Baby Blues and Broken Hearts
I stood in Topanga, looking out toward the ocean. There were green, rolling hills as far as the eye could see, and not a house in sight except the one behind me. I could almost believe I was in Hawaii, it was that lush and green and mountainous, and it felt that far away from my own home in L.A.
I was waiting for my turn to see healers who had come from New Zealand. I was doing this because my heart was broken and I needed to put it back together again.
I say my heart was broken because that’s the way it felt, but another way to say what I was feeling is postpartum depression. This is a strange and clinical phrase, so it never occurred to me to apply it to myself. But five months after my baby was born here I was.
(I’d also made an appointment with a psychiatrist. I was desperate and hedging my bets.)
The thing I’d most wanted, growing up, was to someday have a child of my own. I looked forward to that event far more than anything else about adult life. The world of business that my parents kept trying to convince me I could excel in seemed tedious beyond measure. That my parents kept prodding me towards a path that included the words executive and consulting showed how completely they misunderstood me. A job was just a pale necessity — I wanted to write books. But even that desire paled in comparison to the cosmos of love, in all of its forms. All my attention was taken up by the emotional bonds formed with friends and lovers — more intricate and rich than anything else I could imagine. Except, I thought, for the love I would one day have for my baby.
When my husband M and I decided we were ready to have a baby I could hardly believe it was REALLY HAPPENING. I spent the nine months of my pregnancy alternately taut and giddy with anticipation.
Mothering, to me, seemed like the most absorbing and glamorous occupation. Typing these words I feel nostalgic for the person I was and her idealized, naïve notions. I want to protect her. But I also cannot help but laugh at her a little: How could anyone ever be so clueless?
I remembered talking to my cousin when she had had her first baby. We had grown up together. As little girls we were both obsessed with babies; all our make-believe games revolved around being grown-up ladies with children. We shared the same anticipatory longing for motherhood. Once, in the first weeks of having a newborn, as we talked on the phone from opposite sides of the country, she had described the exhaustion, the loss of freedom: “It’s a waking nightmare, basically.” I had laughed affectionately at the time, misrecognizing her tone for the sarcasm I loved about her. It felt of a piece with the glamorous image of mothering I had constructed: my beautiful cousin was a mother and she was still her funny, self-deprecating self. I looked forward to my own turn to be a mother and to laugh wryly about, among other things, what hard work it was.
I would not take myself too seriously, I thought. I imagined myself simultaneously breezing through the difficulties while generously sharing my hard-earned knowledge with other mothers-to-be. Again, the thought strikes me: how could anyone be so clueless?
Now here I was waiting to be seen by the healers. They were Maori and they traveled the world helping people. My midwife had worked with them in the field of holistic childbirth. When I called her to tell her about my sadness she said I should see the healers. They happened to be in Topanga for a few days seeing clients and she urged me to make an appointment. I had never been to see any kind of healer except an MD or a psychotherapist, but my need to feel better was stronger than any knee-jerk skepticism I harbored. She had been right about everything related to my pregnancy, the birth, and the baby, so it seemed right to trust her on this too.
A few feet away, my guy and our baby were playing on the grass. The baby was cooing and gurgling on his little blanket and reaching for his father’s hands. They looked sweet and relaxed and sun-dappled. How then could I be so unhappy?
The confusing thing is there were good reasons for my misery. Let me enumerate:
1. I was so tired that I was filled with jealous anger at anyone who slept in a normal fashion.
2. My tailbone was broken. Yes, the baby HAD BROKEN MY TAILBONE as he was coming out of my body. I hadn’t been able to sit without pain and sometimes had to nurse the baby standing up. In online forums of fellow broken-coccyx-sufferers the most useful advice I had found was: “ learn to self-advocate” and “let your employer know that you cannot sit for extended periods of time” and “carry your doughnut pillow with you everywhere, it’s an act of strength to care for yourself.” These common-sense practicalities had only made me sob at this vision of my new reality.
3. Our baby had spent a nightmarish week in the NICU because of jaundice so severe the doctors feared permanent brain damage. We had brought him home from the hospital to our cozy nest thinking all was well but on his third day alive our midwife visited and noticed his alarming yellowness and the urgency of the situation. I was filled by an immense gratitude towards our midwife for noticing what we had not, but I also felt panicked at my own ineptness. What would have happened had she not come by for a post-partum visit? M and I were blithely unaware that anything was wrong. In the topsy-turvy-nonsense that time had become for us in the days after the birth, our shades were half-drawn and the house was dim. We might not have noticed his color or his listlessness (weren’t newborns kind of listless?) for hours longer, maybe till the next day. He was not yet a week old and we were already failing the most basic requirements of parenting: KEEP THE BABY ALIVE. DO NOT DAMAGE HIS BRAIN. Thankfully he came out of the NICU healed, but the experience had been harrowing for all of us and I felt haunted by our fallibility, as though another-disaster-we-would-not-be-able-to-identify were lurking around the corner.
4. And in fact there was one. The night before his two-month appointment, M and I were talking about how enormous our little one had become. He was positively gigantic! A behemoth! We couldn’t believe how big he was compared to the frail little thing with foam sunglasses who slept in the NICU under the bright lights of the phototherapy. At the doctor’s office though, the scale showed that he had gained no weight since his last appointment at a month. It turned out that although he nursed umpteen times a day his latch was all wonky and so he hadn’t been getting much and then my milk supply had tapered off and ALL ALONG WE HADN’T KNOWN.
5. To fix what the pediatrician called failure to thrive I was assigned the following ungodly regimen: nurse the baby, immediately after which pump to increase milk supply, immediately after which bottle-feed the baby with just-pumped-milk. This plan worked like a charm for getting the baby’s weight up as well as my milk supply, but it seemed like my every waking hour was consumed with nursing or pumping or bottle-feeding. I was constantly slathering salves and balms over my poor cracked nipples. I was unable to do ordinary things like go to a movie or a long walk because I was tethered to the baby and the pump. My life felt incredibly bizarre and hellish, a weird torture-chamber of anxiety, exhaustion, and physical pain.
In those early months I existed in a Groundhog-Day cycle of just-getting-through-till-dusk and then collapsing into a numb, interrupted sleep before having the whole miserable affair start again the next morning. I remembered my cousin’s words, the ones I had taken for self-deprecation. She was right. This was a waking nightmare, one which I could not dissipate because… I was already awake. This hell was no bad dream but my actual life.
Misery seemed like a reasonable response to all this.
And yet, even when the baby and I got the nursing-thing down and I was able to let the pumping regimen fall by the wayside, even after my tailbone pain started to gradually subside, still I felt numb, joyless, grey. The endless string of colorless days seemed unendurable but I couldn’t imagine any alternative. I didn’t think I could take my own life, and the thought of leaving M alone, and the baby motherless was excruciating, but I didn’t know how to bear it either.
Even then, I didn’t connect what I was feeling to post-partum depression. The exhaustion, the anxiety, and the loss of freedom of having a new baby seemed destined to make anyone miserable. One day at a breastfeeding support, though, I realized the other new mothers didn’t seem so miserable as I was. They too spoke of exhaustion, of feeling overwhelmed or bewildered, but they also spoke of joy. In describing their feelings about mothering they used words like “madly in love” and “the best.” I didn’t feel that. I didn’t feel any of that.
This realization was frightening. I felt unnatural — deformed by my lack ordinary feelings. But it was also, in a strange, roundabout way, a relief. That mine was clearly not a typical response to having a baby meant that I could, I should, seek out a solution. I didn’t have to live this way forever.
So here I was in Topanga.
When it was my turn I was led into an airy studio. Ata introduced herself and took my hand, leading me to a massage table in the center. She was tall and had a lovely smile and a calm and confident manner. She joked gently with her colleagues. I was quiet, taking in the mix of the spiritual and the casual in the atmosphere.
I liked it here. There were other clients on mats and tables around the studio having their bodies worked on by other healers. Occasionally the faint sounds of physical exertion could be heard as muscles were worked on and kinks got unkinked. Ata put her hands on my body, as though scanning it. And then she began to work. Ata hadn’t asked why I had come. It was enough that I had shown up with my body and my broken heart. Her presence was gentle and patient but her hands were strong.
Her thumbs in my calves were the kind of agony I had never before experienced in a massage. As she worked, I winced and moaned and squirmed, but I liked it. It had been so long since I’d felt anything besides despair, exhaustion and the soreness of my ass and breasts. Ata’s knuckles on the soles of my feet pushed deep into my flesh, unlocking a different kind of sensation. It was good to be tortured physically in a benign and loving way and my mind drifted away from its usual tense torpor.
In my reverie I remembered the first 24 hours after my baby’s birth. I had felt the bliss I had always longed for. I could hardly believe my good fortune: he was here with me. The sweet little thing resting peacefully in my arms was everything I could hope for. I felt complete, at peace, dazed by the experience of giving birth but flooded by a sense of calm fulfillment. I kept marveling at the baby. His newborn hair was a rich brown threaded with gold strands. The nurse said, “I’ve never seen hair like that! It sparkles!” and it did not strike me as odd, but in fact normal, that my baby should have hair of almost magical beauty. His little starfish hands resting on my chest were delicious in their gracefulness. His seashell ears fascinated me. The translucent softness of his skin, the faint crease marks on his palms and on the soles of his feet, everything was a marvel. I looked at M with gratitude and wonder. Together we had ushered this little life into the world, and together we were responsible for doing right by it. I was awestruck by the sense of responsibility, the immensity of this opportunity, my thankfulness for having M as a partner in this endeavor. As wondrous as this undertaking was I felt serene, buoyed by the love coursing through me.
But the very next day all that was gone. M and I were at home with the baby who would not sleep and cried incessantly. I felt anguished and afraid and I could not stop weeping. M kept reassuring me, I was simply exhausted and overwhelmed. I didn’t know it yet but a black pit had opened beneath me and I was about to fall in.
After working on my shoulders and back, I turned over and Ata started kneading my abdomen. All the other massages I’d ever had were focused on muscles and releasing the tension held there. This pressure was going deep into my insides. She placed her elbow on my tummy and shifted her weight into it. I edged away from the feeling in alarm. She was so strong, the pressure felt like it could split my belly, crush my organs. I pushed back against her, trying to articulate my inchoate feelings of panic.
Ata edged off and went back to more gentle movements. “I don’t think you’re ready for that yet. That’s okay.” There was no judgment. I had not failed. “The big guy will work on you.” She stroked my arms and limbs with smooth, caressing movements and talked to me soothingly about the process of healing, about time, about readiness. When at first she said “the big guy,” I thought she meant her colleague, Papa Joe, the elder statesman of the healers, but as she talked more about healing and time, I realized she meant the divine presence that inhabits the universe. I thought about this a lot over the days and weeks that followed: that there might be a force in the universe that I could trust to help me heal. Ata had faith in it and it gave me strength to find out how to recover.
When the session was over I thanked Ata and moved woozily to the outdoors. M and the baby were lying together on the grass and I went to lie beside them. M put his arms around me and the baby looked at me with his gummy, beautiful smile. “You’re very brave,” M said and then I started to cry in the great gushing sobs that Ata’s strong and gentle hands had unlocked from my numbness.
I was struck by the immensity of the gulf between my expectations and my reality. I grieved for the dream of motherhood I had kept in my heart since childhood. I cried over the mute dread I had been engulfed in. I mourned my idealism, my hopes, the gargantuan investment I had put into this fantasy of motherhood. I cried hot tears for my sweet little boy, who had not deserved this whole time to have a mother who could only feel numb when she was not feeling despair. I cried for my husband who had also been overwhelmed and bewildered by new parenthood, and had tried to help me though he could not fathom the depth of my sorrow and pain. I sobbed for the five months lost to anguish. Five months that none of us could get back. The first five months in my son’s life. I cried in relief for the sense of dawning hope, that things were going to get better.
I sobbed in gratitude that my baby was beside me and my husband too, and that we would get through this, I felt it now, I knew it to be true.
I have never cried that way before or since: gushing and flowing and unstoppable until spent. When it was over I felt physically purged of most of the anguish and bitterness I had carried with me for five months. I hadn’t been ready for Ata’s work on my belly, which she and her colleagues considered the seat of all emotions, but I felt myself getting there and I was going to trust what she said, that the big guy would work on me and that I would get there eventually.
Later that week I went to see a psychiatrist and though his approach was very different it was, like Ata’s, imbued with respect and intelligence. He asked careful and thoughtful questions and listened as I answered. On his recommendation I started a course of antidepressants.
Over the next few weeks the fog of despair gradually lifted. I began to have moments of pleasure and contentment. The sense of life as an unending and unvarying torment left and I could begin to see that in parenting, as in all of life, there were hills and valleys, hardships and satisfactions. To this day I find mothering exponentially more challenging than the portrait I had created in childhood and brought with me into a naïve adulthood. I am older and wizened now. But thanks to Ata and to my midwife and to my course of antidepressants, I now find in mothering many moments of hilarity and beauty and delight, and sometimes, when I squint my eyes, even a little glamour. And my son, turning twelve this year, is every bit as fascinating and cool as I could have hoped for when, long ago, I contemplated having a child. So is his six-year-old sister.
