Coming Out of the Postpartum Depression Cloud
Surviving Postpartum Depression
A week or so later, I had my six-week check-up and the doctor asked me how I was feeling. I said in my chipper voice, “Fine!” (Of course.) And then added, for no reason, really, “I had to leave and go to a hotel room with the baby one night, but otherwise I’m fine.”
And she stopped and looked at me with a question mark.
“That’s not normal,” she said.
And she talked to me about postpartum depression, which I was still not convinced that I had. She gave me a prescription for Zoloft that I didn’t think I needed or would take. She gave me a business card for a therapist that I knew I wouldn’t call.
No one could really help me because I didn’t think I needed it.
I did end up taking the antidepressant, though. I don’t know why, but I think I thought I was sick of being sad and maybe this would help.
And then one day a couple weeks later, I woke up and things were clear.
I can’t explain this to you except to say that literally, one day I woke up and the fog had lifted.
The birds were chirping, the sky was blue, and I felt like Snow White.
It was almost right at the three-month mark (about a month and a half on Zoloft) and almost about the time my baby started sleeping through the night, too. We had also had a terrible start to nursing (bleeding, cracked nipples and PAIN) and that was getting better, too.
I don’t know what was different, all I knew was that I was back.
Was it the pill? Was it that I was getting sleep now? Was it both?
I still don’t know.
But waking up that day, I mean truly waking up that day, was the only clear sign to me that what I went through was most definitely not me.
For three months, I was not myself.
And now I know that’s okay.
You see, this happens. It happens to mommies every day. And while you’re going through it, you as a mom know that postpartum depression exists, but it most definitely is not happening to you. Or so you think.
That’s the funny thing about postpartum depression.
Sometimes you don’t know you’re in it until you’re OUT of it.
I know now that I did have postpartum depression. That the chemicals coursing through my body made me feel as if my reality was real, when it fact, it wasn’t.