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
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