Post Partum Depression

"Most of a woman's depressions, enuis, and wandering confusions are caused by a severely restricted soul-life in which innovation, impulse, and creation are restricted or forbidden. Women receive enormous impulse to act from the creative force. We cannot overlook the fact that there is still much thieving and hamstringing of women's talents through cultural restriction and punishment of her natural wildish instincts." -Estes

Since suffering from PPD after giving birth to my fourth child I am actually asked why quite often. I was actually just ask this again recently after reconnecting with an old family friend which got me pondering it more as I prepare to welcome another child, it is certainly a concern of both Dave and I. To be perfectly honest I do not even have an answer for myself yet, although I continue to search for them still. Sure I started out looking at it from the physical aspect and started with a daily fish oil which I believed helped a ton. I continue to take it since if I miss it I do notice a dip in my mood but not even close to the dark hole I felt like I was in after the birth of Brody.

I think the hardest thing about coming to terms with PPD, is the title of it. By telling people you have/had Post Partum Depression it automatically insinuates that it was "caused" by your child entering your life in some way. I never experienced it with my first 3 children and probably even wanted this baby even more than the others if that is possible. When Dave and I married we "agreed" on having at least 3 children. Not that there was anything more special about the birth of our 4th but I felt incredibly blessed to be able to have another one... I thought of him as my "bonus" baby. So there was certainly nothing about him entering my life to bring on such a dark storm cloud in my life.

I have just finished reading a book titled "Unassisted Homebirth: An Act of Love" by Lynn M. Griesemer and while I loved it from the stand point that it not only talks about unassisted childbirth it talks about many areas of birthing naturally that you simply do not find in traditional pregnancy books even the ones that speak of more midwife based homebirths. When I read the above excerpt from the book, I think it was the first sentence that rang so true with me. Dave and I later went on to seek life coaching for my PPD which ended up being one of the most wonderful things for our marriage. It brought us closer together and gave us a new understanding of one another. The renewed love that was found between us probably pulled me out of my depression more than anything else and I think it helped me reconnect with my soul-life which I believe I had lost. The best part was that I was able to find that part of myself in my husband rather than without him!

This is some of what the author had to say about PPD that I think can sum up where I was at after the birth of my fourth....

"Couples internalize negative ideas about children from a society comprised of self-centered people, especially since some aggressively dissuade large families. Children are seen as planned choices that interfere with rather than enhance life. Most people believe that having children is not only an economic consideration, but a major investment in time and energy, and from this selfish perspective, children are burdens rather than gifts. Because many people are not able to fully embrace the total joy that children bring to their lives, obstetricians are eager to prescribe birth control or perform surgeries to block conception after a couple has three or four children. It is as if pregnancy and childbirth is special for a first-time mother or for someone whose second child is of a different sex."

I think it wasn't until we became pregnant with our fourth that this surfaced for us. I did not realize that there seems to be a fine line with some people between 3 and 4 children and since we had finally gotten the opposite sex after our 3rd child I believe it puzzled people as to why we would want another one.

"Couples with several children are likely to hear negative insensitive comments such as, 'Wow, your hands are full!... How do you do it?...Better you than me....Are you going to have any more kids?....Haven't you figured out how to prevent that from happening?....There are things you can do to stop having kids, you know...' It is not as common, but refreshing to hear remarks like, 'Wow, what a nice family... your children are so beautiful and well behaved.' Parents with several adult children seldom regretted having raised large families, because there is such a sense of accomplishment after having struggled.

Families are smaller today and children are segregated from the adult world. There is emphasis on engaging in activities within the same age group. Parents want to provide their children with as many experiences as possible. Many parents know that they will only be able to do a good job with no more than two children. It is hard to balance work, family and personal aspirations with several children.

Part of a happy, healthy adulthood involves the ability not to take life so seriously, to laugh a lot and to enjoy the kind of spontaneity that children do. Adults who participate in child's play have an easier time of expressing their inner child, especially those who have a large family and are involved with their children's lives and cannot escape spontaneous play with their children. Adults who are childless or lack a sense of spontaneity are missing a part of life which contributes to creativity and well-being. Having a large family or embracing children keeps adults young. Unfortunately, there is a segment of our population that is unable to derive any pleasure or fun because they are much too serious and psychologically incomplete.

Life can be very pressuring for parents raising children. Not only does everyone want the best education for their children, but they want then to grow up healthy in a safe, peaceful world. We have certain expectations and worries about the future, causing us to set limits or visualize a certain family size."

Dave and I certainly don't feel for one minute that we do not deal with these struggles but we watch parents with less children try to manage the same issues so it does not instill any confidence that we would be spared of this with a smaller family. If anything it seem to reinforce what we love about our large family. As we meet life's challenges, as everyone does, we take comfort in the beautiful family we have created with one another, although there was a point where this thought process was a struggle for us.

"Society imposes many restrictions upon us, making it difficult to experience life on our own terms if we are bombarded by employers, friends, significant others, family and strangers telling us what we should do and how we must live. 'Society' is a collection of individuals with different values, interests and talents. A handful of individuals, not 'society,' is partially restraining us from doing what we would like to do and being who we would like to be. It is more manageable to fend off distracting influences in our lives when we can pinpoint the source. We decide what we want to think or how we want to react towards others. We are ultimately restraining ourselves from attaining our dreams.

Being fully alive and involved with life means being open to new experiences and sometimes committed to unpopular beliefs, striving for new directions and new awakenings, breaking old patterns, creating a vivid sense of self. At the same time, we search for order and harmony in the universe. Self-inquiry may shake up the foundation and threaten the harmony we are searching for. Self-inquiry is a painful process, and what was formerly accepted is suddenly questioned. Even though man seeks consistency, he still strives for perfection, knowledge, truth and awareness. But uncertainty, insecurity, restlessness and new awakenings are the ultimate realities of human existence.

The denial of our deepest self is a denial of life. We are not living life to its fullest when we do not strive for expression of our inner needs. We should not have to sacrifice what our inner voice is telling us. We can make many choices in life about the way we want to be. ultimately, no one or nothing can destroy our inner peace, for the greater the inner peace, the more peaceful our outer world. If we live with love and high standards in our hearts and minds, no one can get us to change our integrity - to lie, cheat, steal, or degrade another person. when we have attained a comfortable level of inner peace, we may feel separate from others, but it will not bother us.

Birth pioneers are those who make lonely, unpopular choices as they seek beauty, grace and fulfillment in the lifegiving process. They strive for improvements for themselves and future generations. Unassisted homebirth lends itself perfectly to self-actualization and is the springboard for a deeper, richer life."

I have always considered myself a fairly confident person even when I have gone "against the grain" I have been able to stay strong in my beliefs and what my needs were. But for some reason after the birth of Brody I struggled deeply with what my heart desired and what my head would allow me to believe was possible for my life. It wasn't until Dave and I were able to work on better communicating our needs to one another that I was able to see how I was denying my deepest self and therefore withdrawing from life.

This makes sense to me that this very thing would be the case for most suffering from PPD, not the family size for all as it seemed to be for me. But so much change takes place within one's life with the birth of a child and there are so many expectations that we ourselves or others put on us for motherhood why wouldn't some mothers struggle with finding a balance between following our inner peace and meeting the expectations which may conflict with what our needs are. I think more mothers would benefit from setting their own standards and hopefully finding other mothers that can accept this of them. To celebrate that we are all on different paths working toward the same goal.

As soon as I was able to remind myself that I am the one in charge of my life and take back my inner peace was my depression lifted. I continue to struggle at times as I walk a new and different path yet again with this pregnancy but I am much more able to recognize that if I continue to focus on my desires and dreams others can not take that from me. I am being fully alive and self-actualization!

"The self-actualizing individual, by definition gratified in his basic needs, is far less dependent, far less beholden, far more autonomous and self-directed. Far from needing other people, growth-motivated people may actually be hampered primarily inner ones, rather than social or environmental. They are the laws of their own inner nature, their potentialities and capacities, their talents, their latent resources, their creative impulses, their needs to know themselves and to become more and more integrated and unified, more and more aware of what they really are, of what they really want, of what their call or vocation or fate is to be." - Maslow