I’m happy.
No, really. I’ve found myself feeling almost unreasonably happy lately. Happy and content and like everything is going to be ok. This is a big deal for me!
Here’s a little something about me that you might not know: I spend a great deal of my time feeling anxious and worried and waiting for the other shoe to drop. I’ve experienced postpartum anxiety after each of my children was born, with increasing degree of severity with each child, and it tends to last for quite a while after the fact, to the point where it might even be safe to call it “generalized anxiety” by this point. It tends to spike under certain conditions (long drives on the highway as a passenger, especially in traffic or at night, for instance) and at specific times of the month (PMS and mid-cycle). I’m not on a maintenance medication, but I do have a prescription for a “rescue dose” of Xanax to prevent anxiety attacks in situations where I know they’re likely to happen or control them when they do. I take approximately 12 pills a year and the pills are 10-25mg.
My baseline is probably a lot closer to what most people experiences as near-panic. Most of the time, I have a running mental monologue about all the bad things that might happen, could be happening right now if I’m not paying enough attention, will happen if I don’t stay in a heightened state of alert at all times. Sometimes I go through stints of having to almost compulsively check on the children at night to make sure they’re breathing, especially Babypie. I call it “bothering the baby,” because if I don’t see her chest moving, I have to touch her and put my hand on her chest until I feel her moving. Sometimes I experience anxiety as an overwhelming wall of sensory input: too much noise, too much light, too much movement. Relaxing has been…difficult. Anxiety goes along with itchiness for me, too, and I’ll often start breaking out in hives on my face or neck/chest when I’m building up to an anxiety attack. Sometimes I can nip it in the bud by taking a well-timed antihistamine; sometimes not so much. I don’t spend every minute of my day in full-blown anxiety, but I’ve spent a lot of time with it lingering underneath the surface.
Officer Daddyman has been very supportive and understanding, especially this go-’round, as he’s done a lot more reading about anxiety in general and postpartum anxiety/depression specifically. I know it’s not fun for him when I’m worrying unreasonably over something. I know how stressful it is for him when I’m shrieking and/or clinging to the door while he’s driving.
I feel like PPA has had a lot of control over my life, both because I have had to take it into account when I did things like travel or let my children do things that are even remotely risk-taking (I get really anxious about them on roller coasters, for example) and because it has played a big part in our decision making process about family size. My anxiety has gotten worse with each subsequent birth and I have a lot of fear about how much worse it could get if we had another child. I hate that it has that kind of power over our lives, but you’ve gotta do what you’ve gotta do. If we ever did decide to have a fourth child, I’d take several extra measures to help prevent or quickly address the anxiety, but just thinking about the possibility of starting over from scratch with a fresh new bout of worry makes me, well, worry.
There are many other ways in which PPA does not control me, though. My friends and family are in the loop and know my stressors. I don’t feel ashamed of being worried about things, even ridiculous things. I can say, “This is unreasonable. I know it’s unreasonable. I can’t make myself stop feeling it, but I’m aware what I’m feeling is disproportionate or unnecessary.” I’ve developed the ability to tell people things like, “I might yelp while you’re drive. Please don’t take it personally. It’s not your driving. It’s my reaction to being a passenger.” I have tried to keep the vocalized worry to a minimum, to keep my kids from picking up on it. I do thinks that cause me stress anyway, because I refuse to stop doing things. I brought my Xanax with me to Disney World (crowds? rides? lots of going to and fro? Yikes!) and barely needed it, because I decided I was going to enjoy myself and anxiety be damned. I delegate the things that are hardest for me, too, like with the recent event Patchfire and I put on (with other friends) — I’m great at planning, then tend to freak out on event day, so I took all the pre-event tasks and then let everyone else handle the day-of-event activities.
Getting enough sleep, getting exercise, having time for myself — these all help a little, but nothing really makes a significant impact until my hormones start to settle down, which seems to happen at around 18 months postpartum. Babypie is now 19 months and change, and I’m finally starting to feel a little closer to my particular brand of normal. I often feel that, if it weren’t for the amazingly huge stressor of Officer Daddyman’s job, I might actually be somewhere closer to actual normal. The job is hard for me, because it gives me a sense of justification and rationality about my anxiety. Police work isn’t the safest thing ever and any time a police officer is killed in the line of duty, I can’t help but take it incredibly personally. When the Lakewood officers were ambushed and murdered, I was particularly grateful for those last few Xanax.
The upshot of all of this, however, is that I am finally doing so much better. I finally feel like I’m starting to climb out of the hole of constant and exhausting worry. I’m seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. I feel more stable, calm, and genuinely happy than I have in a while. PPA isn’t a permanent state, nor is it something I can just decide not to have, nor is it something to be embarrassed about. When I experienced it after Tank, I was very secretive about it. I didn’t like talking about my mental state not being exactly right. Now, though, I realize that it’s nothing that I’ve done wrong. It’s just the way my body and brain react to having babies. It may even be hereditary; apparently my paternal grandmother used to have anxiety issues (after at least one of her kids was born), often coupled with stress-related hives. I’m not a freak or even that unusual. Many women experience postpartum anxiety and/or depression. I just happen to be one of them.
