Where I am

I have entered a new phase as a mom.  I had a pretty smooth sailing pregnancy, a no hiccups delivery, and have a very happy baby.  Things, truly, have gone so well.  But, (of course there is a but) I feel bad.

Over the last few months, I have felt the following things:
Dizziness
Mental confusion
Funny body sensations
Panic Attacks
Shallow breathing
Side cramps
Busy headedness
Disrupted sleep
Generally worked up
Overwhelmed
Body betrayal (excessive clumsiness and the like)
Loss of apetite
Weird and scary thoughts
Thinking I was becoming a nutcase
Planetarium stomach (a term coined by my sister that means, the inability to process everything and it makes you feel tiny and swirly and nauseous to try and comprehend all that is around you, which is heightened when I think about my baby's whole life)

I started to think I was crazy.  Or that I had Lupus.

I called my doctor several months back and told him I felt out of sorts, fatigued, and sick-ish.  He took blood work, which all came back normal.  I began to feel better after that, and thought it was a fluke virus or something.  Then those feelings started to come back a few months later.  But this time they were more aggressive.  There was a moment in Kroger when I thought I was going to die (I am not being sarcastic.  I truly thought I was having a heart attack and I was going to die right there.  And some aproned employee would find my body draped over all the cartons of eggs, that would be sticky and wet since I would have crushed them as I fell to my demise.).

But the crazy thing is, if someone would have asked, I would have said that I did not feel stressed or anxious.  I thought that these things that were happening were physical and not related to my mental state.  I was wrong.  After searching the symptom "feeling drunk when haven't been drinking"  I landed in a blog about post-partum anxiety.  And it was the first time that it even dawned on me, the fact that I had a baby in the last year might have done something to my brain.

I knew about post-partum depression.  I was keenly aware of my mental state in those first few days and was happy to find that I wasn't burdened with that challenge.  However, my understanding of this disorder was that it had a short window of time to strike and that it would always show its face through sadness.  I didn't know that it was much bigger than that.

After I read that blog post, I started thinking.  I thought about all that I had been through in the last year.  I found my list of woes and life changes to be rather long and pretty gloomy.  I think it was the first time I really thought about it.  Making a career change for myself, an unexpected loss of employment for my husband, switching daycares for my son.  Then I kept thinking.  I thought about the day that my beautiful nephew was born, I was standing in the snow, listening to "Taps" being played as my son's name sake was lowered into the ground.  I thought about looking into the rearview mirror and seeing a fifteen passenger van slam into the back of my vehicle on the interstate.  I thought about it all and realized-I needed some help.  (the list goes on.)  And what I found was that,  right now, this life thing has gotten bigger than I can handle.  I believed that I could walk these thoughts away, or meditate them away, or bible them away, but nothing worked.  And my brain, which tries hard not to think about all these things, is telling me(through crazy symptoms) that there is a problem that needs to be addressed.  I am addressing that problem.


The following site helped me realize what was going on.  If you feel at all like I have described, take a read.
http://www.postpartumprogress.com/the-symptoms-of-postpartum-depression-anxiety-in-plain-mama-english

The Little Weenie Weaned Himself

After nine months, two weeks, and three days of breastfeeding, it was just done.  

It wasn't until I was five months pregnant and working on a baby registry at Target that I even thought about the fact that I would have to feed this child.  I knew that the doctor would cut the cord after my baby (lovingly called Hummingbird) was born and then (s)he would look to me for food.  And I had a choice to make.  I was flush, embarrassed, and honestly weirded out by the thought of the actual act of breastfeeding.  I was thinking about all of this while my mom was asking me, "Do you want to register for a breastpump?"  What?  A pump?  For breasts?  What the what?  I gave a quick, "Uh, yeah?  I guess so."  I held the scanner at safe distance and heard the beep.  I knew that I had successfully registered for something in the breastpump section, so I moved on and began scanning tiny bath accessories.  Trying not think about the whole feeding thing for a while.

When I was a kid, my grandparents had a dairy farm.  I spent many summer evenings talking to my grandma as hundreds of cattle moved through shiny mechanical gates, into neat lines.  My grandma would diligently spray each utter with iodine and wipe them a towel then throw on the four pronged automatic milker.  I would stand there and watch as pint after pint of fresh, white milk moved through the lines.  I was going to be a dairy cow.  Just without my grandma to spray me down.

So I thought some more and worked up enough lady balls to start asking questions.  I asked my mom and what my siblings and I ate.  I learned that she nursed us all for 2 months and then like clockwork, her milk dried up and we did formula from there on out.  I asked some other family members and friends and heard so many different feeding strategies.  But, I still felt weird.  

As the months drew past and I got larger and closer to meeting my kiddo, I started to feel a change a-brewin'.  I think it had largely to do with my getting larger.  The more my body started to look like it wasn't  mine anymore, the more it seemed to belong to the baby.  Like the thought of nursing this child would be okay, because those weren't really my cans down there anyway.  They were, ah, changing, and it was all for the baby.  Whatever was in there, wasn't mine and I was okay with sharing it.  

I, like other moms, faced some challenges when actually beginning the whole nursing buidness, but within a few short weeks, we hit our stride.  Then I went back to work and started pumping 3 or 4 times a day.  My little guy had to have formula to supplement his growing appetite.  And as the months wore on, he was needing more formula and I was producing less milk.  Summer came and we quickly found ourselves just nursing in the morning and at night.  The amount of calories he was getting was dismal I am sure, but I felt like I had to this.  I had set goals for myself.  I was going to nurse this baby until he was 11 months old and I went back to work.  11 months, dangit.  

Well, how naive am I to make plans without consulting the baby?  He woke up one morning and REFUSED to nurse.  What does that look like?   It looks like full-on scream-crying, flailing, pushing away with real tears, protest.  Again at nightime.  Again the next night.  

And then it was done.

He voiced his opinion and I heard it loud and clear.  I just didn't want to hear it.  I wanted to meet my goal.  I wanted to still be his mama that could make food for him that was healthy and good for the heart.  I wanted to give him immunity powers.  I realized that this thing, this dairy cow, saggy boobed thing, was something that I wanted.  I was so scared of it just a year before and now I was crying that it was all over.