How Postpartum Depression Really Feels
22.08.2023 - 23:13
/ glamour.com
She’s going to die.
You’re going to lose her.
When you least expect it, you will look away, you won’t be paying attention, and something will happen.
She’ll be gone, and it will be your fault.Thoughts like these played in my head on a near-constant loop starting when my daughter was about five months old.
Or, at least, that’s when the thoughts had become so pervasive and ever present that I finally noticed them.
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Thanks to my history of premenstrual dysphoric disorder, a severe form of PMS I’d been diagnosed with at 15 (which is an early indicator of PPD later in life), I’d been waiting for it all along.
And yet I was still shocked when it happened.
Because the way it felt wasn’t at all how I expected it would feel.Everything I knew about postpartum depression had come from the movie For Keeps starring Molly Ringwald.
As a young mother, Ringwald’s character can’t connect with her newborn baby.
She sits there, near catatonic, unaffected by this screaming, desperate little creature.
I was so scared this would happen to me, that this tiny person I’d waited nine miserable months for would enter my world and I wouldn’t be able love her.
That I wouldn’t feel anything for this baby who needed my love to live.
Pregnancy had been unbearable for me.
I experienced a ruptured ovarian cyst, weekly visits to the hospital with preterm labor, and a descent into depression that was so gradual I don’t think I noticed until months after she was born, when my own thoughts began bludgeoning me with repetition and severity.
The idea that I might not be able to feel love for her after all that terrified me.But that’s not what happened.
The love I felt for my daughter was instantaneous and overpowering.
It is—and remains—an emotional overload
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