Is it postpartum depression, or does your husband just suck?

my experiences with PPD and PPA

No one warns you about the type of postpartum anxiety that still seizes your heart 5 years later until you verify your sleeping child is still breathing.

That clutches your heart in its grip so tightly that you can’t breathe.

The kind that makes you kiss their foreheads every single time you buckle them in, just in case something happens.

It’s as if not completing the ritual could cause something bad to happen.

It’s the kind of postpartum anxiety that makes you drive with one hand lightly touching their fontanelle to make sure it’s still pulsing.

The kind that forces you out of bed in the middle of the night when you can’t see them on the monitor, because they could have been kidnapped.

It’s the kind of postpartum anxiety that comes from having to do it all alone; from being abandoned at your most vulnerable by the one who swore in front of family, friends, and the god he claimed to believe in to cherish you above all else.

Two babies only 20 months apart, and no meaningful contributions from them.

That kind of abandonment leaves a mark on you. It forces you to be hyper-vigilant, because you have to be both parents at once. Because there’s no one but you to be responsible. Because the other one is drunk, out with friends, high, sleeping, playing video games, or flat out refusing to help.

It takes years to retrain your nervous system from that kind of mistreatment.

I think I’m somewhere in the middle right now.

I still had to check that she was breathing.

An invisible hand was still pressed against the base of my throat.

But then I heard her breath, and I took my own, and then another.

I left her sleeping in my bed—where she feels safest—and I went downstairs to enjoy my tea in a rare hour of quiet.