Postpartum Depression

One of the first aspirations I can remember having is wanting to be a Mom. At a young age, I watched The Sound of Music and Seven Brides for Seven Brothers and thought, “I want seven kids too! It looks like so much fun because everyone just dances and sings all the time!” Even as I grew up and reality set in that everyday life wasn’t a musical, I still wanted a large family. I gave up a spot on the Jr High basketball team for a twice-a-week babysitting job so I could grow my mothering skills, and in my small-town graduation ceremony where we made predictions about what we thought classmates would end up doing in ten years, everyone voted that I would most likely be a Mom to a “litter of children”—and yes, that’s a direct quote. When the time for serious dating rolled around as a young adult, I had lowered the number from seven to a more “reasonable” four or five, but still desired nothing more than to be a Mom. I soon found my wonderful husband, who agreed four would be great.

The road to start our family was a bit bumpy, so when we finally found out we were pregnant with our first, I was ecstatic! I remember daydreaming about what this change in our life would look like, and excitedly anticipated this next step for our family. Our firstborn arrived on a Sunday afternoon in June. The laboring process met all my expectations, and I remember thinking how great everything was going. But then our little one entered the world and was handed to me – and I remember feeling nothing. I had heard stories of mothers seeing their infants for the first time and being overcome with a sense of immense Godly love. I teared up a little bit, but it was more out of relief that our baby had arrived safe and sound. Over the course of our short hospital stay, I kept waiting for that outpouring of love for my baby, but instead found a knot that twisted in the bottom of my stomach and remained there once we returned home.

This anxious feeling soon compounded on itself after many sleepless nights, a colicky baby who struggled to eat, and a move across the country from Utah to Michigan when I was just seven weeks postpartum. I had heard my whole life that once I became a Mother, it would be a sacred experience that would have me feeling fulfilled and closer to God, but I was experiencing the opposite. I felt darkness and frustration and felt forsaken. I spent the majority of my days holding my crying infant and crying myself. All my emotions came to a head when my baby was about five months old. After a morning spent trying to calm down my feisty infant, I thought a change of scenery might do us good, so I loaded us up for a car ride to explore our new city. As we drove around town, my baby wailing in the backseat and me barely holding it together, I saw a tree on the side of the road. The thought came to my mind, “You know, if you just turn the wheel you could hit that tree and just end this misery once and for all.” Thankfully I still had enough soundness of mind to not take action on this thought. But I was desperately scared and immediately drove home sobbing.

Later that night, I told my husband what happened that day and how scared I was for my mental health. He was encouraging and understanding, which I appreciated, but then he said something that shocked me— he told me that he knew God loved me and was aware of what I was going through. Aghast, I told him he was wrong. I didn’t feel God’s love, I didn’t feel His presence, and He obviously didn’t care about me and my predicament, as everybody and everything told me that Motherhood wasn’t supposed to be like this. Still my husband persisted in his earnestness to remind me of this, and I flat out told him, “I’m glad you can feel God’s love, but it’s not real for me.” This statement was shocking for even me to hear coming out of my mouth, but that is how I felt.

As I began seeking treatment for my postpartum depression, it was recommended that I do a daily exercise of looking for the good things that happened to me throughout the day and write them down. I struggled to do this in the beginning, and my lists were often only one or two items long. However, as I persisted in the practice of doing this, eventually I started seeing more good things throughout my day. They were often small things, like the sun shining on a gloomy winter day, my baby napping an extra ten minutes so I could get a quick shower in, or a friend sending me a thoughtful text message. But eventually these small things added up over time and did help me to see the good around me, despite a hard situation. As the cloud of depression slowly started to raise, I noticed an interesting correlation—often the good things I noticed throughout my day were EXACTLY what I needed to keep going and pressing forward in that exact moment. So often I had heard of people experiencing God’s love in grand, overwhelming manifestations. But through this experience, I came to realize that God’s love is in the little details of our lives. These “good things” were too much a coincidence to not have a divine explanation. I started to realize that once I looked outward and took notice, that God had been around me this whole time, waiting to show His love in ways that would be meaningful to me.

I’ve since learned that because the spiritual is so intertwined with the mental/emotional parts of ourselves, that it is totally normal for one to struggle with spiritual feelings while experiencing a mental health challenge. That knowledge lifted a huge burden off of me —it hadn’t been anything I personally was or wasn’t doing that made me feel excluded from God’s love. It came down to a simple matter of brain chemistry that was dulling my ability to fully feel God’s love at that point in my life. But, even though I couldn’t feel it, the daily experience of recognizing the good helped me to see it in the small moments around me.

Now that I have some perspective, the only thing I still wonder about is why I had to go through this experience during a time that I was most looking forward to my entire life. I don’t have an answer for that, and may not for many more years to come. But one thing I am grateful for is that I can have better empathy for those who are struggling to feel God’s love in their lives. To those individuals I would say, “I know. I know the darkness you are feeling right now, and how much you yearn for that comforting feeling of peace. I wish I could wrap you up in a hug; not to tell you it’s all going to be okay and that God loves you, but to sit in that dark place alongside you. And then offer this one piece of advice: to look for the good, and trust that with time and healing, feeling God’s love will come back to you in the way that YOU need it.”

-Tabitha Aggen