Postpartum Depression: Excessive Demands Instead Of Maternal Happiness

Having a baby and becoming a mother is what most women imagine to be the greatest happiness. Unfortunately, some women experience becoming a mother and being a mother quite differently. They cannot identify with the role as a mother. They feel desperate, overwhelmed and sad. They find it difficult to form a bond with their child. If this condition persists, it is postpartum depression.

Grief, Disinterest, Feelings Of Guilt

“They put you on my chest so I know I have to love you forever.
They talk about magic and this one moment whose beauty I don’t recognize.
I feel empty, without strength and without perspective. There are a thousand reasons to be sad, but because of your own child? It can’t be …”

“But You Chose The Child!”

Of course. But I didn’t know how I would feel afterwards. I felt cheated by nature. Cheated of the happiness a mother feels for her baby.
My feelings cannot be explained rationally, but they are there. And I am at their mercy.
You can regret everything in life, but you can’t regret being a mother.
The facade of the happy mother must shine. So we polish it.

Also interesting:
• The best snow chains
• Recommended child seats for group 0
• The best gifts for children

The Harbingers:

Even during pregnancy, I lacked a connection with my child. I never stroked my belly and talked to her. I thought it was weird to talk to someone who couldn’t answer me at all. Of course I took belly pictures for my friends, but after that I didn’t care about my belly again.
I only know that my friend was happy and I felt like I had to be happy too.

Phase 1: Loneliness

I always felt lonely together with my child. My boyfriend preferred to do everything rather than take care of our child. She became my only responsibility.
But I had no desire to deal with her, no drive, no joy. Often I would lie in bed for hours wishing for the end of this constant obligation. At some point, we existed only as a collective; I had lost my identity about being a mother. This made me deathly unhappy.

Phase 2: Adjustment Difficulties

Everything was suddenly a huge challenge with child and I didn’t feel up to any of it. I simply couldn’t imagine how to get up the escalator in the shopping center with the stroller and how to go to the bathroom, for example, when I had my child with me. The stroller is too big for the stall and leaving it outside doesn’t work either. These questions scared me, so I mostly stayed home because I felt safe there. I often left the house with my child only when I was accompanied. Polishing the facade.

Phase 3:The Child As A Foreign Body

As soon as my child was awake, I waited for her to go to bed.
My only goals were to get her to daycare on time and pick her up again.
I often sat resignedly at the kitchen table, drinking one coffee after another. I didn’t know what to do with myself anymore. I couldn’t stand it when she pulled my hair or tore something out of my hand. But I also had no strength to assert myself. That’s why I secretly breastfed her for two years.
I didn’t know how else to get her to sleep.
When she slept, everything was fine.

Phase 4: Desperate And Empty

I always hoped that someone would see this. The deep hole in which I find myself.
But nobody saw it. Not my parents, not my friends, not the boy I dated who suggested he couldn’t be a father. “And I’m not a mother,” I thought to myself, feeling insanely bad. That’s exactly why I could never really talk to anyone about it. Sometimes, when I tried, I got skeptical looks: “But you love your child, don’t you?”
The whole overload I felt culminated in a vague suicidal thought: “If I kill myself, then one of you will have to take her and it won’t be me. “The despair spoke from me”.

Phase 5: I Want My Life Back

My best friend helped me a lot by making it clear that I needed to talk to people. Otherwise, no one can properly assess the situation and see how bad I really am.
I didn’t know what to do, but I knew that the situation couldn’t stay like this. I heard daily how the social image of mother in my head collided with the real me. I couldn’t stand it.
I asked my mother if she could take my daughter more often because I know my mother is a good mother. And I finally talked to outside people who encouraged me and made me feel like I wasn’t crazy.

Phase 6: Things Are Looking Up

I had some time to realize I had an attachment problem. About 30 percent of all women affected by postpartum depression, develop an attachment disorder due to the psychological stress.

Too often, I blamed my child for my feelings. At the same time, she can at least be blamed. It’s not her fault that I believed her father when he said, “We can do this together,” and that I was alone. It’s not her fault that some young men don’t want to get involved with a woman with a child.

What I want to say is that there are many reasons that lead one to this point.
In my case, mainly lack of support.
But there is only one way out: to seek help and talk about it.