Postpartum Depression

My Gavin boy when he was one week old

Photo credit Elisabeth Kate Studio

I just stood there as the space ahead of me went blurry. I couldn’t catch my breath and my heart was beating so fast that it scared me. I had never had something like this happen before and I didn’t know what was going on. I just grabbed my car keys and ran outside. I had been at work and in the middle of making a drink for someone. I just remember I couldn’t get to my car fast enough. I locked myself inside and sat in the back seat hyperventilating with the air conditioning on full blast. It was my first time having what I now know was a panic attack. It seemed to come out of nowhere but now I know that physical reactions are almost always triggered by things going on in your life. Pain is normally our bodies’ way of letting us know something isn’t working and needs our attention.

And that is how it was for me. I needed to place attention on a few things and they were stacking up. Things that I could no longer cope with by just pushing them down. I had a little baby, a three year old, a business, and I hadn’t felt like myself in a scary long time. You know that saying, “You can’t see the trees when you are in the forest?” That was so true for me. When you have little ones you are so engrossed in taking care of them that oftentimes just out of pure necessity you ignore what is happening with you. I was suffering from postpartum depression and there’s so many things that contribute to postpartum depression that it feels overwhelming to even begin dealing with it.

With Reeve I had suffered a bit with postpartum things in the first year but mainly it was due to lack of sleep. We decided not to do sleep training with her and some nights she would be up six or more times. With Gavin, I had a few scary moments during his birth, he was born with not only a tongue tie but also buckle ties and a upper lip tie so breastfeeding/weight gain was always a challenge from day one. Gavin also cried A LOT (like A LOT) and he was such a different baby than Reeve that it caused me to have to come up with a brand new way of mothering a newborn. It was hard for me to not slip into depression and anxiety on a daily basis. When you have a new baby your body and mind go through so much and pregnancy and breastfeeding left me feeling so depleted. I felt like I was failing at everything and my emotions and hormones were severely out of the normal for me. I remember feeling daily that I could not cope with everyday life.

When Gavin was six months old I had my first panic attack. I had three more before I realized I really needed to change some things and address the problem on many different fronts. I began with my nutrition and nourishing my body. I go to an amazing chiropractor who practices Nutrition Response Testing and he found that my B levels were incredibly low which happens a lot after pregnancy and during nursing. He put me on multiple amazing food based supplements for my B levels and also gave me St. John’s Wort for the depression side and an adrenal support product. I am not exaggerating when I say that within three days of fully taking my new vitamin regimen I felt like I was coming out of a fog. I still keep up the same vitamin regimen today as a way of valuing myself and staying healthy.

I also started working on my mind and my thought life. Like many of us, I struggle with feeling like I don’t do enough or aren’t further along in many areas. You could say my standards are incredibly high. But, I’ve had to relearn healthy standards, especially for this time period in my life. Addressing new ways of thinking and taking down old ones has been an important key for me in overcoming postpartum depression. It has really challenged me to understand what truly gives my life value.

The last frontier that I changed was the amount of time I work at my job outside of the home each week. I physically could not handle what I was doing in all the areas of my life. I didn’t get help for so long because I felt ashamed that I could not do it all. I did not want to ask for help because I felt bad accepting help. Together, Casey and I began to make a plan as to how we could help me get better. There was a lot of sacrifices we started to make in relation to our schedules, finances, and work life so I could have space to not feel overwhelmed. This has been the most difficult frontier because there’s not a direct path most times to where you are going. It’s still a work in progress but I haven’t had postpartum depression or another panic attack in over a year. What I am doing is working. It took awhile to navigate but my life is better for all the ways I chose to make changes. It was all part of the journey.