Postpartum anxiety breakthrough!

Sadie

(I found this excerpt today on Facebook and I finally understand what goes through my brain constantly and I now know I’m not crazy and what it means to have postpartum anxiety)

Excerpt below:

•I saw a doctor a few months back.

I have a hard time looking people in the eyes, I talk too fast, I think I give myself away. I pretend its okay, but I’m drowning. Has that ever happened to you?

I remember when she was three days old, it hit me. I laid, watching her sleep. One cold tear after the next slid down my face as I realized what I had done.

I changed everything. Nothing would ever be as it was.

I couldn’t have it back the way it was, its just that now, I have everything, to lose.

I saw my doctor for Post-Partum Anxiety.

I mourn things in my mind, before they ever even go. It’s crazy, I know, so I try and talk myself out of it- remind myself that we are still alive.

But, most days, I’m scared. To even go to the grocery store. Everything has a new meaning now- is the person in front of me distracted or drunk? Will today be the last time I see her? Last time I buckle her in?

But the thing is, you never know the last time is the last time, until its over.

So, I memorize like a mad man. The way everything looks giant in her hands or the way her pigtails and teeth are lopsided. Just in case.

It seems unbearable- this intense love I have for her, and what would happen if I lost her? Or him? I hear a story of a mother loosing her child, and I get sick. For days. And then I’m all screwed up in my head again.

Its like a sick joke; going through life so naive, but not knowing it until you know it. You know? Its violating. Not realizing the fragility or pricelessness of a beating heart, until its outside of you.

Like that time I walked through a spiders web and just kept skipping along. It wasn’t until I was back in the house that I realized I had been carrying the biggest spider I’d ever seen, right there on my shoulder. Something about thats always stuck- How you can think its one way, but really you haven’t got a clue. Like giving birth- nothing could’ve prepared me to know what I was going to know when I watched her take her very first breath.

Once you’ve carried life, you somehow understand its counterpart -death- so very intimately.

Post-Partum Anxiety.

I dont, I won’t, I can’t think its too ugly.•