I was so angry

By the age of thirteen, my anger turned into hopelessness, despair and the desire to end my life. It was during this year that I tried to commit suicide by swallowing an entire container of painkillers.

After years of trying to connect with my father emotionally, I had given up on the hope that he could love and accept me for who I was. This realization ate me up inside so badly that I just couldn't stand the pain anymore. I remember my father coming to the hospital to see me at that time. Tears streamed down his face as he saw me lying in the hospital bed. I also remember thinking that I could feel his sadness at the thought of loosing me. This feeling translated into several thoughts in my head - maybe, just maybe, the man actually does love me.

Maybe I was wrong. Maybe if I just kept trying to connect with him instead of giving up, he would stop verbally and emotionally abusing me and finally be there for me. This reasoning helped carry me through fourteen more years of verbal and emotional abuse almost every time I went to see him.

At 17, I entered into a controlling and verbally abusive relationship with a man named Trevor. During these last few years of healing, I have been trying to figure out why I would have put myself through another abusive relationship. I found the answer. Even though my father was so cruel to me, I loved him more than life itself and thought I would only find deep love like that with someone who also had a verbally and emotionally abusive personality. Trevor had these traits - with even more viciousness than my father at times. We would fight like cats and dogs - using swear words and derogatory comments so creatively it was amazing it never escalated into physical violence.
After a few years, I became exhausted and angry about my relationship with Trevor.

It took finding a wonderful, artistic friend named Kristen to come into my life for me to find the courage to break the damaging relationship I was having with Trevor. Creating a friendship with her gave me the support network I needed so that I could make this step without the fear of being left alone. I am forever indebted to her for her love, kindness and generosity.
From the time I ended my relationship with Trevor until the birth of my first son, I enjoyed a life rich with freedom, spontaneity, and growth. For the first time in my life I was only responsible for me and I felt free. I was rarely crying anymore. I felt euphoria for life - dancing at clubs on the weekends, making tons of new friends, and doing what I wanted when I wanted.

During this time I had many relationships, completed my university degree, moved four times, adopted my first kitty Lexy, fell head-over-heels in love with my husband Matthew, conceived our first child, and got married. Life was moving like a speeding bullet train and I loved every minute of it. Then two months before Tyler came into this world… the evils of depressions began to take over again.

Post Partum Depression

For those of you who are not familiar with PPD, essentially it's the sadness, hopelessness and worthlessness experienced after the birth of a child that lasts for longer than a few weeks and can inhibit a woman from caring and bonding with her baby. There are many reasons this can happen. In my case, I believe it was the culmination of my history with depression and anger, never wanting to have children, an unexpected pregnancy, stresses from being newly married, and the medical problems I endured with my son Tyler.

I had every one of the following symptoms of post-partum depression including sadness, hopelessness, low self-esteem, guilt, sleep disturbances, eating disturbances, inability to be comforted, exhaustion, emptiness, inability to enjoy things one previously enjoyed, social withdrawal, no energy, becoming easily frustrated, increased anxiety and panic attacks, feeling of inadequate in taking care of Tyler, and spells of anger towards others. It even went to the extreme that I desperately didn't want to take care of Tyler at all and frequently had thoughts of hurting him.

I hated being a mother. I never wanted to be a mother

Ever since I was a young adult I never wanted to have children. And I mean NEVER. I hated children. Whenever there were children around, my whole body would tense up and I would feel this intense feeling of irritation and anger. I referred to children as objects.

Common thoughts that would run through my mind when children were around included, “Get it away from me” or, “Could that parent possibly shut that annoying little creature up already?” When I found out that I was pregnant, I remember thinking, “Oh, shit. What am I going to do now?” I remember a nauseous, tense feeling in my stomach at the horror of what was going to happen next if I kept this baby. I hated children.
You may be thinking many things to yourself right now. How could a woman think this way? Don't all women want to raise a family? If not, why would this woman keep her baby if she had so much animosity at the thought of having a child?

The main reason is I loved Matthew with all my heart and knew giving up this baby would be the end of us. I couldn't bear the thought of not having him in my life. Also, I knew we would marry eventually and convinced myself that we would inevitably produce spawn. Therefore, giving up this baby for adoption or having an abortion would be regretted later on in life when we were ready to have children and may cause serious problems in our marriage.

So after careful consideration, Matthew and I decided to keep this baby. This started a whole whirlwind of events over the next seven months - planning a shot-gun wedding in three months, moving into a house, preparing the babies room, and adopting a kitty. I was so involved with the amount of things I was doing during this time that it took until the last two months of pregnancy for me to really feel the effects of depression starting to take over again. Two months before my son was born I decided to take early maternity leave because I was so big and found it too exhausting working. This left me lots of time to finish my pregnancy journal and stress about the impending arrival of my first child.

Many thoughts raced through my head at this time. What is it going to be like to be a mother? Am I really ready for this? What if I can't handle it? What if I'm a terrible mother? I began to establish safety nets in case I couldn't handle impending motherhood such as enlisting my mother-in-law to move in for the first two weeks to help with the baby and creating a support network of family and friends that I could call to talk with and come over to visit. These safeguards helped ease a bit of the anxiety, but not that much.

By my due date I was a nervous wreck, filled with anxiety at the thought of becoming a mother. To top it all off, I was over a week late and in a lot of pain from the room this little creature was taking up inside me. I was having a hard time eating, sleeping and breathing.

A week and a half past my due date I had had enough and induced my labor by taking spoonfuls of caster oil and pushing every pressure point I knew on my body to get labor going. For the first six hours of labor, I tried using the shower at the hospital and laughing gas to ease the insufferable pain. The shower worked for about an hour and the laughing gas made me sick to my stomach.

Six hours into labor I succumbed to the wonderful benefits of an epidural and enjoyed the last six hours of labor with a mixture of sleep, resting, and a short ½ hour delivery where I felt no pain. December 5th 2004, my son Tyler came into this world - extremely beautiful and healthy.

Childbirth was very overwhelming for me. After Tyler was born, I was feeling a wide range of conflicting emotions - gratefulness that the pregnancy was finally over, excitement at the sight of my new son, fear of what to do with him now, and and the pain of the delivery.

Right from day one, being a mother was very hard for me. I was extremely exhausted from the delivery and tried to stay in bed as much as I could to prevent pain of movement.

To top it off, I hated breastfeeding Tyler. It wasn't because he was making it difficult for me, I hated the feeling. It just didn't feel natural to me - like he was invading my personal space. I also resented the fact that I had to get up every three hours to feed him and couldn't get a break. I was fortunate to have friends and family try to give me some solutions to this problem. However, neither of the solutions offered worked for me.

At first, my place of employment was understanding and didn't give me any flack for having to leave. But after four months of this, I started to get guilt from them every time I had to go and they started giving me job responsibilities that I hated doing to try to force me to quit.

When Tyler was 18 months old, I hit rock bottom. I had a husband who wasn't helping me with a child I never wanted, a baby who was constantly infringing on time for me, and a job that was like another punishment in my life instead of a salvation. At that point I realized I had two options - seek professional help or leave my husband and son. To be perfectly honest, the deciding factor came down to money. At that time, I decided to seek professional help only because I knew I didn't have enough money to run away and start over.
I started seeing a psychologist that my sister had seen for individual counseling and marriage counseling with Matthew.

During this time, I took a test to determine how depressed I was. I was so far into PPD that the psychologist was amazed I hadn't done anything horrible to myself or to my son. At this time, I also started on anti-depressants prescribed by my doctor. It took about a month for the drug to take affect so for this period of time I made sure that I was never left alone with Tyler.
Individual counseling with this psychologist wasn't very helpful for me because she used relaxation and self-esteem tapes as a solution to my depression. That really didn't work for me.

First of all, I couldn't relax. And second, telling myself that I was a loving, wonderful person was not solving the feelings of anger inside me. However, the marriage counseling was helpful because it helped Matthew and I determine what we really needed from each other to make our marriage work. For the first time in eighteen months, I started to have a shimmer of hope that I could actually learn to live with the reality of my life.

Thank you mankind for anti-depressants!

I honestly believe they made a huge difference in helping reduce the sadness, hopelessness, guilt, frustration, anxiety, and spells of anger I was feeling and eliciting towards others. I started to enjoy some things I used to enjoy doing before Tyler was conceived like dancing and hanging out with my friends.

I was becoming less controlled by my emotions and more by my thoughts.
There was one book that I found while researching on the internet that was so incredibly instrumental in my healing that I can't emphasize enough how important it is for those who are suffering from this disease to read this book. It's called, This Isn't What I Expected: Overcoming Postpartum Depression by Karen R. Kleiman and Valerie D. Raskin. It not only explains what postpartum depression is and how it can be treated; but it does so in a way that is extremely compassionate and understanding.

When I was reading it, I remember thinking, “Yes! Thank you. Finally someone understands!” It even has a chapter for husbands to help them understand what their wives are going through and how they can help. I am forever indebted to this book because it gave me hope in the ability to overcome this disease and live my life as best as I could.

It's been almost four years now since the birth of my son. It is still hard being a mother to him because he is very emotional but I am constantly trying to work at it and be the best mother that I can be.

I found another counselor about eight months ago and I am finally really starting to deal with the anger buried so deep inside me from all those years of abuse. I know it will take a while yet to get to a place where I can truly say I am happy, but I refuse to give up hope for this reality. One day I will be happy.
No matter how long it takes, I will work at it until I get there.
I have to. M