All mothers feel guilty—the girls, it seems just can’t help it. Think long enough, and we’ll come up with countless reasons to chastise ourselves.
Moms surely are the harshest self-critics.
But what if the guilt starts almost as soon as your baby is born? What if the sudden mind-blowing responsibility, sleepless nights, swollen breasts, and crumpled tummy seem to gang up with the insidious, persistent thought that whispers “What have I done?!”
Between 10 and 15 percent of mothers have feelings like this within a year after they give birth, creating a real possibility of postnatal depression.
These feelings aren’t to be confused with the baby blues, which are pretty much normal. Immediately after delivery, pregnancy hormones plunge, making half of all new moms weepy and irritable. But within days, and with love and understanding, those moms usually feel sunny again.
Postnatal depression is different. It can’t simply be attributed to hormonal changes, because it often kicks in well after those changes are done.
Women more susceptible to depression are more likely to succumb. But social factors are also important—being uncertain about becoming a mom is just one.
That certainly shaped Maisie’s experience. She found she was expecting after a drunken New Year’s Eve fumble three years ago. “The father didn’t want to know. And neither did I really,” Maisie, twenty-three, told me.
Maisie’s mother dissuaded her daughter from a termination, and promised to support her.
“To be honest, I didn’t want Josh even before I saw him,” she says frankly.
So there was no euphoric hello the moment she met her son. Just a nonchalant “all right then,” “because I felt nothing,” Maisie explains.
That nothing tipped into a perilous void—days of staring blankly at magnolia maternity ward walls. “I didn’t bother to breastfeed or change the baby. My mom did all that,” she says.
Maisie’s experience is extreme, but far from unheard of. Josephine, thirty, sympathizes, even though her postnatal depression crept up more slowly.
“Although I’d been with my partner nine years,” she explains, “I wasn’t sure I was ready to have a baby.”
