Is there ever a way to really help someone understand what it is like to go through postpartum depression? Why you are the way you are right now (or were then, if you’re a survivor), thinking the things you think during PPD? Probably not. So we justify. We explain away. We keep our mouths shut sometimes when we want to shout. We make excuses or whatever explanations we can to try and help people understand when they don’t. Even though we shouldn’t have to justify or explain, really, not to the extent that we do. It’s an illness. A common illness. And yet …

I received the email below from reader Michelle. It’s a rant really. A much-deserved vent that every mom with postpartum depression or anxiety or antenatal depression has likely had run through her mind as well. I loved it, so I asked for her permission to share it, and she kindly agreed:

I am sick of justifying myself to friends, people I work with, medical professionals, family members. Basically everyone who doesn’t understand how gut-wrenchingly hard postpartum depression has been for me and my family …

I’m sick of it for my husband, who has aged so many years in the space of a few months, who has cried with me and fought with me and for me and for our family, so that his wife stayed with him and his daughters didn’t have to grow up without their mother. For my little four-year-old whose every day gestures in photos look stressed when my illness was really acute. To our little newest member of the family who retreated into her own safe place and refused to make eye contact or interact with the world until her mommy was in a better place.

Even writing this down brings back the pain, the anguish, the horror, the shame, the guilt and yet a meaningless comment by a friend or a work colleague or even a close family member seems to belittle all of this hurt. To take away from all of this suffering. And I am left feeling that I have to justify why I went into a mother-baby unit*, why I didn’t go back to work for a year, why I had to go back to my family home for two months with my girls after leaving the hospital. Why I had to leave my husband on his own in a different country. Why I had to leave being me for a while.

Do they NOT GET IT? Do I need to horrify these people and tell them that the only way I saw fit to protect MY children from ME was by putting a knife through my heart? Or that the nothingness from the never-ending story resided inside of me? Or that the nothingness incarnate WAS me?

I don’t do it. I don’t horrify these people. I really want to. I want them to know, to really know, what it was like for us. I want them to understand and to feel for what we have gone through.

Instead, I justify. Well, I was very sick … Somehow the fact that I was in a mother-baby unit for almost two months helps them get it a little better. Well, she must have been sick if she was in hospital, and that’s only if they know what a mother-baby unit actually is. One of my friends thought that I had still been in the maternity hospital when my daughter was nearly four weeks old!

With my first daughter I didn’t go to a mother-baby unit so I didn’t have the luxury of others understanding relatively quickly that I was actually REALLY sick. I had to put up with the “Oh, well weren’t you lucky to have had so much time off to be at home with your daughter, with the “I wouldn’t mind being on sick leave if it meant that I got to say home with my kids”, with the “You look great” and the “So why the heck aren’t you at work?” look that goes along with it, to name but a few …

Are they serious? Yes, I guess I was lucky. I was physically there for my daughter but it’s only in the last month that I’ve become REALLY THERE with her. I don’t say this to them. I just nonchalantly agree, yes I am very lucky, while inside I am screaming. Tell them … horrify them … then they will get it …

So what do I do when faced with these situations? I hold on to the image of my family as we are now. Me sitting on the couch finally managing to get a sip out of the cup of tea that has long gone cold, cat perched on my wobbly baby belly doing her little kneading thing. My normally ever-so-serious-looking husband sitting across from me in an armchair with my two precious little ladies crawling all over him, all three squealing and laughing. Every so often one of my girls glimpses over and catches my eye, as if to say, “Maman, this is what it’s about.” And it’s then that I realize I shouldn’t need to justify. Our story as a family brings us to moments like these and to justify the route we took to get here only takes away from the contentment of these moments.

~ Michelle

*Mother-baby units are special treatment facilities in Europe (we don’t have them in the US), where moms can get help for PPD and related illnesses and keep their babies with them.