Several hours after giving birth to my daughter, I found myself alone, in a hospital bed, weeping uncontrollably. My husband had gone home to walk the dog and my parents went home to get some rest with plans to return later that day.
As my phone constantly went off with back-to-back congratulatory text messages, requests for pictures and FaceTime sessions, I felt anger. Here I was sleep deprived, sore, struggling to accomplish basic things like making a bowel movement, and all people wanted to do is laugh and kiki. I switched my phone to silent. I didn’t want to be bothered.
I struggled to make sense of my feelings. I was so deeply in awe of the little girl I had just given birth to and thankful to have made it through childbirth without complications, but at the same time, I felt like an emotional wreck and I couldn’t seem to get a grip.
“I can’t stop crying. Is this normal?” I finally broke down and asked one of the nurses in the maternity ward.
She reassured me that it was, but offered no further explanation. The first day rolled into the second and things didn’t improve. Any time that I was left alone in that hospital room, I quickly spiraled into despair. I was falling apart.
At night, I stared at my husband with angry gazes as he slept soundly on the hospital room’s pull-out bed while I was up nursing our daughter every other hour.
“What the f-ck is he so tired from?” I thought to myself. At this point I was seething.
I was happy to finally get out of the hospital and, for a short time, it seemed that my emotions had regulated. However, it wasn’t long before the weepiness and anger returned. Only this time, it had a schedule. Around 4 pm each day, I would find myself battling with this heavy rain cloud of sadness. By 5 pm, I’d lose the fight and could usually be found sobbing on the couch — not because anything was wrong, but simply because the sun was going down.
“What’s wrong?” my confused husband asked one evening during one of my episodes.
“I don’t know,” I said between sobs. “I just get so sad when the sun goes down.”
I realized how ridiculous this sounded, but I loved him for pretending to understand. I often caught my relatives shooting each other concerned glares during those difficult few weeks. I knew what the looks meant. They were worried that I was experiencing postpartum depression. I was afraid of this as well, which made me even more frantic.
Read more on MadameNoire.
