What goes up must come down

After a few days of uninterrupted post-partum mania, I started to hit some inevitable mood crashes.  Most of my time continued to be spent feeling ecstatic, but since a person can only sustain that for so long, I began to have daily plummets into depressive episodes.  My heightened awareness came along with heightened anxiety, which came along with heightened irritability, which meant that any little thing could throw me into the deep end of a crying spell.  And these weren’t the entertaining ‘mood swings’ you might see on t.v. – in fact they were rather frightening for me to experience and probably equally frightening for Ivan to watch.  The slightest disagreements that wouldn’t have phased me pre-baby, began to turn me into an emotional wreck.  I remember falling to my knees and sobbing desperately – the type of cry I hadn’t experienced since I was a child – the kind where you can barely catch your breath.  Yet, I can’t remember what I was crying about in that moment, so it probably wasn’t all that significant.

Each morning I would awake (after barely sleeping) with a smile on my face and the determination to prove to myself that the ‘baby blues’ were over.  Yet each day, for at least the first couple of weeks, I had at least one crying spell that lasted anywhere from a few minutes to half an hour.  That doesn’t seem like a long time – but while I was trapped in those spells, they seemed like they would never end.  At first I tried hard to fight them off, by running to the bathroom and trying to wash away the tears, but soon realized that these attempts were futile.  My hormones needed an outlet, and rather than trying to suppress them, I needed to express them in a healthy way and then move forward.  Similar to childbirth, I stopped resisting the pain, and started allowing my body and mind to experience these intense emotions, in order to move forward.  This helped me to regain control and remember that the dips were temporary, rather than being paralyzed with the fear that I thought I was ‘going crazy’ in those rough moments.  Being the therapist I am, I even wrote a list of ‘coping strategies’ (including simple tasks like eating, drinking, sleeping, relaxing, seeking support, etc.) since it’s easy to forget about self-care when you’re busy tending to a newborn. 

These first couple of weeks post-partum were definitely the toughest – both because my emotions were so raw and intense; and because I didn’t know when they would improve.  But luckily, the mania started to taper off and the crying spells started to become less regular.  I was hopeful, at that time, that my post-partum emotions would end any day, but have realized that they can often change and evolve for at least a full year.