New mom feeling anxious

search history: postpartum anxiety and depression

My son is nine months old. We’re on a telemedicine appointment together early one morning because I have no childcare. Rather, I am the childcare (something I’m still wrapping my brain around.) I’m still in my tattered pajamas and my sleeves are covered in bananas and I have bed head and haven’t flossed my teeth.

My son is naked. He’s at least wearing a diaper (I’m not a gambler) and his face and hair and eyeballs are smeared with dried yogurt leftover from breakfast. I’m bouncing him up and down on my lap while he screams like a pterodactyl. He has no words yet; only various ear-drum-shattering octaves of shrill screams. His tiny hands keep slapping me across the face.

“I’M STRUGGLING WITH ANXIETY,” I yell into my laptop at my doctor over my pet pterodactyl.

“HAVE YOU HEARD… OF MINDFULNESS?” she asks. (And by asks, I mean hollers.)

I quickly consider all the ways that I could answer this question from my wise doctor:

1. Are you serious right now?

2. Do you see and hear and smell this thing on my lap?

3. Doc, have you lost your mind?

Instead, I smile. And I wonder if I’m living in a sit-com.

I don’t tell her that I see the colorful world like there’s a gray veil over my face, blocking my sunshine and clogging my heart. I skip the word “depression” because it feels heavy and hereditary and hopeless. Anxiety feels more acceptable (isn’t the whole world anxious?). I leave out the part about how my heart races and I don’t know how I got here: here, being, in this daily space where I question if I’m cut out for this motherhood thing. Here, as in, what am I doing with my life and when will I ever sleep again and does it all even matter and how do you keep the toilet from molding and eat vegetables and find quiet for mindfulness?

In my earliest postpartum days, when I started feeling the dramatic identity shift that felt like someone plucking out every feather of my being, one by one, until I didn’t recognize any inch of my carcass, I started scouring the internet and books for anything about motherhood and identity. There were countless essays about women lost and overwhelmed and shook. For me, this transition felt revolutionary. In truth, it’s universal. It’s shared. It’s expected. I started finding solace in the phrase, “This isn’t a new thing.”

And yet, this space feels impossibly lonely.

No one is here when I decide how to spend the next 20 minutes of quiet nap time. Do I change the laundry? Scoop the cat litter? Clean the dishes? Scrub the orange stains on the highchair (again) for the next meal? Or do I write? And if I write, what would I even say to explain how pathetic it feels that this is supposed to be the happiest chapter of my life and instead I keep threatening my husband that I'm going to run away to an island? It’s unclear who’s invited to this island with me. All I know is that the king bed is plush, and I ride a bike to go sell coconuts on a quiet beach and feel the breeze through my clean hair.

This isn’t a new thing, I tell myself when it feels like everything’s crumbling around me and I’m not sure how I’ll possibly find enough air to fill my lungs.

This isn’t a new thing, I repeat when I can’t decide if I should work more or work less and then feel guilty for even considering working more or working less.

This isn’t a new thing, I say again when I want a break from my son and then I have a break and he’s gone and I miss him like hell.

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Since writing this essay several months ago, I have reached out to my team of doctors for help. I started with a favorite doctor of mine who has known me for many years. She feels like a friend, a safe place to speak up about how hard motherhood has been for me. We were in person and I told her the story of another well-intentioned doctor screaming into the laptop about mindfulness. We both laughed.

I still find comfort in saying, This isn’t a new thing, because of the power it has to remind me of all of the shared experiences with other moms. I’m not alone. But I also know now that there’s equal power in reminding myself that this is a new thing for me. And for that I can learn to show myself grace.

This essay has no ending. There are no “quick fix” answers to anxiety and depression. I’m confident we’ll continue to explore this in many posts to come. After all, when a mom Googles “mindfulness,” there’s much more hiding behind that search.

Give these a try…

1. Start here to find a therapist near you who specializes in motherhood and postpartum depression and anxiety. I found one who I love on the first try and I know that’s a gift.

2. Coffee & Crumbs - “People offer mothers a lot of advice. We offer stories instead.” In my early search for writing about motherhood and identity, I landed on several essays from C&C that have inspired me and made me feel less alone.

3. Maggie Smith’s memoir, You Could Make This Place Beautiful, is one I’m currently devouring. Beautiful poetic essays about motherhood and marriage.

   “Outside the trees were encased in ice, the branches clacking against each other. What spark was I supposed to feel each day in waking up, tipping the whistling kettle over the coffee grounds, warm and wet and black as soil, then trudging, hunched over, to the basement to do more laundry? What spark was I supposed to feel in making a bottle, then another bottle, then another bottle? How sad the kettle sounded when I removed it from the flame—how it whined before it grew quiet, went silent.

   I didn’t write for the first year of Violet’s life. Strike that: I couldn’t write. I was sleep deprived and anxious and, I know now, suffering from something with a name. Something I could have treated. The land of poems felt impossibly far away; I could barely make it out on the horizon and had no idea how to get there. Even if I’d known the way, even if I’d had a map, when could I have made that journey?

   After a year, the first poem finally arrived.”

   -Maggie Smith, author of You Could Make This Place Beautiful