When things fall apart.

It's gotten pretty bad. 

I took a postpartum depression screening online a few weeks ago, and while I wasn't too surprised, it finally let me say out loud what I've been feeling since I was pregnant.  I am ill.  I have postpartum  depression.  The hardest thing about saying that is the fact that I don't necessarily feel depressed, just extremely agitated, rageful, and anxious.  I've felt depressed before and it didn't feel like this does.  But I definitely feel like I have no control over my emotions, and I've reached a point where I don't want to be a mother.  I love my sweet little child, but I don't want to be his mother anymore.  I want to go home.


The most terrible part is that I can't really breathe.  I have just kept going going going with school and my other many hats that I'm always wearing some hat, some role, and feeling really screwed into being something to somebody all the time.  I don't know what it feels like to relax, to be nothing but my open, honest, joyful self.  Feeling phobia socially, snapping at everything that gets under my skin and dragging it out for fifteen minutes, and especially losing my appetite- none of that is ME.  I've lost a lot of weight.  Everybody tells me that I look great, and I just want to tell them that I feel like shit.


To be honest, to lay it all out, I feel like shit.  My marriage is maxed out, I've had blowouts with my mother, mother-in-law, and best friend, and I've pretty much alienated myself into a corner of distrust and isolation.  I see my midwife today.  I had to wait two weeks to get into the clinic because I couldn't afford to see her right away.  But what price did I pay by waiting?  Greg says that things are going to get better after the first of the year, after Elijah goes to school, after just a few more months.  I don't think I can last that long.


This is the first time in my life that I've even considered getting on some medication.  I feel like an emergency, like a walking time bomb.  If anything hits up against me hard enough, I'll shatter all over the place.  I don't want to wean Elijah, but I've thought about it.  It makes me so sad.  I know sometimes that nursing him really drives me crazy, but I'm not ready to let him go like that.  I don't want to look back at this time and think that I really screwed him out of a good mama.  And that's where I'm stuck.  I'm tired of being his mama.  But I know I can't stop.  And I want to say it's because I love him, but I don't even know how to love myself right now.  I know I love him, but right now, it's next to impossible for me to feel it.


We'll see how today's appointment goes.  I guess I knew these two weeks would be hell.