Ever since I was a girl, I knew I wanted to be a mom. I was sold on the fantasy of motherhood based on playing with my mother’s friends’ babies, on seeing magazine pictures of happy mothers with smiling infants, on the Pottery Barn Kids catalogues and stores that made it all look so cute and pretty and, well, easy. Who wouldn’t want to hold a cute baby dressed in adorable clothes in a perfectly coordinated nursery, looking like you just stepped out of a fashion magazine yourself? If I had only known what Real Motherhood looked like.
Real Motherhood set in as soon as my son was born. I remember the nurse placing my son on my chest for skin-to-skin moments after he was born. I asked my husband to take him off of me, trying desperately to put words to emotion. The only thing I could muster was, “He stinks.” I remember the shock on my husband’s face when he heard my words. He couldn’t understand what was making me say such a horrific thing. After all, all I had wanted from the time we started dating was to be a mother. I remember the crushing guilt that was a direct result of seeing my husband’s reaction to my request. “I’m the worst mother ever.” I remember.
From there, things went from bad to worse. The exhaustion, coupled with being a total control freak who no longer had control over when I slept or ate or did anything, was just unbearable. I felt hollow inside. Kind of like a robot, just going through the motions of feeding, sleeping, and eating. Every time the baby cried, I thought, “Ugh! Now what does he want?! Why can’t I just sleep???” I didn’t want to hold him. I didn’t want to feed him. I didn’t want to do anything for him. As if thinking these things wasn’t terrible enough, I felt crushing guilt for not being more compassionate toward this tiny human. I remember thinking, “What’s wrong with me? He’s just a baby. MY baby. Why don’t I want to hold him more, snuggle him more, love on him more? I’m a terrible mother.” Those thoughts embarrassed me, so much so that I shrank further into the depths of my guilt and self-loathing. I felt isolated. When I was alone with my baby, I would just sob for hours, gasping for air, only because I knew I had to stay alive to feed my baby. I only did that when my husband was at work. I was too embarrassed to display my real feelings when he was around. He had no idea. He had no idea because I couldn’t bring myself to tell him how I was feeling. It was just too terrible. Shameful. What if he didn’t understand? Real Motherhood.
I thought I was “prepared” for having a baby. I had read all the books, asked all the questions, researched all the baby products. I ate organic only, worked out throughout my entire pregnancy. My home was safe. My husband and I were great with each other. So it perplexed me why I was in such a terrible place after we brought our son home. It was almost like a switch, instantaneously after his birth. Every time I cried at the hospital, the nurses would say, as if I wasn’t even in the room, “Oh, she just has the baby blues.” I wanted to scream every time I heard that. Real Motherhood.
The truth is, no amount of reading can prepare you for having a baby for the first time. You can watch others do it, and you still won’t get it, because it’s not your body that feels exhaustion, or turmoil from having just created and pushed out life. But I didn’t know that. I didn’t know that everything I was feeling was a facet of what parenthood looks like. I was still sold on the idea that everyone else must be feeling amazing, and looking amazing, because that’s the idea that magazines sell. I felt so incongruent.
People made snide comments about my decision to exclusively breast-feed, to stay at home with him instead of going back to doctoring others, about why we sleep-trained the baby, about my choice to make his baby food instead of buy it. They made comments about everything. And I couldn’t figure out for the life of me why people were spewing so much judgement. Which pushed me further into depression. I was discovering another aspect of Real Motherhood—judgement. Nowhere in the Pottery Barn Kids catalogues were they selling Real Motherhood.
All that was going on, but I think the worst thing of all was how disconnected I felt toward my son. Even after he began sleeping through the night, I still felt like I was just going through the motions. I took him to baby swim class, read him books, took him for walks—everything I was “supposed” to do. But it was a total out-of-body experience, just going through the motions. I was acutely aware that I didn’t feel engaged, and acutely aware of that nasty guilt because of it. It followed me everywhere I went, like the stench of old lady perfume.
It took months before I realized I was depressed, and not just sleep-deprived. The realization hit me like a sack of bricks—unexpected, and breath-taking. When I finally got the courage to tell my husband that I thought I might have depression, he couldn’t fathom it. Despite being a pediatrician, he couldn’t accept that what I had was something serious. He wasn’t a jerk about it. He just couldn’t imagine that I could be affected. He couldn’t understand. Not at first, anyway.
Things didn’t start turning around for me until about a year after our son was born. I found yoga around then, and it helped tremendously. Gradually, I began to feel strength again, both physically and mentally. I still needed help, though, and I decided to try acupuncture. With the help of my acupuncturist, the last of the mental fog and exhaustion were conquered. Recently, someone told me that you would never know I had ever been affected by postpartum depression based on my Instagram feed. I never really thought about it from that perspective, maybe because once you overcome it, it becomes a part of your story, but it doesn’t define your everyday life the way it does when you are in the thick of it.
Practicing yoga was my therapy. It revived me, made me whole again. I felt guilty about taking time away from my son to go to class, but I stuck with it. I wouldn’t be where I am now without it. I am so grateful to and for it. Yoga took what was once a chasm of disconnection and turned it into a deep bond and mutual understanding between my son and me. It’s something that we do together that connects us on a deeper level. I truly believe it prevented me from having postpartum depression when I had my daughter. I was far more balanced, more engaged, with her. Sure, I was exhausted. I still got snide, judgy remarks from people. But I was in a much more stable place, so I could deal with it without being shaken to my core. That’s another aspect of Real Motherhood—learning to gain the strength to be your own person, and be the person your child needs you to be. Maybe Real Motherhood isn’t all bad.
