I reached out to some of my fellow warrior moms to see if anyone wanted to share their story, and the following is by one of the brave women who responded to say, “Yes, it’s finally time for me to share.” Thank you to Diane Stenglein of Motherhood is Painless for writing this.

Sometimes my daughter wants to know what she was like when she was a baby. She folds her lanky eight year-old self into my lap. “Tell me about my chubba cheeks,” she says. And so I do. I tell her about the nurse who carried her around the delivery ward, showing off her chubby cheeks, or what she sounded like when she first giggled. She was perfect. Brown hair, brown eyes. Chubby cheeks and plump thighs.

Sometimes, I tell her about taking her to see the fireworks on the Fourth of July when she was two months old and cupping my hands over her ears, or about Daddy carrying her in the Baby Bjorn around our neighborhood. I tell her about how she slept soundly in her stroller at her Aunt Kathy’s wedding, even as all the guests oohed and ahhed over her.

She was so much to us. After battling cancer and the resulting fertility hurdles, we had our family. So I tell her.

And I love to tell her, because then I don’t have to think about the rest of it.

I can’t forget the dark corners of that first summer. How scared I was from the moment she was born. I remember holding her in the hospital and thinking, “Who are you?”

I remember sitting in the park near our apartment, on the phone with my best friend and her husband. I was shaking with the fear, crying while they talked me back to reality. “I can’t do this. I’m not supposed to do it this way,” I told them.

I can still picture myself lying on the bed in our third story walk-up, hysterically sobbing with sleep deprivation. I can still hear the sound of my cries, matching hers in the other room, I remember being afraid to put her down, so I spent hours with her, sitting in the glider. Day after day, waking, nursing and sleeping. Many more hours than I should have stayed.

She was born in May, and I didn’t leave the apartment again until the end of July. I came up with reason after reason. First, it was because she was so very new. Then I told myself it was because it was too hot. But I was scared. I was afraid of the cars, or of falling with her in my arms as we navigated the stairways in our crooked building. I lived for the weekly visits from my mother-in-law, bringing me food and a respite for a few hours.

One moment still echoes in my memory. It was late. She had been fussing, and my husband was changing the bedding since she had had a leaky diaper. I was lying in bed, nursing her, and crying.

“I am your mommy,” I said. “I will be your mom forever. I’ll be there when you are a big girl baby, and a little girl. I’ll take care of you until you are a grown up Clairebaby, and when you have a baby of your own, I’ll take care of you and your little one.”

Thinking of those years, rolling ahead of me shook me to the core. My husband took her back to her bed, and I lay there, the rest of the night, wondering why the thought of my child growing up made me so sad.

I didn’t realize how depressed I was until the pain had faded. One day in July, the weather abruptly changed, and we had a glorious day. It was clear and sunny, but not humid. I managed to get us out of the apartment, in clean clothes, and got the stroller down the stairs without stumbling.

I started walking, feeling a brightness start to form in the darkness. We met my brother, had some coffee. I walked down to the river and found the park. We watched the kids playing for a while, and I could finally see things a little more clearly.

Looking back, I know that I needed help getting through those days. But I didn’t know any better. Parenthood shouldn’t make you sad all the time, or afraid. And if it does, you shouldn’t feel ashamed to say “I don’t think I feel like I’m supposed to feel.”

Editor’s Note: Please check out our PPD Support Groups in the US and Canada Resource if you don’t know where to start looking for help. You are not alone.