It's A Scary Word!

Finally I knew I needed to do something.  I knew I had to talk to someone. Because there was no way I was going to let this go further.  I have had many struggles in my life and always, always after talking to my mom and journeying through it I felt better and life moved on happily. 

So, I sent an email. I never felt like I could start the conversation face to face.   Well the email was vague and I think left both my mom and Ben quite confused about what I was getting to.  One night my mom finally came over to chat about it.  I thought I’m going to have to just say it. 

Thankfully my  mom alluded to PPD for me.  So I had the conversation. I started to explain to her the reasons why I thought I might have a mild case. She got it, she agreed and we were going to look for natural alternatives for treatment ( I am not a big fan of drugs). 

What shocked me is through the whole conversation I kept my composure. I never do this when I have conversations with my mom. The hard ones like this always end with me in tears.  This time I was strong, because clearly once it was named and we all knew  I could move on.  Mmmm not so much….

Here I am today about 5 days since that conversation and almost anything will send me into tears. This was the first time I did not feel better after having talked to my mom.  It has sent me into an emotional warfare. 

I still have a hard time actually saying the words. I tried talking to Ben about two days ago and when I attempted to say the words that make up PPD it felt like my throat was closing in.  The tears came instantly.

I feel like I am the broken one. The person in the family who was to weak to do it all. I watched my sisters go through pain free pregnancies, raise there children with ease and never seem to have troubles.  I would ilke to point out that I love being a mom and taking care of the kids is easy, taking care of myself emotionally is not. 

So seeing myself as the weak one and the one who can’t keep up is so hard.  But then on top of it feeling like you need to hide it from everyone is even harder.  Everytime I think about having the conversation with one of my sisters the tears come.  How do you sit down with someone you love and say “I have post partum depression and basically feel like a failure in comparison to everyone else” .  thinking of doing this just breaks me even more.  How do you tell someone that you are so in love with your children but that you are depressed.  Because of course people will think that you hate being a mom, you are going to harm someone, and that you wish you didn’t have kids.  None of this is true for me. If my body allowed me I would have 5 kids! 

Luckily for me the PPD is mild.  I do not have the extreme feelings that some women do, I don’t feel like hurting myself or children. I am easily able to connect with my girls and love on them (this is not always the case for women with PPD). 

So now I am trying to see where I go from here.  I feel like God is trying to test me to see if I am strong enough for whatever is coming next. Who knows what that could be?!  And I find myself thinking, why couldn’t he choose something a little kinder to teach me my lessons.