There is Postpartum Anxiety, Postpartum Depression and Then Just Postpartum

How long does postpartum last? 

Is it six weeks? Three months? Indefinitely? 

Clinically speaking, it’s six to eight weeks. But when you consider all that the season of postpartum holds, you would think it would be more than a matter of weeks.

There is postpartum anxiety, postpartum depression, and then there is just postpartum - the time after birth. And there seems to be this idea that without anxiety or depression, postpartum is smooth-sailing. 

At 30-some weeks pregnant, the aftermath of what birth could hold for me physically, mentally, and emotionally was the last thing I was thinking about. (Ok, maybe I was thinking physically to an extent, like… how soon would I fit back into my Levi Wedgie Icon high-rise jeans?)

I thought little about what my body would go through after giving birth - or rather a human being excavating my body. Of course, I had moments of wondering and worrying, “Am I going to panic when I deliver?”, “Is something going to go wrong”, or my biggest fear, “What if poop?” Which was my first question for the nurse when everything was all said and done, although there were plenty of other things to be concerned with.

Following what is both a miraculously beautiful and traumatic experience, I didn’t think of all that my body would have to go through to recover.

After you deliver and are wheeled out to a room, assisted by nurses caring for you and your baby on the hour, and before you walk out the door with an entirely new family, the doctor stops by to “clear you” with little to no preparation for what you are about to face. Not much more direction than “no movement for 6 weeks.”

Days after your baby has been born, you're still pinching yourself that he’s real and not a figment of your imagination. But you’re also riding off three and a half hours of sleep. No amount of pinching or coffee could make you feel normal. 

Within the first week at your baby's first checkup, you're asked to fill out the Edinburgh Postnatal scale, rating your level of depression. 

I blame myself when things go wrong. 

I am not able to laugh and see the funny side of things. 

I have been anxious or worried for no good reason. 

The irony in filling out these forms is that overnight you’ve been given this little being to care for, and suddenly your senses are acutely heightened to the grave fragility of life. So yes, you just might be worried your baby will get sick, have newborn sudden death syndrome, or your foggy head will somehow miss a step and you will clumsily drop them.

Without any clinical anxiety or depression, postpartum alone is a step into an entirely new bodily, emotional and mental realm. 

There is the physical event your body has just encountered. Things are immediately deflating in places and inflating in others. Your breasts are sore from learning to feed an eager baby who is learning to eat. Your only way of sitting like a normal human being is on a donut pillow due to tears that are so painful it makes you wonder how you will be able to walk again. And as eager as you are to wear those Levis, you can't even think about putting on lace underwear without wincing. 

Logistically, your life has been flipped upside down. You’re learning how to swaddle, feed and read the language of cries. Never mind you’re not getting sleep. Like literally, you are not sleeping.

And if you’re smart like us, you don’t get more than four hours of uninterrupted sleep for five months until you finally bite the bullet to sleep train. (But I’ll take the blame for that, I just wasn’t ready to part with waking up to my little boy in that bassinet each morning -  the things I thought I’d never say.)

Ultimately, the ride of postpartum I could have never anticipated was rapidly my heart would grow, almost painfully so. The transition to experience this wild love was something nothing and no one could have equipped me for. A love that runs so crazy deep and feels crazy because you are immediately bound to this little boy who has just entered your life. You feel like you know them inside and out and yet are overwhelmed with anticipation to discover the depths of who they are. 

This season has been a wild ride for me. It has been both losing a part of myself and yet gaining the whole world in this little boy's smile. 

The magnitude of this season of life is often diminished for us by a culturally skewed view of the word. I'm not sure if it is that many of us women feel we need to keep this season private because we don't have it all together, or it's too unglamorous a season for society to engage. 

But if postpartum was anything for me, it was the most blissful exhaustion. 

It continues to be pure bliss, now just with more sleep and dirty diapers.