PPD and horrible contemplations during new motherhood

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

This week’s Scrubs dealt in a very authentic way with postpartum depression and the forbidden thoughts mothers may have, and this spawned a lot of discussion over in the Cafe Society thread. Instead of pursuing the issue there, let’s dedicate a thread to this.

As we started to discuss in the Scrubs thread, it seems thoughts of throwing the baby out the window or simply abandoning the baby are prevalent. As is the feeling that regardless of society’s acknowledgement of PPD, these particular thoughts are too awful to share with anyone, no one else could think such things, and having these thoughts makes you a bad mother.

For me, it started with my mother telling stories of how connected she felt to me the moment I was born, and how breastfeeding was the most profoundly joyful experience she has ever had. With that in my mind, I gave birth and did not particularly bond with my newborn. I distinctly remember her big eyes looking at me, like, “What now?” and feeling merely astonished, not really loving or close.

Within a few days, the high of labor had worn off, I’d developed some complications, and breastfeeding was like having to put my nipples in a meatgrinder every two hours. Several times I pondered what the procedure would be for giving her up for adoption, and whether I could withstand the reaction people would have to that. I felt an overwhelming sense of responsibility for keeping her safe and healthy, but no love. I quite hated her at several points.

On top of that, I developed what I understand to be a symptom of anxiety disorder: intrusive thoughts of harming my baby. These were not impulses to harm, quite the opposite. I felt I must guard against anything bad, and images of the worst things that could happen constantly popped up. If it is hard to tell others you do not love your baby, imagine how much harder to discuss having thoughts of harming them! Thank goodness for my husband - he was a rock, and he helped get me through it.

Through the weeks and months of learning to be a mother, fixing nursing problems, and just spending time with my baby, I came to fall in love with her. But I always try to share with people that it is normal and OK not to fall in love at first sight, though that seems to be the most popular story of mother love.

So, please share your own “I’m a horrid mother” experiences, in the hopes of educating and preparing other readers, and hopefully making people realize they are not alone.

2

I am not a mother and have no stories. However, I am ever so grateful that we are finally coming around to even trying to understand PPD, even if we still have a long way to go to really understand it.

I hope people do share their stories. Thank you, Cinnamon, for sharing yours.

3

Do you find with the second baby (and later) it’s easier? I certainly had “odd” thoughts with my son, but when his sister was born, about two and a half years later, I was much more comfortable with my role as mother (and actually knew what the hell I was doing.)

I don’t think I suffered from PPD, but I was certainly not myself.

4

A dad here. Seems to me that if you don’t have thoughts of throwing the dear little sleep-destroying monster out the window at some point during the first three months, you aren’t normal. :wink:

From my perspective, newborns are more of a chore than cute - they get cute when they are over the “fourth trimester”. It is easy to see why some can get overwhelmed by the responsibility and difficulty of it all (plus not knowing that it will get better, if it is your first). Waking up every couple of hours is a form of torture used in interrogations - and on new parents. :stuck_out_tongue:

5

I never had those thoughts when she was little, but that changed when she got older. When she was a toddler I found myself easier to anger.

Once I remember she had taken my keys and I was running late for work. Never mind I should’ve put them higher. It had been a hard morning so I was already frustrated.

I kept saying to her, “Where are Mommy’s keys?” She would reply, in a sing-song voice, “Keys?”
Finally I lost it, I was walking behind her while she was walkng down the hallway and I pushed her, not hard, but she fell to her knees, while yelling “WHERE ARE MOMMY’S KEYS?”
She cried, more from me yelling like that then anything else.

I was so shocked that I would put my hands on my child in anger in that way. I cried for hours.

The next time was when she took her diaper off in her bed and spread poop all over the walls, crib and herself. I was so disgusted. I pulled her out of bed and put her in the bath. She was half-asleep and naturally started crying (I would too if someone yanked me out of bed and put me in the bath) but I was gagging and couldn’t comfort her until she was cleaned up. Afterwards of course I cuddled her and kissed her and said over and over, “Mommy is sorry. I love you.”

I still carry guilt from these times, and am blinking back the tears as I type. I’m sure there were other times I failed my baby, but I do the best I can.

I have a good friend that I called the other day I could hear her son screaming in the background. He is at that age where naps may still be needed, but not always taken. She was about to lose it, so I chatted with her for a while.

It’s hard to be a momma.

6

I couldn’t sleep for hours one night because I couldn’t figure out how to get my baby safely to shore should my car plunge into the river in the winter. How to keep her dry? She would get hypothermia so fast…?

7

I had my son when I was 18 and still living with my mother (my boyfriend moved in with us while I was pregnant and stayed until the baby was 2.5). I didn’t feel much one way or the other, frankly. I felt numb. I felt inconvenienced. The baby had a high billirubin count for the first two weeks, and barely woke up and wouldn’t eat, so that didn’t really endear me to him any. My mother “helped” out a lot, but that meant that I just wasn’t all that involved in his care right away. Breastfeeding was a whole lot harder for me than it was for her, and I got infected nipples and the baby had thrush, and it was just awful. We supplemented with formula after the first week or so and were on total formula by four months, which was not what I had wanted at all, but it just all seemed so much easier. I was so tired and blah and just couldn’t get motivated to DO anything with him.

As he got older, I grew to love him, but honestly it’s still quite a detached sort of love. He’s a very independent kid, and in many ways feels “older” than me. He feels and acts more like a little brother than a child. Whether this is due to our personalities, my age at his birth or our living with my mother until he was 5 is hard to say.

13 years later, my daughter was born 17 weeks early and whisked away to the NICU without us being able to even hold her. It was 6 hours before they stabilized her enough for us to go see her, and even then we couldn’t touch her. Her skin was so fragile that it would tear under the slightest rubbing pressure, so for the first two weeks the most we could do was lay an unmoving finger on her palm or head. She was in the hospital for almost 4 months. I worried a lot that we would never bond, and didn’t feel incredibly close to her in the hospital (except when she would stop breathing, when I would feel panic and terror and crazy impending doom and I’d realize that I did love her after all.) When we brought her home, there was a literal “What do we do with her now?” moment, but it faded pretty quickly. And soon I fell head over heels crazy insane in love with her. Obnoxiously so. And I still am today.

Do I feel guilty sometimes for loving her “more” than I love her brother? Yeah, I do, a lot. I even started a thread about it once. But some other Dopers, including Zev Steinhardt’s classic post on which of his kids is his favorite, helped reassure me that it’s normal. It’s not really a question of more love as in quantity (how do you measure love, anyway?) it’s just different kinds of love for different relationships with different people.

My point? Not only is it common to not bond with your baby instantly, you may never have the Hallmark kind of love you think everyone else has for their kids. But it’s okay and you can be a great parent anyway. (But do seek medical treatment for PPD and PPP - there’s no need to suffer through those.)

8

Oh, it was horrible. It didn’t help that my normally very nice husband wasn’t helpful and was very selfish during labor and recovery (at one point he went to Dunkin’ Donuts, okay? and about an hour before the actual c-section he came storming up from the cafeteria to complain that they wanted $1.15 for flavored coffee. I should kick him in the nuts, I swear.) My son’s 8th birthday was last week and I still get mad this time of year.

Anyway…The kid wouldn’t breastfeed and everyone thought they could perform the miracle that made it happen and then would wander away all stunned when they couldn’t. I felt like shit. I had a boy when I wanted a girl. They’d bring him in while I was trying to sleep and say “Mom! Baby’s hungry!” and I’d be like “Suck my dick, bitch.”
He was particularly ugly, too. Not anymore, but back then? Faccia brute doesn’t begin to tell the story.

My husband is just shocked about all of this.

9

The scary thing is, it doesn’t go away.

My kids are 17 and 14, and I still worry about them walking home from school, running an errand in our very small town, going out for a bike ride.

Even yesterday, my daughter was on a soccer trip, and I was thinking “What if the bus crashes?” :eek:

Poysyn, don’t feel bad. We’ve all done things in anger that we regret. I think overall you’ll find you’re a good mommy, but yes, it’s a helluva hard job.

10

This is such a good point. While I think I had a very mild case of PPD, I already deal with anxiety disorder, so I kept imagining horrible things happening to him.

When my son was born, I was taken into the OR for a C-section after 35 hours of labor. When they started cutting, I could feel everything, so they ended up having to put me out for the surgery. The worst thing in the world for me was not being awake to see my baby born and not to take his first breaths. Five hours later, after they had stabilized his blood sugar, and his breathing, they brought him into my hospital room so that I could meet him for the first time and nurse him.

I just remember looking at him thinking “Shouldn’t I feel more than this?”. It was like they’d given me a baby, but it wasn’t MY baby. It could have been any baby from the nursery. While I was lucky enough not to have any problems with getting him latched on and nursing (my problems came later with supply), all I wanted was for him to go back to the nursery so I could sleep.

Before we’d gone into the hospital, I’d wanted him to room in the whole time. I ended up sending him to the nursery every night because 1. I just wasn’t strong enough to care for him 24/7, and 2. I didn’t feel like I had any kind of maternal instinct for him. So they brought him to me when he was hungry at night, and then took him back to the nursery.

When we got home, luckily, I had my mom there for a week and a half. That whole week, I just felt like I was role-playing and that this wasn’t my baby. I kept waiting for those feelings to sweep over me like all of my friends said had happened with their babies. Looking back, I probably was dealing with more PPD than I thought, but at the time, I just figured I was a crappy mother. I kept thinking he’d be better off with someone else as his mom.

It took weeks for me to bond with him, and now, 5 1/2 months later, I finally feel like we’re completely bonded. I know now that I would do anything to protect him, and I would do anything FOR him, but I didn’t feel like that in the beginning, and I really do think that the way he was born had a lot to do with that. I felt cheated, and in turn, felt like I was cheating him out of a ‘real’ mom. I adore him, and luckily, he adores me, but if I could change the way things went those first couple of months, I would do so in a heartbeat.

My DH was great, but I don’t think he understood why I felt the way I did. He still doesn’t understand why I’m so devastated about the way my son was born, although I think I’m finally starting to heal emotionally from that, almost five months later.

There was a lot of lying to people those first few months, a lot of the ‘becoming a mom is the best thing I’ve ever done’, a lot of untruths and half-truths…at the time. Now I can say those things and mean them completely, but then…I hated myself for the way I felt and for the way I lied.

Thanks for starting this thread, Unauthorized Cinnamon. Until I actually started writing these things out, I never realized how precarious those first couple of months were.

E.

11

I don’t have any direct experiences to share, but my mother-in-law has told me about PPD symptoms she experienced with her second baby. Most prominent was wanting to be alone with the new baby. There were days at a time when she was consumed with wishing that her husband and three-year-old daughter would just GO AWAY, so she and the baby could be all alone.

12

My birth experience was almost identical to Elza B’s and I remember making all kinds of excuses not to hold the baby. I didn’t even want to touch him and my husband took my hand to feel how soft his skin was. I said “very nice” and asked to be allowed to go back to sleep. In recovery I refused to hold him outright and was like “YES!” when they had to put him under the lamps in the nursery for either the yellow jaundice (I love to call it that) or low body temp - I forget. Finally about 6 hours later my husband just put him in my arms and I felt nothing.

13

I imagine bonding with the second one (we’re ttc now) will be easier for me. I can already look back at my daughter’s birth, and retroactively inject my current intense love for her, so that it feels like I loved her from moment one. I imagine the same would happen with a second baby - when I give birth, I will know that love from my daughter, and apply it to the new baby.

My situation is complicated, so I don’t know what to expect, though. I have a history of depression independent of pregnancy, and I’m not on drugs now. On the other hand, I was in a lot of pain and I had a Foley catheter for the first six weeks, plus I had no experience. This time, I know I’ll have a lot more confidence, and hopefully fewer medical/nursing issues. I pretty much plan to strap the kid to my torso, keep him latched most of the time, and sleep right next to him. That will take loads of pressure off!

I bet men have difficulty understanding this kind of thing because they are by definition in the position you found yourself in: the kid appears, and even if they see him born, they do not have a built-in physical connection. The baby must seem like a “little stranger” to most fathers, until they have time to get to know each other.

14

So tired.

And sitting in the tub crying telling myself “this is PPD, cry the hormones out, you’ll get over it.”

My first pregnancy was my second child (my first is adopted) so I already had a baby at home. I think that made it worse for me, since the first one came so effortlessly - but I was already tired and stretched from being a new mom when the second was born (my first wasn’t quite 13 months and had only been home about six months when my daughter came). With the second comes guilt that you’ve disturbed the family structure for the first. Now you have two to be anxious about. No more rational than the anxiety, but it can be there.

15

The Mother and Baby clinic I attended gave all new mothers a questionnaire to monitor PPD. It also served to reassure me that even though I was experiencing difficult moments, it wasn’t completely deviant and monstrous to have those horrible contemplations, which had really scared me. I was able to put it into proportion. I had bonded with my son from the first moment I saw him - even though I had to have a c-section under total anaesthetic so he was a couple of hours old when they brought him to me.

In the post-natal period I was definitely being more weepy emotional than my usual self, and despite all my best efforts I had not managed to breastfeed successfully - I supplemented with formula after two weeks, and my milk dried up at 12 weeks - which was a tremendous disappointment.

On the plus side, it was only really the first month that was completely sleep deprived, and he was a fairly easy baby after that.

What did surprise me about my reaction to seeing my baby son, was that instead of being overwhelmed with protective urges due to his vulnerability and defencelessness, which is what I expected, I had a strong impression that he was a tough little chap who looked as if he could stand up for himself. :slight_smile:

16

Thanks for starting this thread. In about 15 years, when my daughter is pregnant with her first baby, I plan to warn her about possible PPD and tell her it’s not unusual, it doesn’t make her a bad mother, and to get help if she needs it.

Of course, I plan on helping out for the first week…gotta get a jump on the Grandma Spoiling Rights.