Cry it Out

When I was going through my worst bout of post-partum depression, I met with my midwife. She was kind enough to disclose that she, herself, had suffered from post-partum depression that had been made worse by her son’s terrible sleeping habits. She had pushed off the idea of sleep-training until he was 11 months old and then she had gotten into such a state of sleep deprivation, that she did 2 nights of ‘cry it out’ with her son, a total of 20 minutes each night and BOOM he was, overall, a good sleeper after that.

I thought it would never happen to me. Potamus is always held or rocked or comforted back to sleep by patting or bouncing on the exercise ball or nursing. But there has been quite a few nights lately, where he is “awake” in the middle of the night for 3-4 hours, refusing to be bounced, not interested in nursing for very long, but CLEARLY tired. While he motors around the house he rubs his eyes, whines, cries, and rubs his eyes some more.

Last night I had enough.

I have had one five hour stretch of sleep in the last 9 months, and that happened 3 days ago. The rest of the time has been spending my nights with 2-2.5 stretches at a time, because Potamus was reverse cycling. The last few days, he has been up every hour all night long. He is tired. I am tired. But I don’t want to stop bed-sharing just yet, and crying it out doesn’t seem all that conducive when the crying person is in bed with you (let alone, crying it out has triggered ideas  of abandoning babies in nurseries while they wait to be put up for adoption and are only left to be cared for by nurses).

But, at 3am this morning, I had had enough. He was clearly tired. Boof was tired, and has been pulling long hours sitting in the living room in the middle of the night so that I can try and sleep. And so, I let him lay there between us. And I patted his back. And he cried. And wailed. And cried. And I thought I was going to die, or punch the wall, or tear my hair out. Most others talk about crying-it-out in similar ways, but their babies are in cribs in other rooms and they can go to the farthest reach of the house and get away from it.

It was the longest 15 minutes. And then he was quiet, with eyes half-open, and then he rolled onto his side and snuggled up to me.

And four hours later he woke up, hungry.

I don’t know if I will keep doing it, but it seemed to work. We all got more sleep. I didn’t abandon my baby or my instincts of bed-sharing, and being right there to comfort him. And I am thankful for the midwife’s story, which somehow gave me permission last night, to be the best mom I could…and let my baby sleep.

 

But I admit, after he fell asleep, a few tears of my own were shed. I guess I had my own cry it out night…

Burnout

There’s a clinical term for the rage I fee: secondary trauma…vicarious trauma…burnout. Try to explain that rage, funneled into one angry outburst of angry “stop screaming!” at my teething/growing/over-stimulated baby tonight.

Not my finest mother-moment.

Sure there are many contributing factors to this rage: Boof being out of work due to his own dumbass mistakes and taking this intensive 10 week class while also working for the Mariners when they are at home (currently there tonight, yes, part of my frustration), and a family caregiver who loves Potamus dearly, but hasn’t quite gotten into a very good rythym of watching him due to the up-and-down nature of my job. She’s gotten too comfortable, scheduling hair appointments one day, nail appointments another, and while I’ve been okay for the most part, I am actually getting paid a salary, even if my work is slow, things come up and Potamus needs to be minded, and I can’t be the village raising my child. And as my clients get better, I seem to be getting worse, but then I beat myself up about wanting a new job.

Today I consulted with a dear friend, former colleague, and former classmate. She made me laugh when she said, “oh, you aren’t supposed to be affected by seeing suicidal kids everyday? by seeing the worst of the worst situations?” I do see the seedy underbelly of mental health and family life. I impart wisdom and coping skills and education to my clients, and am losing just a little bit of myself in each of these exchanges. I am having  a hard time stopping the slow leakage and its effecting me deeply.

The look on Potamus’ face when I yelled at him, was heartbreaking. While this isn’t my first time, when he was only a few weeks old, he reacted out of what seemed to be simply instinct. Tonight there was awareness. There was this flitting look on his face that seemed to say (before he broke out in even more tears) “but this is my mom who is yelling, why? why?”

After 30 more minutes of nursing/rocking/stroking of sweet baby hair, he was finally asleep. Will he wake up with forgiveness? Will I?

Word Vomit

-I was in a car accident on Tuesday. The first one that has ever been my fault, and wed are crossing our fingers that it isn’t totalled. Worst part (beyond the pain and wrecked car) was that it wasn’t due to anything but a brain fart. I wasn’t txting or even pumping (though I had finished pumping recently)…it was simply a moment of distraction. And a lack of sleep, I suppose.

-Potamus is 5 months old today. He has been Teething and has a bum rash which has left him (and us) crabby, with not very much sleep. My heart breaks every time he goes to nurse and cries and cries because of the pain. I finally have given in to liberal amounts of tylenol and gum numbing liquids and he finally comfort nursed and fell asleep today. Hallelujah. But mama needs some sleep.

-my sister-in-law is filing for separation from my brother and is refusing for him to see his daughter unless he is supervised. My heart breaks for him. She is only 1 month old and already her life is in tumult. I tell him to hang in there, that the first few months of parenthood are SO hard, and she may be suffering from post-partum depression/anxiety/ocd/or psychosis. 

-Potamus is doing this sweet things when he falls asleep. He likes his back to be patted, but he also likes to hold onto my thumb…and with his other hand, he reaches out, and grabs a fistfull of my hair, or strokes my face, or jams his fingers into my mouth (or, ooops, eyeball). It’s like he is memorizing me. And while it is startling, when he wakes up sort of suddenly, and reaches out to touch me on the arm, or face, as if to say to himself “are you still there mama? Oh yes, phew, you are.”

Oh hello anger

Apparently I have been a little cocky in the PPD realm lately, sorta half-assing in the med department, because overall I feel fucking AMAZING as a new mama.

And then, last night, Boof was working late at the baseball game, and I had worked a full day and had a little less sleep than normal and yeah, Potamus was way over tired somehow and it took almost 2 hours of a screaming-nursing-bouncing/rocking-fallingasleepforfiveminutesbeforewakingupagain cycle. I was dazzled and angry. I might have yelled (okay, I definitely yelled) which made Potamus cry harder (i didn’t yell AT him, just let out a yell of frustration).  I wasn’t in danger of losing it, but I definitely just let him lay swaddled on the bed fussing for a few minutes while I went and got a snack.

And then, like magic, he fell asleep.

Maybe its not PPD, but I definitely am taking my meds today.

Making the call…

Boof did it. After a long talk, Boof, with my blessing, called the midwife to seek advice for my-likely-post-partu-depression and the result has been cautiously magical.

After talking to my favorite midwife, explaining my episodes, she prescribed me my favorite anti-depressant and encouraged me that I was an “amazing mama for recognizing this.”

I don’t know why that means so much to me,  it it did.

So, I braved the snowstorm and drove, solo (for the first time, leaving baby Boof in his daddy’s hands) to the pharmacy to pick up my medication, to begin a hopefully-new chapter in this whole parenting challenge.

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It comes out of nowhere, and yet, in retrospect I guess there are signs and symptoms of the spinning. Like when you’ve been drinking tequila shots all night, thinking you’re doing fine, and then BAM on the dance floor you are suddenly completely wasted and you wonder to yourself “how did this happen?” Of course, there ARE warning signs, but it’s hard for me to see them in the moment. The ramping up of my irritability that becomes more than sleepy, middle-of-the-night frustration at a poor latch and moves into an uncontrollable, unexplicalbe anger-bordering-on-rage,that makes absolutely NO sense, and leaves me despondant, detached, with feelings of incredible guilt after the episode passes.

It didn’t start out this way. There was a mostly blissful bubble, punctured by perfectionism and my desire to be the best mom ever, get my kid to latch on without a nipple shield, exclusively breastfeed to get him back up to birth-weight (rather than supplement with formula given by our pediatrician), to lost the baby-weight, to be up and around entertaining people post-partum like a combination of Wonder Woman and Betty Crocker. I had showered a mere 1.5 hours after birth, was wearing mascara and eye-liner during our first pictures with baby, and had an awesome amount of energy in the first few days that felt brilliant.

There were a few little moments of irritability that left me concerned enough to at least mention it to my midwife and husband that I was afraid I was heading into a tunnel. Nights were particularly bad, but not always bad. That’s the dangerous part of all of this, is that there seems to be no rhyme or reason to the nights with spinning thoughts, irritability, despair, guilt and the nights where I nurse with ease and we go about our sleeping business with relatively little interuption, 1.5 or 2 hours at a time, before we begin our little routine of nurse-burp-change diaper-nurse-burp-sleep, again.

So last night, when I woke up and the only language I could must were “fuck yous,” I handed the little one to Boof and curled up in bed. I thought of dying. I thought of running away. I thought that everyone would be better off without me. I felt worthless and detached and angry. And then I felt sad. And my thoughts spun rapidly out of control down this horrible rabbit hole into a nightmare of Wonderland proportions. Though I am experienced with depression and anxiety, I have not felt this level of despair in years. And then, after almost an hour, it went away and I nursed with ease, and slept like a rock (until we did our routine again). My humor and sweetness and ability to communicate returned as switftly as it left, which should comfort me, but actually scares me more than anything.

Because, when drinking tequila shots and getting out of control wasted is a choice, and while I can’t necessarily know if 8 drinks will cause that out-of-control drunk space, I can know that 1 drink, or 0 drinks, will not. But this feeling of spinning isn’t caused by alcohol or drugs. It is something more sinister, inside of me, that turns on and off without any apparent reason. Though I suppose I can begin to analyze the ramp-up to the point at which I had to hand our child over because I couldn’t be quite sure that I was safe enough for myself, let alone to be a mother.

And just like being drunk, the incredible next-day embarassment and walk of shame, facing my husband who triaged the situation, lingers inside my mind. Human guilt and mom guilt colliding as I wonder “what the hell is wrong with me? Why can’t I get it together?”

Yoga for a new mom

Today I read an article over at that resonated with my soul. I have practiced yoga, off and on as most things go, since I was in high school. While I have been mostly off in my practice, as far as asanas go, I have still managed to employ ujayii breathing techniques, some meditation when my Buddha self reminds me that monkey-mind isn’t all their is, and an asana on occasion (mostly to counteract my horrible posture, which is now worsened by the nursing slouch).

So I have googled “yoga for new moms” in hopes to get a list of asanas to ease the body and mind aches that have set in over the past few weeks of new motherhood. And so I came across this article, which wasn’t as much focused on the doing of asanas, but put perfectly into words the experience of caring for my infant that is now out of utero.

It is something I have known cognitive for awhile, that humans give birth much earlier than other primates, to accommodate for our brain size, but the practicality of this is my day-to-day reality. Whereas other primates have the luxury if giving birth to toddler-formed “infants” who are much more self-sufficient (can cling to mom and walk and communicate), we humans have sacrificed this development for big brained helpless babes who require many months of out-of-utero care. And so, here we mothers are, caring for our babies that technically should still be gestating.

For me this is hard. My pregnancy was relatively easy and my birth as smooth as one could hope for. And here is this little person that I am responsible for, even though my brain/heart haven’t completely put the pieces together that he-was-what-was-inside-me. Sometimes he seems to have dropped from the sky and I am somehow supposed to know what to do with him now that I can see and hear and feel him with my senses, rather than the vague movement inside my belly. My body knew what to do when my mind did not, and so here I am, trying to muddle through this process of still acting as a womb, while recognizing this being that is no longer truly part of me.

So while the list of asanas was beneficial, and I plan to utilize them in my attempt toward a more intentioned yoga practice, it was simply reading that I am not alone in this post-delivery gestational period, that was truly powerful.

Pelican and penguin

Today I had a fabulous mom-baby Reiki session with the lovely Courtney Putnam over at Rising Bird Healing Arts. I love getting body and energy work done with her, especially during times when I am prone to anxiety, depression or body aches. During our session I had several insights:

1) I feel a tremendous love and peaceful connection to my baby Boof.

2) my chest felt to be a source of tremendous strength, and the image was of Haystack Rock, strong and peacefully weathering storms and sunny days. Not trying to be anything but what it is…existing in the moment. This strength resides in me, in my heart chakra, and connects me with my babe.

3) two bird images came to Courtney during our session, the penguin and the pelican. She read to me from the bird signs book, and the pelican symbolized spontaneity and the penguin, purpose.

These two images are meaningful to me, as I sift through the feelings associated with being 4 weeks into new mommyhood. The pelican, as I researched later, in mythology, is associated with motherhood sacrifice, with this belief that mother pelican would stab their chests to feed their young if needed. While this doesn’t necessarily translate to spontaneity, it is meaningful to me, as I spend hours on the couch, or in my bedroom, nursing my sweet little boy.

And penguin. Well, penguin cannot fly like other birds, which is how I am feeling….a bird with wings that cannot fly… I wonder if penguin look to other birds and wonder what its like to fly, as they poor along, looking for their purpose (to be the best penguin they can be, in the cliche sense).  But penguin have a lot to offer as far as parenting goes (watch March of the Penguin if you don’t believe me). What do penguin think about in the frigid cold as they sit for months on the egg, keeping it warm? Probably the same crazy things that I think about when I am holed up inside and baby Boof is clusterfeeding for hours at a time.

Love and loathing

Love and loathing must be cut from the same cloth, they are so similar in intensity. I get caught up in the moment to moment of it all and when the pendulum swings to the dark-side, I wonder what the help am I doing in this situation? When did I want to be a mom, and now that I am here, the trapped scrambling-to-escape feelings come rushing back…predictably strong, like  stormy ocean waves. I am beginning to dread the darkness that falls so early in these winter evenings, as it means feeding on demand in the warm, dimly lit cave of a bedroom with Boof quietly sleeping next to me. The thoughts race again…night has never been my friend, and when I can escape the danger by sleeping I am a good person. And when I am awake, left to my own devices, the thoughts turn dark and scary. And thoughts influence action, and only 16 days into this new relationship, a relationship imbalanced by such brute strength and tiny innocence. He is completely dependent and I both love and resent it. How can I hold such dualities within me? Same how do I keep the shadow-self from hurting my sweet child?