lundi 23 octobre 2017
Mom Admits It Took "3 Solid Years" to Bond With Her Son Because of Postpartum Depression
We've come a long way in how we talk about postpartum depression - namely that we are finally actually talking about it. So it's important to remember that just when we think we've heard every warning sign and gleaned lessons about every which way one can cope, a new perspective can swoop in to prove how much we all still have to learn.
That's the essence of Bunmi Laditan's experience. In the mom blogger's recent Facebook post, she revealed that there's no timetable for postpartum depression or its recovery. She wrote:
I had it bad with my third born. My last baby, my first son. We all know about the anxiety, OCD, chilling thoughts, rage that sneaks up on you like a flash fire and then is drowned by your own shame-filled tears and all that fun stuff . . . but what no one can prepare you for is how it feels to hold a baby and not feel like she's yours.
He didn't feel like mine. I felt like I was taking care of someone's else's child. My body felt distinctly postpartum and was leaking from too many places but as I'd change his diapers and gently push his sweet little arms through his yellow and white pajamas, I remember looking my bedroom door, half expecting his real mother to walk in and say, "Excellent work, fräulein, I'll take it from here."
She admits that it took her not just a couple months to get over that feeling. It took her 36 months. Three years. "Once I finally was diagnosed and medicated, my mood began to stabilize, but that connection? God is my witness, it took three solid years," she wrote.
"What no one can prepare you for is how it feels to hold a baby and not feel like she's yours."
Bunmi explained how this lack of a bond went unnoticed by even those closest to her: "In those early days, I'd sit up in the dark of night nursing him looking like the picture of maternal devotion, but there was something missing and one of my greatest fears was that someone would notice," she wrote. "In that time, I loved my baby boy, took him to play centers, parks, we cuddled, I painted his hands and pushed them into soft clay for keepsakes, and snapped a million photos, but there was a valley between us that I prayed he didn't feel."
What changed? It's hard for even her to say: "Then one day, or perhaps over several days, or maybe through each day of showing up, his real mother finally walked through the door and it was me."
For other moms who haven't so easily snapped out of their "baby blues," who are still struggling with this often-secretive symptom, she has some simple advice:
Please just wait. Keep showing up. Keep rocking them to sleep searching their little faces for what you need. Keep wiping down that high chair and kissing their pillow soft cheeks. Every time you do you, the angels throw a handful of sand into the canyon between you. One day it will be full and you'll walk across it to find you were always there somehow.
No, it's not fair that you have to work at what's supposed to come naturally, but in life the only thing that's promised is work. Have faith, sweet mother. Your efforts will be rewarded. Speak gently to yourself. Breathe. Ask for help. Dawn will come, girlie. Just stay.
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