Things were just starting to normalize with Erin when Abi came along. We had no more paediatric appointments, no more specialists telling me how I’m doing it all wrong on a weekly basis and I was trying to get used to the idea that pretty soon she’d be in school and maybe my life could return in some ways to how it used to be. Maybe I could even go back to work. Yeah…no, that wasn’t going to happen.

There was no emergency surrounding Abi’s birth. Aside from being a cesarean her birth was perfectly normal. She roomed in with me and came home at the same time I did, yet there wasn’t the joy and excitement I’d expected to feel. Despite this for a short while, things were good. I had a newborn baby who slept through most things and then she didn’t. I don’t remember when precisely it started, was it a gradual thing or did it happen all of a sudden? All I know is that I went from sleeping badly because I had symphysis pubis dysfunction to sleeping even worse because the baby would simply not stop crying.

As I slept sitting up or not at all for rocking her or taking her for a walk I realized my life was never going to go back to normal. I had this bundle of joy who was nothing at all like I’d expected a full term baby to be. Things were meant to be easier weren’t they? Why then was everything so hard?

Why did Erin’s five month hospital stay feel like a walk in the park compared to my nice, normal full term baby and what was I doing wrong to make her so miserable? I breast fed around the clock–sometimes that was a literal fact because she only ever gave me twenty minute breaks–and I cried. I cried because I was tired, because I was a failure and because I couldn’t see how I was going to get through it.

That’s the thing about depression: A human being can survive almost anything, as long as she sees the end in sight. But depression is so insidious, and it compounds daily, that it’s impossible to ever see the end. The fog is like a cage without a key.
- Elizabeth Wurtzel

As each week passed it become more and more clear that the crying and overwhelming exhaustion wasn’t going to end. Weeks turned into months and I still grieved for my life before Erin, perhaps even more so now because it was so obvious that I’d never have anything that even approximated that again. I longed for a time when I didn’t feel broken from the difficulty I was experiencing just coping with everyday life. I was failing at everything.

I grieved for my expectations of motherhood, what I’d expected raising a full term baby to be like. I cried because everyone was telling me how easier their babies were in comparison to mine. Perhaps other people wouldn’t describe PND as grief, but to me that’s exactly what it was. A loss of expectation, perspective and normal, how do you get those things back when you don’t even believe that there is an end to the difficulty?

Yesterday morning I was all ready to tell you that, in the three months since I admitted I wasn’t coping and found my sanity in a box things had been great. Since then I’ve come to realize that’s not entirely true. Things are better, there’s absolutely no doubt, but not great, life still definitely swings from good to bad at the drop of a hat sometimes.

My growing sleep deficit means some difficult days. Days where I’m doing the absolute best I can to keep my eyes open while the girls take advantage of the fact that mum’s not on her best game. Okay, so it’s possible that I’m simply overreacting to regular everyday situations and toddler antics, but at the moment I’m too tired to tell.

The good days, and their number is growing, are pretty good. A good day might mean some fresh bread or a lovely ANZAC slice made in our kitchen. Erin may even get to go for a walk to the park or the pool (assuming it’s not bucketing down). At the end of a good day I’m still tired but it’s a good kind of tired. The kind where I’m happy to sit quietly and watch a movie without a million and one thoughts running through my head. A good day usually means a good nights sleep–at least on my end, a bad day often means tossing and turning, waking at random and from disquieting dreams.

Overall things have really improved. I have more motivation and energy than I have in a very long time, just in the past couple of weeks I’ve gotten more things finished than I had in the previous twelve months. So, yes, things are definitely on the improve and I like to believe that one day very soon Abi will sleep through and things will improve again. Maybe great is still to come.

This is a particularly hard post to write, not because of the content, but because it’s hard to maintain a focus with the side effects of Paroxetine, my new anti-depressant, still raging through my body and two children who need attention now and constantly.

Despite the side effects, some of which have been pretty nasty, things are looking up around here. Aside from the side effects, Paroxetine seems to be doing its job and I’m feeling much better. I still have my moments, I still need to sit in the toilet with the exhaust fan on just so I can’t hear the noise. Yesterday I holed up in Erin’s room with my head firmly buried in my pillow while Abi grumbled about not wanting to go to sleep. Sometimes, just the noise of every day life is too much for me.

My girls can be extremely full on–I’m sure that isn’t something exclusive to us–some days their needs are constant, these are the days I’m most likely to snap. Even so I’m coping better. I’m not loosing my head because Erin neeeeds a drink and I’m busy changing Abi’s nappy. I don’t find myself screaming and bursting into to tears because, even though it took me nearly half an hour to get Abi to sleep she only slept for forty minutes. It’s frustrating, incredibly so, but it doesn’t cause the world to come tumbling down. I’m learning to deal with her cat napping even though I hate it.

This isn’t the only reason I haven’t been blogging lately, but it’s the biggest. Trying to focus on writing while my head is so full and busy feels like going insane. Finding the words I want to use to get my thoughts down on paper has been nearly impossible so I’ve avoided it. I’ve avoided email and forums for the same reason. I don’t want to be known as the woman who constantly complains about her kids. I don’t want people to skip over my posts because they know it’ll just be more of the same. Maybe that’s paranoia, but maybe not.

But yes, things are getting better. Hopefully they’ll continue to. Hopefully I’ll be able to function properly and get on my with my life soon.

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There have been a lot of these since Abi was born. A lot, a lot. I’d even go as far as to say that the bad days, the hard ones outweigh the good ones 3:1.

We’ve had the solid weeks of crying and constant holding before we began giving her Zantac and miraculously things got better. For two weeks. Almost exactly 14 days after she started on Zantac the bad days began again. No, they’re not as bad nor as frequently but they’re still not easy. What do I mean by “not easy”?

Not easy is her sleeping for a maximum of half and hour at a time and no more than 3 times a day and that’s assuming you can get her to sleep at all. When she’s awake she whines constantly because she’s tired. Then there’s Erin who’s three, do I really need to say more? She cries at the drop of a hat, literally. Yesterday we walked to the post office and her hat fell off, she cried broken hearted sobs until I picked it up and put it back on.

Like I said, we do have some good days. These days are fantastic. She’s happy, she goes to bed without a fight and then she sleeps for almost three hours at a time. In the beginning when we’d have these days I’d be optimistic that this was the start of something good. It wasn’t. Now, when we have our rare good day what I find myself thinking is that tomorrow will be another bad one because it often is.

It’s exhausting both physically and mentally and in all honesty I don’t know how many hard days I’ve got left in me.

I’ve lost my perspective lately. Things that probably aren’t so bad have been blown out of all proportion. The baby starts to cry and I do to, Erin neeeeds to help and I loose my temper. I’ve been convinced that there’s something wrong with Abi, something more than her reflux, now I wonder if the problem isn’t just me.

Inside my head it’s so busy, so loud that getting normal, everyday things done is difficult and often overwhelming. Add to that the extra things I do, like writing this blog and things can get…interesting. There’s simply not enough hours in the day to get everything done and I find that endlessly frustrating which contributes significantly to the tension in this house. Unfortunately, the harder I try to cope. The more I try to be positive and normal the harder it gets. It’s exhausting.

Yesterday I bit the bullet. I went to the doctor, even though I didn’t want to, things had gotten bad enough that I knew I couldn’t keep going by myself. I had thought that once Abi was better I’d be better too, but it wasn’t to be. She had gotten better but, still, every time she cries it grates on my very last, well worn nerve.

It could take up to 4 weeks for me to feel any benefits from the happy pills I’ve been given. In the mean time I could have a whole slew of side effects. Of course this assumes that the pills I’ve been given work for me. I hope it doesn’t take that long because, right now I’m just tired.