Enough is enough- Mental Health in Women after birth

My son will soon be 2 years old and that means 2 years of depression for me.

I have been fighting this battle for what it feels like too long. Ever since I gave birth, I have not been the same person and all my efforts to get back there seem to fail.

Being pregnant comes with much hope and expectation of good outcomes, a new, brilliant future, a loving family life where everyone rejoices at the sight of the newly born child.

The self-built expectations of being a mother include picture perfect moments of yourself in a cozy sweater that probably smells amazing (just like in the fabric softener commercials), holding your baby, gazing at each other and pouring out love while your partner holds you and stares at the baby with the most amazing amount of love ever possible.

While it might be true that everyone is pouring love out for the baby, no one ever told me that there was another possible outcome: One where you can’t grasp what is happening around you, where you have suffered a physical, emotional and mental trauma that you have no idea how to recover from and where the amount of energy you will require just to heal your body from that trauma could overpower everything else, including your capabilities of caring for your own child.

It is sad, but it is true, and it happened to me.

If only I could have known that I would be in excruciating pain, physically, emotionally and mentally AFTER the birth of my son and that this would significantly lower my quality of life, I would have made sure to work on strengthening my SELF, building up resilience, researching my family’s medical history with depression…etc., instead of just reading baby and family magazines and advice givers.

Post Partum Depression (PPD) is “a common problem, affecting more than 1 in every 10 women within a year of giving birth. It can also affect fathers and partners” according to the National Health Service in the United Kingdom.

Yet, PPD is not something that people talk about. It is a mental health issue that goes silent, untreated, misdiagnosed, under-esteemed and that affects the life of many families for years (mothers, partners and children).

Only now, after two years of dealing with this condition, am I starting to wonder, how many women in my family were affected by PPD and were never even diagnosed, let alone treated. I remember my mother being miserable for a long period of her life, and her sisters too, I remember my grandmother only being happy when the kids were around, I know that my partner has a similar memory from his mother and her mother from her mother before her and I wonder…are women meant to be unhappy for a long period of time in their lives and just suck it up because that’s how it is?

We are conditioned to sacrifice our lives as mothers, to give up everything…that is how mothers raise their daughters and we never question this, we think that we will do it effortlessly once the baby is in our arms but how can this make any sense? If we sacrifice ourselves, what do we have left to give?

I find this cultural misconception truly impossible to deal with, everyone around me keeps telling me: “It will get better once your kid can walk”, “it will get better once your kid goes to pre-school”, “it will get better once your kid is older and goes to school”…but it is not getting better! It doesn’t get better! My life is here and now and I can’t wait 6 years or 18 years until my kid is “more independent” to finally start to try and make sense of my life and put myself together.

Enough is enough, women already have to fight against inequality, violence and sexism as it is and minimizing a woman’s mental health state because they are a mother is absolutely not acceptable.

Post Partum Depression is real, it is a special form of depression and we need to start talking about it.