Sarah Meier: The Invisible Burden of Birth

It’s dark because you’re trying too hard.
Lightly child, lightly.

Aldous Huxley

I guess there are two ways to write about a journey through a tunnel; one while reflecting within the depths of its belly, otherwise, offering perspective once the traversing of the thing is through. I wish I could tell you where I’m writing from today, but the truth is that I don’t really know, and that’s because my postpartum depression doesn’t seem to have a head or a tail, a discernible beginning nor end. I know I’m over the worst of it and that I’ve been feeling pretty incredible the past few months, but healing is never linear and I, as a recovering optimist and I’m-alright-ist, am intimately familiar with the pitfalls of a premature declaration (and between us Moms, yes, familiar with premature ejaculation as well, but that’s not why we’re here [this time, anyway]).

Before we go any further, I am obligated to tell you that aside from two attempts to plug an epidural related spinal fluid leak, plus a trip to Planned Parenthood to discuss postpartum birth control (both, in themselves, potentially enlightening articles), I have not seen a doctor since giving birth two years ago, and have not been clinically diagnosed with postpartum depression. Which is a complicated confession for me to make, because while I have since learned how many encounters with postpartum depression have ended in family tragedy, and therefore thoroughly advocate seeking advice from medical professionals, this was a thing that, in the thick of it, I did not have the desire nor wherewithal to validate with anyone. Simply put, I was depressed, and the idea of getting an expert to confirm that I was depressed, seemed too depressing to handle.

In hindsight, might a consultation and Perinatal Mood and Anxiety Disorders (PMADs) diagnosis have helped? Quite likely, yes. At the very least, I’m sure giving the thing a name would have made the off-the-wall emotions easier to tuck into a container that my husband could then hold and contemplate, and subsequently try to fix, in the earnest way he does. But what then, if I didn’t qualify as clinically depressed? Could I have stomached the academic invalidation of my dismal, engulfing sorrow as something hormonal that I would “get over”? I was convinced nobody would understand, and that I would be simultaneously dismissed, shamed, and deemed an unfit mother. I couldn’t fathom that I was doing anything other than failing for not being able to get my shit together. After all, I’d done this before; I knew about the novelly-named “Baby Blues” from my first daughter’s birth, and this was not it. This was dark and cavernous. This was scary.

At about six-thirty every evening, the copper-tinged end-of-day sunlight angles through the north balcony windows of our Bay Area home and dances across the face of a Monstera plant, positioned precisely for this, at the base of our breakfast counter.

This counter—granite-topped, mottled graphite and white—has edges that match up to my elbows-when-bent, the crooks of which, in that first year, possessively cradled my beautiful newborn daughter Juno for hours on end. Her cries incapacitated me. Her smile made everything possible. I could not bear to be apart from her for more than a few moments, and yet, simultaneously wished someone could just take her, promise to love on her, and let me disappear forever.

Time and time again, like a devilish whirlwind, I’d pass that counter in the first months of Juno’s life, and brace myself for The Hijacker; an ugly creature that could numb all of my senses and infiltrate my mind for a fleeting moment with a recurring vision of my baby’s head smashing against the countertop’s jutting stone corner. A rush of shame, despair, and horror would then flood me, and I’d be deprived of breath until I was back in the cocoon-comfort of our bedroom. Here, I would tuck Juno in closely to me and vow to protect us both from anything this darkness had in its arsenal.

I knew this particular darkness wasn’t me; wasn’t mine. I’d danced on the outer edges of my nervous system’s ‘window of tolerance’ many times in my life, enough to know that however messy and dysregulated I got, violence was not my nature. On the contrary, immobilization had, in its quicksand, often allowed me to recover deeply embedded gems of an inherent quest for healing; forgiveness, for example, for a coping mechanism formed by my earliest of traumas.

It is this exercise, laborious but rewarding, that I have committed to for years in my alone time—perfecting the art of not panicking, and sinking deep enough to fix what’s down there before running out of air.

So while the hold of postpartum depression was in itself unfamiliar and unrelenting, I trusted myself to fall from grace and massive self-expectation, back to that old familiar floor, where I could at least lodge myself against something sturdy (for nothing budges as reluctantly as my mountain of shame), begin to figure out which way was up, and how I was going to get there.

I’ve loved organized basketball deeply in my life, more so, perhaps, for the analogies it offers, than anything else. Here, now, is one of them.

I’ve seen, firsthand, the care that goes into supporting an injured player; witnessed how shortcuts motivated by desperation or high expectation—rushing someone back on the court before they’ve amply healed—is detrimental to full recovery. I’ve been there myself to cheerlead a downed-man through the grueling process of rehabilitation; which is not singularly defined by physical healing and rebuilding, but intricately synthesized with the art of asserting mental fortitude, empowering navigation of the full emotional spectrum, and the rekindling of spirit.

It is my opinion that a modern post-delivery mother—confidence shaky, adapting to seismic hormonal shifts, and (severity depending on the nature of their pregnancy and delivery) left with a compromised pelvic floor or abdomen—often does not receive the immediate nor extended support necessitated by the trauma of birth. In many cases in today’s society, a mother is expected to masterfully transition into the primary role of keeping the baby thriving and well above water, while she, herself, hasn’t yet had the opportunity to come up for air.

While I don’t think that support alone is the conclusory cure-all for postpartum depression, I think that ample perinatal and postpartum support can drastically improve the severity of its effects, both in longevity and magnitude. And sure, depending on one’s circumstances, that support might exist; in family and community, in the options offered by the groups and doctors and professionals I didn’t go to see, in information and opinion across the internet (not entirely advisable, but on many-a-night, proved crucial in making me feel less alone). But the exhaustion of explaining something I didn’t have the words for; the shame, the lack of empowerment, the stigma, the martyrdom—all of this kept me silent in the throes of the postpartum fog.
It doesn’t have to be this way.
I am reminded of a related lesson I learned from a wise woman, and want to leave you with precisely this line of thinking:

We can only test the stability of a support system by putting the full weight of our burden on it.

I was reluctant to write about postpartum depression today for several reasons—because I didn’t know where in the tunnel I was; because I didn’t want to be judged, stereotyped, or misconstrued; because there are folks out there who have it worse. Because I’m not an expert; because I’ve never had a doctor say that depression is what it is; because I think I’m okay now, but don’t have the faintest clue how to tell others to get to their okay. Because, shoot—‘okay’ looks different for different people, and ‘not-okay’ looks different on different people. We need to account for it all, even if a malaise with many faces goes in the opposite direction of what much of medicine seeks to do; streamline symptoms, fit patients nicely into boxes that peers corroborate are the right boxes, get a pat on the back for moving the dial forward. Not backward.

But backward is where we have to go to correct our missteps, because judging by maternal mental health statistics, we have not, collectively, been moving in the right direction.

So, my hope for the first step of a better trajectory is this: that the full weight of the burden of maternal mental health, and the complexity of its synchronous physical, emotional, and spiritual aspects, at least be measured.

This, we can only do when mothers let their burdens be known. So today, I write. As hesitant as I am; as many other things there are that know I should be doing. This is important, and nobody else can retell our postpartum journeys, harrowing and joyful both, the way we can.

So, yes, it’s on us again, Mamas. But this time, we’re not requiring lifting strength. We don’t have to pick another damn thing up. This time, all we need to do, is lay that shit all the way down, flick on the light, and wait for others to recognize what we’ve been carrying all this time.

It gets dark sometimes because we try too hard.

May we know what it is to live lightly, Mama.
Lightly.