Baby Blues

When you have your baby, they try to prepare you for what they call “baby blues,” or better known as “postpartum depression.” They remind you to pay attention to how long you’re experiencing this sadness, and mention to you not-so-discretely that there are drugs you can take to help you cope, should you find your moods unmanageable.

“These feelings are quite common after you have a baby,”

“Many people experience the same thing,”

“You are not alone.”

Studies do, in fact, show us that there is a significant surge of hormones in the body post-birth which are branded as the culprits of these melancholic feelings, but in my opinion, I think it’s actually quite patronizing and dismissive to the experience of a woman post-birth to chalk down their emotional response to extreme amounts of sleep deprivation and stress as hormonal and leave it at that. These studies completely remove all aspects of personhood from the equation, only to regard us as no more than a pituitary gland.

And quite frankly, I think it’s bullshit.

I feel forgotten about as a person most of the time, and studies like that sort of reinforce the notion that forgetting about the women who give birth is okay because they’re just hormonal and their emotional instability will either resolve on its own, or they can be drugged into normalcy if it doesn’t.

They don’t take into account that you only get 4 or 5 hours of interrupted sleep during the night, or that your nipples are cracked and bleeding and chafe up against your shirt every time you move, or that your insides for the first six weeks literally feel like they’re going to fall out of you at any second.

They don’t take into account that your baby needs to eat every 3 hours while everyone in the world is asking you when you’re going to lose the baby weight, or that eye contact is important but the baby only likes being held at a 37° angle and your neck is aching on a constant basis and now you have a migraine.

They don’t take into account that baby really only wants you when they have a problem. They really try to sell that by saying things like, “Mama knows best,” or calling it “mother’s intuition,” when the reality is that you were as clueless as they were in the beginning, it’s just that you’re the only one who could be assed to spend more than ten minutes (let’s be real: it was actually hours in the middle of a sleepless night) of trial and error to figure out what they like.

We don’t get the privilege of handing off a fussy baby and saying, “They only want you,” and going off to make a hot meal and actually getting to enjoy it with both hands. Our most basic needs like eating, showering, putting on real people clothes and getting exercise are now labeled “self care,” a luxury, when for everyone else it’s just part of the monotony of every day life. They offer to help until the baby is alert and needs to be occupied, then it’s either back to mama immediately, or, if they are brave enough to endure, it’s, “That was hard, I understand now,”…and then back to mama.

Postpartum depression isn’t just hormones.

It’s being repeatedly punched in the face by an overtired tiny human at 3:00AM with your breasts out.

It’s having your hair pulled and tangled in between little baby fingers during every burp.

It’s hours of, “Put me down, no, pick me back up again.”

It’s looking at the same mess day-in and day-out and saying, “I’ll get to that when the baby naps,” but then they never do, unless it’s on top of you.

It’s having to make the decision between getting to poop, or quickly shoving a sandwich in your face.

It’s days where “doing your best” means surviving on the same cold cup of coffee and a bowl of soggy Golden Grahams.

It’s feeling like an inconvenience because you and your partner can’t go out to dinner anymore, or they have to post-pone that thing they really wanted to do so you can leave the house for two hours without a baby attached to you. It’s feeling endlessly guilty about even taking those two hours because they already work so hard to give you everything and you can barely manage to get the dishes done most days. It’s knowing those two hours would be better spent catching up on all of the other shit you need to do, but you’ve been instructed to leave and enjoy your time away. Except you can’t because…well…all that other shit is still waiting for you when you come back.

“How long are you going to be?”

“Are you on the way home yet?”

And you get it. You really do. Your heart bleeds for them in a way you can’t adequately put into words. So instead, you just rush back, even if you really could have used an extra 30 minutes.

It’s having to pretend to your doctor that you’re fine and happy when you have to mention that something is wrong with your baby or your milk supply or your body because there is a fine line between valid concern and new mother paranoia, but it still takes months of mentioning the same issue over and over again for anyone to even half-believe you, and then they still don’t actually do anything about it.

It’s having to defend your parenting choices or your baby’s preferences to the endless mob of unsolicited advice givers.

“Have you tried swaddling him?” No, Karen. It’s been 3 months and I haven’t tried that, holy shit wow you’re a genius.

“You should let him sleep on his tummy.” Okay, are you volunteering to supervise him while he screams like a banshee until he chokes on his own spit or…?

“Gas drops saved us!” Fuck off.

It’s watching everyone with their smiley, well-slept babies and wondering if your baby will ever be happy because he has been miserable for all but seven minutes of his entire life.

Am I doing something wrong?

Does my baby hate me?

Am I just not meant to be a mother?

While I’m sure the hormones exacerbate the initial emotional responses to the everyday stressors of life with a fresh baby, I really wish we didn’t dismiss the everyday stressors of life with a fresh baby.

I really wish we could say, “I am feeling a bit overwhelmed by everything that is going on and all of the things I can’t seem to get done,” without someone suggesting we have an illness that needs to be medicated.

I really wish we could say, “I am anxious about being responsible for someone who can’t tell me what’s wrong and all of the things I’ve read about SIDS,” without a pill being shoved in our face.

I wish it were acceptable to say, “Actually, it’s really annoying that my baby fights sleep and kicks and punches me when I’m trying to settle him,” because apparently the moment you talk any shit about your baby, it means you hate them or want to hurt them.

It is so completely isolating to be living with perfectly valid thoughts and feelings, only to be told you’re mentally ill because somewhere down the line as a society we have manufactured wanting to be a mother and giving birth into some sort of magical fantasy where nothing ever goes wrong and you love every second of your life because you have a baby now. And if something does go wrong or you find yourself thinking, “Hmmm, wow this part sucks,” you aren’t a real mother because a real mother wouldn’t be like that!

A REAL mother would consider herself blessed and devote every millisecond of her life to meeting the needs of her child, the home and her partner without complaint. She would adore looking like a crack whore unless she somehow manages to put on a full face of makeup because her sleepless nights meant that she fed her baby. She would love that she only manages to consume a little less than 1000 calories a day and is still fat because who knows why, since her body did this amazing thing and wow isn’t that so great? She would love her permanently clenched jaw, the weird discharge, the hair loss, the nightmares, the body odour, the dry skin, and getting the leftovers of the day because that’s what mothers are supposed to love, right? They have a baby and that’s all that should matter, right? And if she doesn’t love all of that, it couldn’t possibly be that her upset is purely situational and sometimes shit is really just shitty…no. It HAS to be that her hormones are out of whack and she needs drugs.

BOO to that.

Mama, I see you. You aren’t hormonal. You aren’t crazy. There isn’t anything wrong with you. At first, life with a new baby is pretty whack, and that’s the truth.

But it does get better, I swear. It might take months, but one day you’ll wake up and your baby will smile at you. He’ll only cry for two hours instead of five. And then he’ll only cry when he’s hungry or tired. And he’ll sleep! Maybe not for long, at first, but he’ll sleep, and you’ll rejoice. He’ll become predictable and you’ll wonder why you didn’t figure this out sooner, but at the end of the day, it won’t really matter.

And everything will actually be okay.