This week I noticed unease building just under the surface of my ordinary busyness. The mundane can be quite deceitful, shouting “no big deal” in the face of time we will never see again. I can sense that I’m losing track of the big picture in this unremarkable present moment. It’s surprisingly easy to forget. That everything in my entire world is about to change.
In ten weeks, I am going to be bringing my second child into this world. As if the apparent changes in my body aren’t warning enough, the impending due date is not so safely tucked away in the future. Denial has lost its luster, now it’s sheer panic that is kicking this mama into action. Panic, and the potential for a life changing experience before I even step into the delivery room. That maybe, just maybe, this time will be different than last time. That maybe, no matter what happens, everything is going to be okay. That I might be able to do this.
I labored a day and a half with my first born only to end in an emergency cesarean. I attributed the end result to internal causes: the fact that I was young, and didn’t know what in the world I was doing (Gruman et al, 2017). In the weeks to come I would develop post-partum depression that would take quite some effort and time to resolve. I am currently discovering these attributions once again, that they’ve remained stable over time (Gruman et al, 2017). That to some degree I fear that future births will have the same negative outcome. At least it could have, had it not been for intervention.
After last time I wasn’t going to just sit idly by and let the history repeat itself. With some education on mental health, and therapy work, I knew that I would have to be intentional this time around. This means coming face to face with learned helplessness, my experientially valid but horribly outdated survival mechanism (Gruman et al, 2017). For so long I believed that I could not expect good things. That I am powerless to change situations in my life, and that it is hopeless for me to even try (Gruman et al, 2017).
Part of learning to get my power back meant learning how to ask for help. Having the support of my friends, counselor, partner, and birth coach was huge in the sense that they could model empowerment with me. Believing that I was deserving of their support was next level challenging, and I’m surprised by how difficult it is to allow others to lift me up. By allowing their kindness and provision to manifest, however, I find myself in a more hopeful place than I could have ever imagined. They have shown me that maybe I can expect good things to happen in the throes of laboring waves. That maybe I am capable of doing hard things, and maybe I will be pleasantly surprised in how it will be worth it. I can’t predict the future from here, but I am betting that no matter what comes my way I have the power to turn it into something good.
References
Gruman, J. A., Schneider, F. W., and Coutts, L. M. (Eds.) (2017). Applied Social Psychology: Understanding and Addressing Social and Practical Problems (3rd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.
Congratulations on your pregnancy and the next one who is forthcoming! Being a male, I cannot relate or pretend to truly understand the experience you have endured as a female, but I will try my best to relate those emotions to an experience in my life I can parallel. Minor or major postpartum depression are both serious mental traumas that are difficult to cope with and even comprehend. I do think that miscarriages and postpartum depression are similar in regards to emotional state of mind and through time since the birth or miscarriage.
One of my friends in her late 30’s suffered from a miscarriage and struggled to cope with not having that child because it was a late miscarriage. The amount of personal guilt she held onto herself was overcoming her mind and led her to experience severe depression and didn’t want to have try to have kids or even drive past a school. Similiar to postpartum depression, the separation from the child causes many of the same symptoms, yet one side has the child while the other doesn’t have the child.
Gruman wrote about the psychological effects where hope is given up post birth as the mother may have feelings of overwhelming stress, anxiety, and giving up hope (Gruman, Schneider, and Coutts. 2017. p 151). When I saw my friend who had the miscarriage, I’m sure the emotions were relatively the same because hope was felt to have been lost and unreachable in present and future times.
Ultimately from this, I can understand where the hopelessness theory of depression can be visibly seen with my friend’s case and the postpartum depression explanation. I never heard my friend ask or seek mental help, probably because again, the idea of hope was not even conceivable. The change that led to hope was the fact she got pregnant again without being planned which led to hope of stability in her mind.
In your post, you discuss the strength to overcome the potential mental effects of pregnancy and the positive and negative effects it carries. I think by now, you understand this and know that overcoming that feeling is possible and worth it in the end. But, in the case of it seeming unreachable, I do hope you seek counsel for what will better enable you to heal and overcome the mental obstacles of a child and raising that child. Good luck with yourself and your family!
Reference
Gruman, J., Schneider, F., and Coutts, L. (Eds.) (2017). Applied Social Psychology: Understanding and Addressing Social and Practical Problems (3rd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. ISBN 978-1-4833-6973-0. p 285
Hi Ma’am,
I must say this post had me in my feelings, even though I am not a mom, all my friends have kids and they have endured somewhat the same hardships you have. Congratulations on your second child and I bet it’s very hard to deal what you have been dealing with. I’ve seen my friends deal with it and it’s very heartbreaking, but I was there every step of the way. Postpartum depression is no joke and there are times where my friends would feel like they aren’t doing enough, they aren’t a good parent, and they dislike how they look. Not knowing how beautiful and strong of a woman you are.
What I can relate to you is how we don’t like asking for help. We don’t look for it because it’s just in our nature to do things ourselves. But when it comes to hard times, it’s okay to ask a friend when you don’t have the strength and doing all the work a mother does. It’s okay to seek professional help and also one thing I harp on a lot is having a self-love day at least once a week. It could be taking a nice hot bath to relax while the baby is sleeping. I’m glad you have the support that you have, we all need it at some point. Gaining your power back to be the strong woman you are. God bless and congrats on your blessing.
Lesson 5 Blog Response
First off, a huge congratulation on your pregnancy and forthcoming second child! As well, congratulations on eventually overcoming issues associated with your postpartum the first go around. My hat is forever off to mothers following my wife’s pregnancy and bouts with even minor postpartum effects after delivering our twins. While I can never fully understand what a mother goes through, I can empathize, and appreciate the sacrifice.
My wife too acquired to an extent symptoms of learned helplessness in her postpartum depression. The first eight months of our children’s lives, to about the point when they finally slept concurrently for any significant stretch of time, were a blur. We realized quickly that routine was key, and a by-product of our circumstance and choices was the routine of dragging myself out of bed exhausted every morning to go to work, while she stayed home with the kids, until I came home to expend whatever energy I no longer had left on fathering and making my wife’s life easier. Within about two months following delivery I noticed symptoms of learned helplessness in my wife, whereby she seemed to have adopted that her life as a mother was overwhelming, often too difficult, and there was nothing she could do to change it (nor understanding that time would eventually improve her circumstances). Essentially having given up hope that her circumstance would improve (Gruman, Schneider, and Coutts. 2017. p 152).
I can see now where the hopelessness theory of depression explain in part, physiological changes aside, why my wife fell into such a funk during our children’s infancy. As Gruman et al. (2017. P 152) posited of the model, women are generally very vulnerable even in the months after giving birth, and in conjunction with the negatively associated environmental circumstances, one becomes especially susceptible to depression. My wife never did seek professional mental health intervention, despite my sensitively approaching the option, nor though did she or my children ever seem in immediate danger from the depression she endured. What did her, was adjusting her attributions of our circumstance to a more global outlook. Rather than attribute her perceived feelings of misery and ineptitude to her own shortcoming and inabilities as a mother as stable, she was continually reassured by myself and, probably more importantly, her friends and family whom are mothers that her attributions are global and that mothering is hard work, and her feelings where not abnormal (Gruman et al. 2017. p 153). Another change that drastically helped was helping my wife convince herself that going back to work at her hospital, where she was a registered nurse, for whatever amount of hours she felt comfortable with would not make her a bad mother that abandons her children, and would inevitably help her through increased social interaction with adults and to provide her examples of her contributions. Mom guilt is real, and another story altogether, but she realized that getting out of the house for a useful purpose would benefit her outlook, and this greatly enhanced an attributional shift that would pay psychological dividends for her until symptoms of postpartum depression passed.
You posited in your post that you have the strength to overcome the potential effects that might follow this pregnancy too, and that you hope it is all worth it; I believe you already know the answer. In any case, I hope you seek help where and when intervention is needed, and overcome any obstacles that get in the way of you loving and enjoying your new child to the fullest extent that a mother can!
Reference
Gruman, J., Schneider, F., and Coutts, L. (Eds.) (2017). Applied Social Psychology: Understanding and Addressing Social and Practical Problems (3rd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. ISBN 978-1-4833-6973-0. p 285