Postpartum is supposed to be about healing. No one tells you what happens when the trauma doesn’t end. I have postpartum depression. Not the kind people talk about in soft voices with neat solutions and hopeful endings. The kind that wraps itself around your ribs and tightens when no one is looking. The kind that follows you into the shower, where the water hides the sound of you crying most days.My son was born, and instead of placing him on my chest, he was whisked away.I never really got to say hello.
There was no moment. No pause. No breath where it was just me and him.Only people moving quickly. Only fear. I had to ask to hold my own son. I had to ask permission to be his mother.
And then I went home with an empty car seat. There is no way to explain that kind of silence. The kind that fills the backseat on the drive home. The kind that sits in your chest and refuses to leave.
I watched my son breathe on a ventilator.I watched machines keep him alive while I stood there, helpless. There is something inside a mother that breaks when she cannot save her child with her own body. I felt like I failed him. I felt like my husband deserved someone who could give him healthy children. Someone whose body didn’t betray her. Someone who didn’t pass down broken genes.Because in the middle of postpartum, I was diagnosed with a rare genetic heart condition that could kill me. And then we found out my daughter has it too.Postpartum wasn’t just recovery. It was grief. It was fear. It was guilt that lived in my bloodstream.People say, “Get on medication. Go to therapy. Build community.” They mean well.
But healing is not one-size-fits-all. Medication isn’t a simple option for me. The medications that could help my mind could harm my heart. Could kill me. Therapy requires energy I am barely surviving without. And community requires explaining things I don’t even have words for.
How do you explain to someone that you don’t know how to exist in the world after seeing the inside of the NICU?
The NICU doesn’t leave you when your baby comes home. It follows you.It lives in the way I watch his chest rise and fall. It lives in my severe OCD, in the constant fear that if he gets sick, he will die. That I will lose him after everything he survived.It lives in the way I cancel plans at the last minute, because I cannot watch my baby almost die again. I cannot risk that this time, he won’t come back.
It lives in my body, which never learned how to feel safe again.
People don’t check on me as much anymore.
Not because they don’t care.
Some of them are raising their own families. Some of them don’t know what to say. Some of them believe the answer is simple.
I tried being vulnerable. I reached out. I told people I was struggling.
They told me to get on medication. To go to therapy. To build community.
But how do you build community when your world feels like a nightmare you cannot wake up from?
How do you explain that you don’t even recognize yourself anymore?
How do you tell them that last time, when you reached out during postpartum with your daughter, someone called CPS on you?
That you did everything you possibly could to get better.
That sometimes postpartum depression doesn’t budge, no matter how hard you fight.
That the people you thought would protect you stayed silent.
Now, every time you think about asking for help, you are terrified they will take your babies away and say you are unfit. That they will mistake your pain for lack of love.
When the truth is, your pain exists because of how deeply you love them.
So you stay quiet.
You learn to carry it alone.
I have friends who have been there. Friends who would listen.
But you don’t want to be a burden. You don’t want to trauma dump. You don’t want to be the friend who only takes and cannot give back, because you are barely surviving your own life.
So you say, “I’m okay.”
Even when you’re not.
Especially when you’re not.
Sometimes it feels like I am chained to my depression, waiting for time to unlock something I cannot unlock myself.
So I cling to the crucifix like my life depends on it.
Because in many ways, it does.
I cling to it when I don’t understand why this is my story.
I cling to it when I am suffering inside in ways no one can see.
I cling to it because I know God chose me to be their mother.
Even when I feel weak. Even when I feel unworthy. Even when I feel like I am breaking.
I believe he did not make a mistake.
But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt.
Sometimes it feels like He is pruning my heart.
Like He is doing open heart surgery without anesthesia.
Cutting away parts of me I used to rely on. Parts that felt safe. Parts that felt certain.
And all I can do is stay there on the table and trust that He is not harming me, but saving me.
This is what I dreamed of.
Being a mother.
And yet there are days I feel unworthy of it. Days I feel distant, like I am watching my life from outside my own body.
Like I am a ghost in my own home.
There is guilt in that.
There is shame.
There is grief for the mother I thought I would be.
But there is also this:
I am still here.
I am still waking up.
I am still fighting for my children.
I am still loving them with everything I have, even on the days when I cannot feel myself.
Postpartum after trauma is not beautiful.
It is survival.
It is loving your children while your mind tells you lies about yourself.
It is carrying fear and showing up anyway.
It is learning to live in a world that no longer feels safe.
It is becoming a mother while grieving the person you used to be.
And maybe healing, for me, doesn’t look like suddenly feeling okay.
Maybe healing looks like this.
Telling the truth.
And hoping that somewhere in the truth, I can find my way back to myself.
Postpartum After the NICU: Living in a Body and Mind I Don’t Recognize
