I think I can sum up the mood of the first six weeks as complete insanity slowly turning into mild insanity. Now that I'm nearly 8 weeks post partum, I feel pretty good.
I remember holding my son when he was just a few days old and thinking about all the things in the world that could harm him. When they are that fragile and little, you just don't see how anyone could possibly survive to become an adult. Certainly, I thought, I would not make it with him. He was healthy and growing well, but it was the outside world that scared me. I have never felt more vulnerable. I also was so afraid of abusing him, even though I am far from an abusive person, I needed lots of reassurance from Brent that I wasn't going to hurt him. "Promise me we will never hurt him," I would say. As if some outside force was going to turn me into a cruel person without me realizing it.
I had to constantly remind myself to live in the moment. To enjoy holding him and feeding him. To be content to sit at home and watch him sleep. To try to not worry about getting sleep or returning to work (which seemed an impossibility for a while). To just be, and be happy. It worked sometimes, and other times I was deeply depressed. And when I get depressed I am super critical of the actions of others. Every phone all that wasn't returned to me, every email that never got a reply back felt awful and I asked Brent what was wrong with everyone. But I've lived long enough to know that if it seems like everyone else has a problem, it's probably me with the problem. So then it became, "am I a total freak that no one wants to be around?" This is the voice of depression. When the depression lifted, the unanswered emails didn't bother me as much, they didn't become a referendum on my likeability. "People are busy this summer." Maybe that is delusional too, but it feels better than "I'm a freak!"
So I would say that I got the post partum depression, but that I coped with it alright. And it only lasted hours or a couple days, not the clinical diagnosis of two weeks, most of the time. Plus my therapist helps a lot. I kept off of meds for the prenatal depression, I can keep off of them for the post natal. And now, maybe finally, I can get back to feeling like myself. Which brings me to the body.
I hated pregnancy. The first month wasn't too bad, I had a couple bad headaches and some dizziness, but that's it. Then I had nausea for the next two months. My nausea wasn't severe, but it was moderate, and lasted 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, for a good 6 weeks, and wasn't really completely gone until week 15. I never threw up, but only because I hate throwing up so much that I did everything I could to prevent it, there were definitely some close calls and dry heaves. And then when the nausea went away I had headaches for a month. Then months 5, 6, and 7 weren't too bad accept that my heartburn was still going strong and I was swelling and needing to sleep a bunch, then month 8 is when I really started to feel like I did not own my body at all, that something awful was controlling it and I felt trapped. This feeling only intensified in the ninth month, the last couple weeks before he was born I was even starting to feel resentful. I wanted the pregnancy to end, I wanted my body back. I did not bond with my unborn baby. I did not like that he had to grow inside of me, I wanted a baby, not a pregnancy! I was super impatient and extremely crabby the last week. I was so happy that he came a week early. I felt like he listened to me and said, "OK mom, I guess I can get born now if it will make you feel better."
I'm still happy to not be pregnant. So happy. My uterus is off limits for two years. I want two years of having my body back. And because I so badly felt like I didn't have my body during pregnancy, I now feel this intense connection to my body. I've never loved my body more. I feel so in control of it now. My shoes fit again and my waist is slowly shrinking. I feel like it took the pregnancy to make me appreciate this body. For nine months I had to give up control of my body over to this alien growing inside of me. Pregnancy effects everything, they don't tell you that, it changes EVERYTHING in your body. But you get it back, slightly changed, slightly deformed, but you get it back. Except not your boobs, your boobs still belong to the alien, but you learn to love giving them to him.
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