Tamara recently left her beloved buckeye-state and relocated to Pittsburgh with her husband and infant son. While at home, she’s decided to give writing, attachment parenting, and photography a try. And when she saw our post about depression, she decided to share her story.

The birth of my son brought about some of the craziest emotions I’ve ever had in my entire life. Happy ones, sad ones, normal ones, and desperate ones. After a pretty uneventful first two trimesters–being put on bed rest in my third trimester really took a toll on me emotionally. Then after he was born, we struggled with breastfeeding. At his two month visit when we found out that he hadn’t gained weight, my husband and I were broken to the core. The entire day is a blur, all I remember is the pediatrician shaking her head at the weight and then–as if I am a ghost in the room–I watch myself sobbing uncontrollably, tears falling on my tiny boy who is screaming at the breast. That visit threw me down a hole of self blame. This precious gift that I worked so hard to bring into this world was hungry.

At the time nothing was as it should be. We closed on our home-sale the day my water broke and we were packing up our belongings on no more than two hours of sleep each night. I was struggling with pain from some postpartum complications and my body was weak and still recovering from bed rest. And to top it all off, I hadn’t finished writing our thank you notes yet.

We were living amongst boxes.
We were worrying about money.
We were moving to a city where we had no friends or family.
My baby was hungry.
It was too much.

Looking back–all that was probably too much for almost anyone.

I cried, a lot. Every day I cried. I cried because I couldn’t pump enough milk. I cried because my baby wouldn’t latch. I cried because we were leaving a home we loved. I cried because I felt I had no business being a mother.

Other people saw us struggling. We asked for more help than we ever have in our entire lives in that three month time span. It was like my husband and I were shells of ourselves just going through the motions of our hectic life. Everything we knew was being changed, all at once. Everything. Our friends, where we lived, our jobs, our marriage, our finances. And we were responsible for this new little person who didn’t happen to arrive with an instruction booklet. Read the rest of this entry →

• Posted in Parenting
• Tags: Anxiety, depression, featured, new parents, Newborn, postpartum depression

I can tell you what I didn’t expect. I didn’t expect to be having my first panic attack ever, and to be wandering around and around the circular driveway in front of my house, at 4 in the morning four days after having given birth to my daughter. Did you know that 4 am is when most people run their sprinklers? It didn’t occur to me, but now I know.

Why the panic attack? It came out of the blue on certain levels. I had my baby last Wednesday morning and she is beautiful and perfect (I may be biased). The delivery…well, let’s just say all’s well that ends well (my obstetrician showed up at 11:02. Baby delivered 11:13. Can you say “cutting it close”?), and take up a collection to send the anesthesiologist back to school for some refresher courses in Epidural 101.

But after having this baby, a few things happened that were new and wonderful. Like looking at my husband just after we heard her cry for the first time, and watching each other cry as well out of sheer joy. So this is what it feels like, I thought (ignoring the goings-on of my placenta at the other end of the table), to be totally and completely overjoyed. Another wonder: by the end of the day, I was walking around, footloose and cramp-free and feeling amazingly happy, as though I should be followed around by the Katrina and the Waves classic tune “Walking on Sunshine.” And a third: less than 48 hours after I delivered, my sister gave birth to her own little girl right down the hall from me. We took pictures of the two new cousins in their plastic bassinets. Pretty awesome.

In short, it’s been an amazing week and I could not be more grateful. Read the rest of this entry →

• Posted in Parenting
• Tags: Anxiety, Newborn