Sitting in a dark room, clinging to my newborn son, rocking him for more than an hour as he struggled to fall asleep, I whisper-sang the words to every single Taylor Swift song I could think of. My breath was heavy and my chest was tight. I wanted to scream and cry, but I just kept rocking and whisper-singing late into the night like some country music–obsessed zombie. On nights like this, my mind became a tangled mess of thoughts: I wondered if I was a good enough mom. I obsessively questioned how I was supposed to keep not one, but now two, of my own children alive and well-cared for. I felt like a failure. But I never thought that I might be experiencing postpartum depression (PPD) for a second time.
The pressure on a second-time mom to handle the ups and downs of adjusting to caring for both a newborn and another child (in my case, a toddler) was something that I was completely unprepared for. During my first pregnancy and immediately after giving birth, people around me were quick to give advice or be forgiving if I didn’t know quite what I was doing.
When I became pregnant with my second son, I noticed that the words of encouragement I received changed from instructive in nature to comments that were borderline dismissive. “At least you know what you’re doing now because you’ve done it before,” and “Oh, come on! You’re a pro now!” were statements I heard frequently from friends and loved ones during my second pregnancy when I expressed trepidation about adjusting to life with a newborn and a toddler. In reality, I did not feel like a ”pro” or like I knew what I was doing at all, but those comments flipped a switch in me that made me vow to be the perfect mom of two that people imagined me to be.
Despite being treated by a psychiatrist for PPD after my first son was born and knowing that I could develop PPD again, no one explained to me that the experience could feel completely different. I thought that experiencing PPD before at least gave me a leg up in recognizing it: I knew the sadness, exhaustion, and fog that came with PPD after my first pregnancy. But I didn’t know that emotions like anger and rage, while less stereotypical signs, can also be elements of postpartum depression. Had I known that my PPD could look totally different after each pregnancy, I would like to think that I would have noticed the warning signs the second time around and sought treatment sooner. I also knew that every birth experience could be different, so I’m still not sure why I didn’t connect the dots sooner that PPD symptoms could also differ. But then again, I was being constantly reassured that I knew what I was doing the second time around, making it hard to question much of anything.
With my first, PPD might have been expected: I was a newlywed in an unhappy marriage that ended in divorce just a few months after I gave birth. My second son was born nearly two years later into a much happier, albeit slightly more complicated, situation with my now-husband, who has two children of his own from a previous marriage.
After giving birth the first time, I truly felt that “dark fog” of depression that people talk about. I vacillated between utter despair and outrage. While I had suffered from anxiety before, this was completely different. I felt like my thoughts were swirling in an endless sea and I couldn’t grasp any one of them long enough to hold a decent conversation.
I felt numb and isolated—and angry once I realized these feelings were happening during a time I was supposed to be happy.
After baby number two, people would ask me how I was feeling, and I’d deny that anything was wrong. After all, I had already had one baby and had been through PPD, and how I was feeling after baby number two didn’t feel like that. At my six-week postpartum check-up, my doctor asked how I was adjusting and whether I needed additional anxiety medication. I denied any need for additional meds and reassured my doctor and my husband that I was doing just fine. I was communicating, but I wasn’t revealing the important feelings buried beneath the surface. Deep down, I wondered if I really was doing anything right, and it was overwhelming, but I was afraid to admit it. I was afraid that everyone who had told me that I had it under control would look at me struggling and see me as a failure.
Because I was an “experienced” mom, I thought I knew what I was doing. I thought that getting out of the house was the right thing to do, because I didn’t want our other kids to be bored or for people to think that I couldn’t handle having a new baby. So I took my two-week-old son to my stepdaughters’ softball tournament because as a “good” mom, I thought I should be able to support all my kids at once. I took him at four weeks old to walk around the entire Houston zoo in the blazing hot, dead of summer heat for the sake of entertaining my older kids. I’m sure that poor baby was overheated, but I was on a mission to prove myself. But I know now that this was unhealthy and borderline dangerous. What I didn’t understand until much later was that this compulsive need to prove myself (and the accompanying feeling of utter disappointment when I felt like I was failing) was PPD rearing its ugly head.
I didn’t sleep. Even when the baby slept, I would just sit in his room holding him and crying over not living up to the standards of being the perfect mom I thought I should be. My anger got the best of me more days than not as I began to look at my life begrudgingly. As my second baby grew, my husband and I both noticed that I was becoming more and more stressed and frustrated despite coming out of the newborn phase and the haziness that it brings for everyone involved. I was trying hard to be a perfect mom and felt like I was failing, which fed feelings of resentment toward my family and my life in general. Things that I had really enjoyed doing for my first son, like making homemade baby food, were suddenly unimportant and even nonexistent for my second. I sought professional help for coping with these feelings out of sheer necessity. I could not function in the mind-set that I was in. It took me months to come to terms with the fact that I was dealing with PPD again and that this was keeping me from accepting my new reality with the grace that I wanted to.
While I won’t be having any more children of my own, I want to help other moms be aware of how PPD can manifest in multiple ways and be different from one pregnancy to the next. If just one mom can read my story and recognize in herself what it took me too long to see in myself, that is progress. Awareness, education, and candid discussion are the first steps to challenging the stigma surrounding PPD and helping rewrite the narrative for all families after childbirth.