Postpartum Depression: a Call to be Transformed

My Personal Experience & Explorations of the Emotional and Psychological Transformation of Motherhood

Unexpected Beginnings: My Rocky Entrance to Motherhood

Ever since I could remember, I’ve wanted to be a mother. And when I finally became pregnant unexpectedly, I was hesitant to allow myself any excitement. My boyfriend at the time (now my husband) and I were still living with our parents, and I was in the middle of applying for medical school. I had no idea what my life was going to look like when I had the baby, if I had the baby. Working in a women’s clinic, I’ve witnessed the excitement of a first ultrasound ending in the disappointment of a lost heartbeat frequently enough to know that for a healthy baby to be born was nothing short of a miracle.

When that day finally came, it started rather anticlimactic. Unbeknownst to me, my water had broken, not all at once, but very slowly. I thought I was just peeing myself but the doctor wanted me to go in to check just in case. I ended up getting admitted, and since I was 39 weeks and my water was leaking they wanted to induce me. There was no slow progression in my body and mind like you would have in a natural labor. After 12 hours on Pitocin (artificial oxytocin — the chemical that brings on labor) I was still not feeling any contractions. There was a shift change in the nurses, and my night nurse said the one coming to replace her was known to have babies born on her watch. I was about to find out why. She came in and said she needed to put monitors inside me. Didn’t know exactly what she meant, but after the fact, I’m pretty sure that was her bullshit way of going in to fully break my water to get things moving (completely without consent). I suddenly began to feel all the pain of the contractions I was having but not feeling due to a large part of my water bag being intact. It went from 0 to 100. In the next hour, I got the epidural and the OB on call pushed back her scheduled c-section to deliver me. My baby’s heart rate kept going down during the delivery due to intense contractions and her head possibly being stuck. It seemed like every nurse in the unit was in my delivery room all of a sudden. The doctor had to use a vacuum suction to get my baby out quickly. And next thing I know there is a little screaming alien on me going straight for my boob. And I felt… nothing.

Everything felt wrong. There’s no way I was supposed to have a baby; it just didn’t make sense. It was a surprise pregnancy, a surprise and rushed labor. All of this happened essentially without me doing much of anything, it seemed. I didn’t have my life together and I was not fit to be a mother. It felt like I didn’t deserve it. And now I have this screaming baby that’s mine? And she’s starving. And I had no clue how to breastfeed (no, you don’t just put the boob in the baby’s mouth. Crazy, right?).

So I’m sitting there, my husband is crying tears of joy, and the doctor is doing her thing down there. I know I’m not having the typical reaction. Luckily for me, I had actually heard stories before of women saying they didn’t feel instantly connected to their babies when they were born. So I figured shaming myself would only make the situation worse and probably make me more depressed. I knew the thoughts I was having at that moment were not me.

So I told myself in that moment, I will bond with this baby, I don’t care how long it takes, I will do the things, I will feed her and nurture her and the connection will come in me doing those things. Turns out, I was right. And for me, it took much shorter than expected. Only a few hours later in the middle of the night when my husband was asleep, my daughter woke up crying and I held her as she fell asleep in my arms. I was sitting there watching her sleep and thought she was the most beautiful thing in the whole world.

Expectation of Fulfillment vs The Reality of Responsibility

A lot of women who desire to be mothers have spent a large portion of their lives imagining the day and what it will be like to finally have a cute little baby of their own. But those imaginings of the experience of having a baby are coming from the mind of a little girl. A girl who has no clue what babies are actually like, what they need, and what it takes to have one and take care of one.

Having a child is like Judgment Day. The stress and anxiety my husband and I went through when we found out we were pregnant ultimately came from a place of, what do we actually have to give to our baby? We hadn’t built a life for ourselves yet so we felt like we had let our baby down. And that is one of the hardest and coldest pills to swallow. My husband stepped up big time and put all his entrepreneurial and creative pursuits aside and found a program where he could get his teaching credential and start teaching that year. They told him there was no way he could find a job, but he did. We stepped up to the challenge to do right by our baby, which has made us way better people. But, making those decisions does not come easy.

Part of the expectation of girls for motherhood is that it is going to fulfill them and make them feel complete. And while I think motherhood is one of the most, if not the most, fulfilling things I’ve ever done, that is not something that comes automatically. The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer put it well when he said:

“Every man wishes to lay hold of the results of great talents without possessing such talents himself; he wishes to use them to his own advantage, and to reap the fruits thereof without having sown the seed; not to speak of the fact that he has no inkling of the inner nature of the talent he covets, or of the fact that one must pay dearly for the acquisition of anything.”

The fulfillment that I have received from motherhood has not come directly from my child, but rather from me stepping up to the challenge that my child presented me. I get to experience life now on a greater level because I have opened up my heart more, earned a greater character through making difficult decisions time and time again, and have a new perspective to approach life.

The love I speak of came from the action of me choosing to commit to my child, despite not having the emotions and feelings most would require to do something for another. Love comes from commitment. Now, I have all the feelings in the world for my children, but those are things that need to be wrestled with to provide proper love with the proper action to my children. You feeling something for someone actually has no effect on their life unless you do something about it. Unless you are constantly thinking about what is best for them.

Love has little to do with your own feelings, and is best given when you are thinking of yourself the least. When a girl becomes a mother, and she learns this lesson, and that is when she becomes a woman.

This transition into becoming a mother for the first time truly has everything to do with your relationship to love and to responsibility. And for most, these are complex entanglements. One of the advantages my husband and I did have on our side when we got pregnant was that we had been together for five years and had actually navigated a lot of our past “trauma” together and cultivated a beautiful relationship together (this was of course tested many times since).

One thing I hadn’t put much thought into was my view of my relationship with my own mother. Ever since becoming a mother, I have seen her in a different light. I had a moment recently where I was thinking about her (she was born and raised in Iran, in a Christian family in a strict Muslim nation) and how she’s not the most emotionally present or nurturing. And I had a thought where I wondered if the way I felt when I delivered my baby, detached and numb, is how she felt as a mother. And how in that big moment for me of becoming a mother for the first time, I “absorbed” that “generational trauma,” so to speak.

Whatever is not uncovered within us will surely show up when we have big life moments, when we are faced with big questions like: Can you step up and love someone you are tasked with giving the ultimate love to? Fortunately, I had done enough inner work and educated myself extensively to build a mental and psychological scaffolding to navigate these muddy waters and ask the hard questions.

It is no surprise that postpartum can be a time rife with all sorts of disordered thinking and feelings. It is the biggest change a woman will ever go through. She is facing the ultimate judgment day. She is facing all the unmet expectations of her girlhood. She is facing the biggest, scariest, and most demanding responsibility of all. She is being tasked with one of the most difficult things a human can be faced with: to open her heart to true sacrificial love.

Autumn Kern, a fellow mom and thinker from the Commonplace, once said

“Motherhood is an invitation to a million little deaths… the invitation to die to ourselves and press into the hard thing in order to see life grow.”

The presentation of depression, anxiety, rage, or psychosis in the postpartum woman is a signal that something inside the woman needs to die. It is our responsibility as mothers to uphold ourselves in those uncertain times and be brave enough to look the darkness in the face and let it burn the dead wood so that we can rise above it.

Self-sacrifice wouldn’t be sacrifice if it weren’t for the strong presence of the self, and for the intentional choosing to give something up. It is of the utmost importance for the first-time mom to take a look at the state of her relationship with love in her life — with her husband, with her father, with her mother, how she has received or given love, how she has been let down, and what she wants to rise to. She must also look at her relationship with responsibility in her life — is she one of the cursed victims in this cruel world, or is she someone who can step up to challenge and bring her will to fruition no matter what?

Motherhood is a place where all the shadows that have been lurking will suddenly appear in full force. It is the ultimate opportunity to face them once and for all (and sometimes battle more than once). Those battles are what make a girl into a woman —a matriarch that will provide stability for her children and family and for all future generations.