Please Fire Me From My Job

"I don't want to be a mom anymore!" I sobbed into his consoling, non-judgemental embrace four days after our daughter was born.

What I wanted was a team of experts to stampede into my room and whisk her, and all her encroaching necessities, out of my house and life so that I could sleep for a month and then resume my life pre-pregnancy style. What happened instead was the beginning of an unimaginable two year struggle to climb out of an abyss of self-loathing and unbearable hopelessness.

Of course I was familiar with the term "post-partum depression", all the pregnancy books wrote about it and it was something my mid-wife and I briefly covered during one of our visits. I knew the symptoms, what I didn't recognize was how they felt and how they could happen to me, someone who was having a text-book pregnancy. Never mind that the word I exclaimed when I found out I was pregnant only included four letters. Never mind that I couldn't bear the thought of shopping for diapers or sleepers...and definitely never mind that throughout the nine months of supposed glowing bliss, I frequently questioned my decision to have our baby. Ambivalence was putting it mildly.

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Lil is also a contributing editor for Postpartum Depression. She is beginning to write about her experience with prenatal and postpartum depression at There is a Crack in Everything. She also blogs about daily life at From Maiden to Mother.