When it comes to PND I have previous experience. This is something I went through before with my eldest daughter. It was bad. I tried committing suicide, I drove iraticly as I hoped to die in a car crash (did have one). But I got through it. With more scares on my body, added to those placed there when I was suicidal in school, I got through it. It was not easy and I spent more time crying and feeling worthless while holding my baby than any mum ever should. I also started having a really bad lifestyle, one that it is only on reflection that I know it was because of the depression.
I did not get it with my son, I always joked and said it was because I didn’t have time. I was too busy to be so self involved. This what I always said. In my head I knew it was silly, I knew it was just my way of trying to cover up how awful I was in many ways, but the fact still remains that I didn’t get it. Maybe it was just simpler. My eldest was contented with simpler things, I only had to provide food for the two of us, and the bay milk was bought by their dad each week as child support. Now it’s not that simple.
I have not been diagnosed with having PND this time but, a big but, I know the warning signs. I have trodden this vicious path before. I have slipped down this road of self hate, this trail of feeling pointless and not needed. This time tho there is another added edge. The in capability.
This is all where I think to my self that I have put myself here and that I should be able to cope. That I some how should not be feeling thai way as I have wanted to keep all three of my children. This is where I start to feel a failure. Because I can’t cope. I just can’t do it on my own. My kids can sometimes put themselves in dangerous situations and I just don’t know how to handle it. I don’t know how to react. There is no book entitled “how not to lose your s**t”. I have tried reading books on toddler behaviour when my eldest daughter played up when I had my son. I tried every parenting experts tips and it never works for long. So I feel like the worst pedant ever because I can’t even handed my own kids.
The biggest feeling of hatred come from failing to be able to breastfeed my new baby for more than 4 weeks. We managed 4 weeks before I got really bad mastitis and had a very bad fever (that’s a whole other story). After that I really struggled, and with no support from my husband, my mother ( who hates breastfeeding) telling me I can now have my life back, it just made me feel unable to even provide for her. It seemed to me and still does that I was not providing even on a basic level. I was not longer feeding her, I was no longer the sole person she needed and I miss that bond. I only managed four weeks on something I wanted to do up untill six months. It really has mad me feel inadaquet. I almost have looked at it as and inevitable. I only managed six weeks with my first as I had to go back to collage. My son had a posterior tongue tie and so found it impossible to feed, not just from me but from a bottle and solids. Now i had an opportunity to do it, to really push and use my amazing milk supply (always had loads before, even donated some), but this just never happened. There wasn’t loads, it was hard and I could never to seem to feed for long enough as I always had someone else to look after. I have done research into PND after breastfeeding and found that it happens, the drop in hormones makes you feel depressed but i have never found anything to suggest its as long lasting as I have been experiencing it.
I think there are many people out there that can help, that I can talk to, but from previous experience there is not much they will do for me. I found last time it was lonley, I spoke to a few people and they listened, refereed me to someone else and the this became a cycle. I felt like a broken tape. Playing the same message over and over hoping to be heard, only to be told it was mild and it would pass. The suicidalness did but i turned to something else instead, i went from self harming by cutting to self harm of a different sense. I turned to drinking. It didn’t last long, about six months. But in those six months I went through a lot, I got shown the dark side of a life i could have ended up having just by becoming and alcoholic.
Unlike my 18 year olds that I was drinking with, I was not the purely to have a good time. I also had resposabilities. I had a baby waiting at home and a job that I had to do. I made it work. I lived like two different people. One who was a mummy at collage, getting good grades to go to university, working to pay for my baby and all her needs. Then there was this 18 year old. The girl who couldn’t see past a black fog of stupidity and emotionalness. These two spent little time together. And one rarely thought about the others life. I would drink every night, and I spend a large part of my week partying. Meeting new men, doing stupid things, living very close to a live I didn’t want my daughter to know about. I was doing this alone. My daughter farther (my now husband) didn’t have much to do with us as we split not long after her birth. He was unfaithful through my pregnancy. I couldn’t handle it so we split. For six months. Then it was like a light-bulb moment. My daughter was doing more, I was going to university, I had worked hard to get to where I was and I was finally about to begin the career of my dreams. And so I just stopped. I stopped drinking all the time, joined the gym. Worked hard at university, I got back together with my daughters farther. We where making life work. It just seemed to stop. The fog just passed. I could see that I was not useless and a horrible mother, I had a purpose, to show my daughter that no matter what you keep putting one foot in-front of the other and you work hard. Eventually you shall be rewarded.
Now though, I know that nothing is going to change. I will go back to work, I will continue to do all the things my kids need and I will continue to be the girl no-one notices. The one you walk past because she has too many kids, the one you stare at because she can’t keep them together. I’m the woman who is having a bad day, everyday. I’m that woman that you see on T.V and scream at her to leave her husband because not only is he not there for her he is not there for anyone but himself. I know all this, yet I know somehow it is all my fault. That my husband wont touch me because I don’t look like used to. My body it not the same, it has been through three pregnancies and each one has taken something from my looks. Each one adding its own dark ring around my eyes. For the icing on with very deflated, bulging, stretched cake, through all this stress I have started to lose my hair. This not the normal port baby hair loss this as now you can see bald patches. If I where my husband i wouldn’t want me either. I can’t leave him, I can’t do it on my own. Even if he doesn’t have much to do with them, he is still there. A little back up for when I can’t take anymore and I just need to leave for a second. Almost like that teddy that you should throw away because it is old, smelly and you have out grown it, but you also know that when things where bad it was there and your not sure if it went away that things would ever be OK.
Its not all doom and gloom. I have realized I need to get help. That I can’t keep living on this tension wire of wishing I was dead but worrying what would happen to my kids. I have found some information, people to talk to and I’m sure that I will get through this. I’m sure that there will be an end. I will get through the fog. I just need to find my torch. That thing that makes it a little easier to deal with. That time will come. I will get back to me, having a baby is no easy feet and it defiantly is not easy when you are always on your own. But I will get there.
Please visit these sites for support:
www.tommys.org/pregnancy-information
thethreewaymum.wordpress.com 