Hello Again
I feel like I’ve crawled out of a very dark and deep hole, clawing the earth with bruised and broken fingers on my laborious ascent. To say that I found motherhood an adjustment would be the grossest of understatements—the ground opened up below me and swallowed me whole as I fell, Alice/Persephone/Innana-like, skirts ballooning, into the worst hell I’ve ever known. No one tells you how difficult taking care of an infant is, how the intolerable sleep deprivation and the endless divination of the needs of an inconsolable creature who cannot tell you what it wants will tax every last reserve of strength, dragging you to the brink of sanity before smashing you on the rocks of utter madness.
I’ve written about my history with depression before. When I became pregnant last year, my doctor weaned me off the antidepressants that had been so pivotal in my functioning as a normal, productive human being. So when the full fury of post-partum depression slammed into me just days after I first cradled my newborn daughter, I was completely armorless, like a burn victim without any protective skin. And when one of my cats died because he nibbled on the lilies that someone sent the baby, I blamed myself mercilessly and rued the day I ever got pregnant. Every day, all I could think of was how much I didn’t want to be a mother and how I would have traded my living child for my dead cat in a heartbeat. Most of all, I thought about how badly I wanted to die, too.
