regret.

It's not pretty, but it's the truth. I couldn't trust myself sometimes, and I'm thankful that those moments only came in the middle of the night when Andy could take over caring for her and then be my shoulder to cry on. I struggled a lot with these feelings and thoughts, and it only made me feel more inadequate as a mother. There's so much judgement for mothers who admit to being less than thrilled with parenting, and even more for those who don't know how to handle the challenges, but I feel it's important to be honest about this, even if it took me several weeks to share what I've been through.

After all the time we spent trying to get pregnant, I forgot to prepare myself for how hard the transition to motherhood would be. It's not just the sleepless nights, though that was one of my biggest triggers. It's also the insecurity of not knowing what she's trying to tell me with her cries, the fear that the mistakes I make (big or small) will have long-term consequences, and the sheer bewilderment of having a relative stranger running my life. I felt like I couldn't make her happy, but being a perfectionist, I had the completely unreasonable standard for myself that I should be able to figure what she wanted in the first couple weeks.

Life doesn't work like that though. It takes time to learn a baby's cries and cues, and even then, sometimes she's just crying to cry and there's nothing to do but soothe her until it runs its course or hand her off to someone else when you can't handle it anymore. Breastfeeding isn't strictly intuitive; there's a bit of a learning curve to get past the soreness and the leaking. And then there are the diaper changes where she pees all over the place before you can get the fresh diaper on, and then does it again two more times.

It should have been one of the most special times in my life, but I couldn't enjoy my daughter until she was almost 2 months old. I'd have brief periods of happiness, but the rest of the time I was struggling to live without being able to control how she behaved or change my environment to be more manageable. Eventually I learned to go with the flow, to not take it personally when she screamed, to recognize when I was approaching that border between rational response and losing it again. Weekly therapy has made all that possible. Medication also helped make it easier to accept the difficult moments even when I didn't have half the sleep I needed. So many people have told me that you get the hang of it around 3 months, and it seems to be true.

It's so much easier now, especially now that she only wakes up twice during the night, if at all. Life feels a lot better, though there are still hard moments when I have to walk away. I'm not sure where to take this blog now, though. I don't really have any interest in making this a "look at how cute my kid is! she has sunshine and rainbows coming out of her ass!" mommyblog (though I could do that somewhere else, since she has some spectacularly surprising stuff coming out of her ass sometimes). Yet there's not a whole lot to say about my ovaries or my hoo-ha at this point (sorry Hoozin, I just couldn't leave it alone). In about a year we'll be trying for kid #2, but until then there may be some radio silence. So tell me what you think. Should I start another blog, or should I just transform this yet again to reflect the newest stage of my life?