When Motherhood Is Not What You Expect
Congratulations! Your baby is finally here, happy and healthy!
You worked hard to make sure that your house was prepared to welcome your bundle of love: the sets of clothing and all necessary equipment are ready to use. Your husband is always near and ready to help, the grandparents are ecstatic, and you feel more supple than you have in months, but still….something is not right.
Why can’t you enjoy it all?
Why don’t you feel happy and fulfilled like you expected to be?
Why do you feel so detached from everything?
Why are you so sad and impossible to comfort?
Post- and antenatal emotional disturbances affect a wide segment of new mothers, creating severe discomfort and breaking the living balance of entire families. However, they remain a taboo subject for most of us. Because of shame, guilt, prejudice and the failure to understand their causality, most women decide to keep quiet about experiencing them.
As with any form of emotional disturbance the causality is not unique. New studies weren’t able to find any differences in hormonal levels in women who suffered PPD (postpartum depression) and those who didn’t. Postpartum emotional disorders are triggered by a combination of biological, contextual, social and psychological factors.
The fact that the symptoms for postpartum emotional disorders overlap makes them extremely hard to diagnose and treat. Many women still fail to seek specialized help for their perinatal emotional challenges, especially postpartum depression (PPD), making it one of the most misdiagnosed and undertreated mental disorders.
The number of women diagnosed with postpartum emotional disorders is rising every year, and it seems that with all the advances in living standards and medical care, we never felt so alone, so isolated and misunderstood in our quest to bring human beings into the world and raise them. It seems that motherhood has never been so easy and so hard at the same time.
All women experience some kind of emotional disturbance during pregnancy, birth or postpartum. For 70 percent of them, the chance is that nothing is wrong; they are simply new mothers. They have just been through the most challenging experiences of their lives, have a storm of hormones inside their bodies and forgot how it feels to sleep through the night. The unpleasant symptoms are likely to disappear once their babies have settled into a sleep/feed routine; then they will get more rest and adjust to their new role as mothers.
Around 20 percent of new mothers experience what is popularly called the “baby blues,” an emotional disturbance triggered by the fast-changing hormone levels after birth. The baby blues set in immediately after birth should not last more than two weeks. Symptoms usually disappear once the hormone levels regulate after the birth.
9 to 15 percent of mothers suffer from postpartum depression, a serious mental condition that requires medical care and supervision. PPD affects ability to function in everyday life, generates sleep disturbances, eating disturbances, inability to relate and care for an infant or older children, general withdrawal, thoughts of self harm and/or baby harm.
Around 0.1 percent of new mothers suffer from a severe form a depression called postpartum psychosis, which manifests with extreme mood swings and hallucinations, suicidal or infanticide thoughts. Attention! Postpartum psychosis constitutes a medical emergency. If you think that you or someone you know might be at risk, seek medical help immediately!
What you can do:
Knowledge is power! Educate yourself about perinatal emotional disorders, learn to recognize the signs and the symptoms and educate those around you about them. In most cases it is loved ones or friends who realize that “something is wrong” and insist that the new mum seeks specialized help.
Know the risk factors: pre-pregnancy mental disorders, traumatic and stressful events, couple difficulties, stressful pregnancy and traumatic birth, major life changes that generate severe stress, financial burdens, physical disorders or other body-related issues.
Build realistic expectataions; knowing what to expect will protect and educate you.
The Internet overflows with birth and new parenting stories that will melt your heart and will leave you wishing for the same experience. I am not questioning the sincerity of the women who have orgasmic births and pain-free deliveries, who fall in love with their babies from the first second and whose births seem to be more like a romantic encounter than a medical event. What I am questioning is their ability to remember their own birth the way it really was, given that the woman’s brain is floating in a sea of endorphins; and pain perception, time perception and emotions are severely altered during labor and birth.
Media and society in general paint an idyllic image of birth and motherhood, thus leading to false presumptions and expectations. Yes, motherhood is a most wonderful, fulfilling time of self-growth and knowledge. However, for most women motherhood is also a long line of sacrifices, self-abandonment and hard work. Expecting only the positive and refusing to acknowledge the negatives is a recipe for disappointment.
Do not repress your emotions. Everything that you feel is real for you, and you probably feel it for a good reason. Emotions are a very important part of our mental lives, and they should be accepted and embraced. Though during pregnancy, birth and postpartum our emotions are strengthened by the hormonal changes, they are still our way of experiencing the things that happen to us. Any repressed emotions – during pregnancy or otherwise – can bubble and become toxic when they’re not released.
Care for your mind and your body As women we usually to put others’ needs before our own, at all costs. This, so we tend to believe, is what makes a woman a “good” and “caring” mother. The constant care for an infant’s needs is too much for anyone, especially if this is your first child and you are not accustomed to waking up every three hours and abandoning yourself in caring for someone else.
Learn to make time for yourself. Your baby might be the center of your life, but you are also the center of hers; never forget that!
Getting into a workout groove encourages your brain to release endorphins, the body’s naturally occurring painkiller that is deployed whenever you are subjected to pain or stress.
Watch what you eat! Stick with good mood food – the healthy stuff.
Learn to relax. Even the easiest relaxation techniques like “Body Scan” or “Breathing Focused Relaxation” prove to be very helpful.
Rest! Everything seems a little harder to bear when you’re tired. Hormones are already messing with your brain; don’t let fatigue add an extra burden.
Find support, whether from friends, partner, family or a pregnancy support group. It is very important to feel understood and to find other people who are going through the same experiences. Postpartum emotional disorders can be managed through support groups, counseling, psychotherapy and medication.
Do not fail to seek help if you feel that something is wrong. It is always easier to prevent than to treat a full-blown depressive episode.
You are not alone, motherhood has its highs and lows for everyone, whether they admit it or not.
By Raluca Babota
Raluca is a psychologist and the mother of two daughters. She lived in Romania, Japan and the U.K. before relocating with her family to Zurich in 2012.
Illustration by Albina Nogueira
Albina Nogueira has been a primary school teacher since 1992, and a writer and illustrator since 2006. She currently lives in Switzerland, but her homeland is Portugal. She is also the author of Letters to Grandparents and Hairdresser. To find out more, like her on Facebook or see her books in Amazon.
Postpartum Emotional Disorders Resources (Links):
