iii
Hormones

A week later, standing in the park-and-ride lot where suburban commuters parked and caught buses to the city’s center, I held on to my mom and didn’t want to let go. I’d spent the last ten years trying to separate from her, to be independent, different, and now all I wanted was for her to stay and take care of me. It was time to say good-bye, for her to take a shuttle to the airport to go home to Larry in Seattle, and for me to start life as a mom. Knowing how sad she was to leave, I tried not to cry. I blinked back the tears. The good-bye was inevitable, so I pulled my body from hers, stepped back, and opened the door of the car where Gabi and Derek waited.

As we drove away, Derek said, “I can’t believe your mom. She’s willing to take a bus to the airport.”

“She’s taken buses all over the world,” I reminded him. I now let the tears flow freely and didn’t bother wiping them since everything was already drippy and wet. They added to my generally moist state.

“I know, but still, she’s so adventurous.”

I wondered if I would always miss her this much.

For some reason, getting out of the house with the baby had turned a five-minute process into a forty-minute tactical exercise. So we were late, rushing from dropping off my mom at the shuttle stop to Lindsay’s Colorado wedding reception at my in-laws’ home. Derek’s sister lived and got married in California, and we all assumed I would still be pregnant at this second reception. My early induction put me one week postpartum and a big weepy mess for the day. I spent the entire party hiding in my in-laws’ bedroom, trying to nurse the baby while well-wishers came in to catch a peek. I eventually moved my hiding place to their bathroom until we left the party early.

Four days of sleepless nights and nap-filled days passed, and Derek went back to work. I spent nine hours holding the baby, putting her down only to toast a bagel and go to the bathroom. The reality of our move from Portland, and the loneliness it brought, was settling in. I had no one to call. One of my sorority sisters lived in Denver, but her days were consumed with graduate school. I didn’t want to call my mom; it would just make both of us sadder. So I sat and wondered if this was what the rest of my life held.

It took about a week of that moping misery before I broke down at dinner.

“This isn’t what I thought it would be,” I told Derek, my legs stretched out from my chair to his.

“What’s wrong?”

Staring at him, I didn’t have an answer, and at the same time it seemed so obvious. That everything was wrong. It was nothing and everything at the same time. I started crying and couldn’t stop. He wanted me to love being home with the baby. I wanted to love being home with the baby. My brain knew this was what I’d wanted since I first started thinking about creating my own family, to be fully consumed by motherhood. And yet I was sad and disappointed. I didn’t know why I wasn’t loving every second. I didn’t know what was wrong with me.

A month later, Lindsay called from California. “I can’t believe how much I miss that baby,” she told Derek. So she bought a ticket and came to visit. The baby and I drove half an hour to Boulder to have lunch with Lindsay and Carol at a deli.

“You guys stay here,” Carol said, motioning to the booth we’d chosen. “I’ll go up and order. What would you like?”

I stared at the menu scribbled out on the chalkboard above the counter. It seemed like an impossible decision.

“A Cobb salad. No onion,” Lindsay answered.

I looked at her in disbelief. How did she make that decision so quickly? With such confidence? And it sounded so healthy, so unsatisfying. Carol turned to me. I looked up at the board again and tried to block out the restaurant’s background noise so I could focus.

“Can I hold her?” Lindsay asked as her mom walked to the counter to order. I watched Lindsay unbuckle the car seat, pull the baby up close to her face, and talk to her in a hushed voice. The cloud from labor and delivery had returned, putting everything I saw in a misty fog. Lindsay pulled her face back a few inches so she and the baby had full view of each other. I noticed Gabi follow her auntie with her eyes. Lindsay gave her a big smile, and then with a stab to my heart, Gabi smiled back. A huge cheek-to-cheek smile that flashed only for a second, but was without question a real smile, not just a facial spasm.

“Did you see that?!” Lindsay’s voice indicated she was excited. And who wouldn’t be? It was about the cutest thing the world had ever seen. “Has she ever done that before?”

“A few times,” I answered, followed by, “I think.” I couldn’t really remember if or how many times Gabi had thrown out such an obvious smile. I wondered why my sister-in-law was better at getting my baby to smile than I was.

At home that afternoon, I lay Gabi on my bed and sat down next to her. She looked up from the flowered bedspread and kicked her jammied feet. I wondered if I should try to bend down and put my face close to hers, like Lindsay did earlier, and try to make her smile. I was terrified it wouldn’t work, so I didn’t try. If I tried and failed, it would confirm my biggest, most shameful fear: that I shouldn’t be Gabi’s mother. That my sister-in-law, who’d only been with the baby an hour, was better at caring for Gabi and making her feel loved than I was. Maybe she should be Gabi’s mom, I thought.

I cried and wondered why motherhood was so completely different from what I had pictured. Why I was so sad when it was what I had wanted for so long. I now had the tight, clean, nuclear family I’d dreamed of, and all I wanted to do was sleep.

By the time Gabi was three months old, I was feeling more capable, more the person I remembered before delivery—well, really since before pregnancy. It was as though I’d had terrible PMS for three months. Once out of it, I could look back and see with some clarity that my hormones were dictating my feelings and behavior. A heavy case of the baby blues, I figured.

Years and another baby later, I heard a psychiatrist speak to a room of MOPS women on the topic of postpartum depression. As he listed off the symptoms, those first few months of mothering rushed back. Knowing depression is not neat and tidy but tends to fall on a continuum of symptoms, I realized I may have been further down the depression scale than I’d realized after Gabi was born. My bad case of the baby blues was more likely a mild case of postpartum depression. He then said something that made total sense: the development of postpartum depression is usually linked to a woman’s perception of her support system.

“Remember, this is perception we’re talking about,” he said. “She may have a great support system to tap into, but if she doesn’t believe she does, she’ll feel isolated, and that will put her at risk.”

I thought of the endless days sitting alone on the couch, nursing the baby, wondering if or how the next day would be any better. Of my prayers echoing off the walls of our tiny living room, bouncing back unanswered. Of daydreaming about the idyllic mothering life if only we still lived in Portland surrounded by sweet friends with babies. Of my mother-in-law and the women from her Bible study who brought me dinner and would have been thrilled to help more if only they, and I, knew I needed it. I likely had a support system available to me, but often perception becomes reality. I felt lonely and isolated, so I was lonely and isolated.