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.

Lil's Story

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.

This is like walking up to you in a bar and just blurting out stuff about me, hoping something will spark your interest and we'll connect. How about postpartum depression? It affects close to 20% of mothers (and some fathers) in North America alone. Maybe you're one of them...like I was.

I was going to become a holistic health practitioner, my long-time need to be a mother quickly diminishing with the end of every other weekend with my partner's three children. Clearly Big Momma upstairs was still checking off my "life list", because nine months after committing to a man I loved and finally being able to afford to study in the field I knew I would be brilliant in, I became pregnant. Is @#*% the appropriate response when one sees the pink strip on the pee stick?

I now know that I had prenatal depression during my first trimester and that it was a precurssor to my postpartum depression (PPD). Two months into my daughter's life I was diagnosed. In its grip I was far from the earth mother I imagined I'd be...I was despondent, ambivalent about this screaming, demanding baby and didn't care whether I lived through it or drowned, just as long as it (my daughter, nursing and late-night-ass dragging) all went to hell so that I could go back to a life that was meant for me, because this was not it.

I went through it all ~ medication, hospitalization and thoughts of suicide and adoption. Three years later, I'm still here and so is my daughter. I survived just like I was assured I would. Now I write about my experience with PPD in my blogs because I want others to know they will survive too.