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

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