Rebuild from Depression Blog

This week is the 5th anniversary of the birth of my son Frederick. They say that motherhood changes you but I really was naïve about what was in store for me five years and nine months ago when I got that positive pregnancy test.

We worked to get pregnant and then in the pregnancy, my life began to fall apart slowly. It started as extreme fatigue early in the pregnancy. The fatigue lessened about halfway through and my mental health began to decline. By January of 2002, I was unable to function in my work and unable to interact with people even in a casual manner.

In light of my recent obsession with milk and my planned trip to Chicago for the 50th anniversary of the La Leche League, I have been thinking about the kind of milk that doesn't get sold at the corner store.

New moms worry a lot about their baby's health. They wonder if their milk is all it's cut out to be. Maybe they should give a little formula. Maybe some goat's milk. The options that we have today only add to the worry because we wonder if we are making the right choice.

Study after study tells us that our own milk is the best for our baby. Common sense does a pretty good job of telling us that as well. The problem is that when we are caring for our own newborn baby, we do not necessarily go through a rational thought process.

My good friend had a beautiful baby girl about a month ago and has called a number of times genuinely worried about her baby. Her baby is doing very well. But it's my friend's job to worry because she's the baby's mother. That's totally normal. I assured her that baby was fine and we reviewed the resources that she had in case something should go wrong. Days have passed and baby continues to thrive.

Vitamin D and Iron

In about two months my friend will call and wonder if she should give baby a vitamin and mineral supplement.

Researchers tell us that when we suffer from depression, laughter might actually help alleviate our mental state. When I struggled with depression postpartum, one of my doctors recommended that I watch funny movies.

I remember feeling angry. I thought to myself, "if it's so darned easy I expect I would be feeling better right now."

I was right and I was wrong.

There is nothing easy about recovering from depression. This website is about nutrients and depression, but nutrients are one often missing part of a complex picture. Laughter is another.

Everyone struggles to improve their diets and sometimes the task seems so monumental that it is not even worth the effort. But small changes can have an impact. A study of breastfeeding moms from about ten years ago makes that point.

In honor of this week's 50th Anniversary of the La Leche League at their conference in Chicago, I have found an interesting article on Omega-3 fatty acids, trans fats, and the cord blood of newborn babies. Pregnant or not, woman or not, a study of the cord blood of newborn babies is important for our health.

It was just five years ago that a large group of women and I made it into the Guinness Book of World Records. We had some help from our babies. I was one of 1,135 women breastfeeding simultaneously during World Breastfeeding Week in 2002.

It was a huge stretch for me to attend the event and that fact is what probably makes the memory so special. I was still sleep deprived and recovering from Frederick's newborn feeding problems. Some details of the feeding story are chronicled in the book.

I had a report due for work in about a week and decided "The client will not notice if the report is a couple of days late."

I was right about the client and made what I consider to be a great self-centered decision to attend the event planned by the Alameda Public Health Department. It was a four hour drive to Berkeley. My mom and I packed up Frederick and hit the road.

The drive itself is worthy of a story in itself with missed turns, emergency bathroom stops, and my first breastfeeding-in-public experience at what I call a "Cowboy Restaurant."

A friend of mine is pregnant with her first child. She's my age - extremely close to forty and many years behind her since she was twenty. I have been thinking about the issues that older professional women face when they have children. I wrote her a letter with some of the thoughts below.

~~~~~

Many of our perceptions of motherhood - what is possible and what is expected - is shaped by women closer to twenty than to forty. Traditionally, after all, women had their children closer to twenty than to forty.

When you see a woman with a baby at a ballgame, I can just about guarantee you that she's closer to twenty than to forty. The women walking their babies around the block three days postpartum are closer to twenty than to forty. The women with four babies under four are closer to twenty than to forty.

How do I know this?

Well, it is just about impossible for women closer to forty than to twenty to do those things.

Should we fight it and try?

Should we be down when we cannot meet those expectations?

No. We should hire a twenty year old to walk the baby around the block.

I am here to say out loud that it is a whole lot different to be forty than to be twenty. For one thing, many women having babies later are in professional, stressful careers. Those careers take some toll on our health. The added decades take a toll on our health as well.

In light of these issues, here is my unsolicited advice to you as you make it through your pregnancy:

I am remembering a line from the movie “Armageddon” where the oil drillers are being shuttled into space to break up the asteroid threatening the Earth. As they belt up and prepare to be launched into space, one driller asks the other

“How are you feeling?”

“95% excitement and 5% fear. Or is it 95% fear and 5% excitement? I don’t know and that’s part of what makes it so exciting!”

I don’t know if I am feeling more fear or excitement, but it’s definitely a combination of the two.

It looks like we may well be having a baby in December.

When I shared our news with my dad (“I’m having a baby, Dad.”), he said, “Oh really? What kind of baby?”

“I am hoping for a humanoid baby.”

The conversation meandered in a strange sort of way and I finally said,

“Dad, I’m pregnant.”

The look of shock on his face was priceless.

When your only pregnancy resulted in psychosis, when that child reaches grade school, and when you are pressing the boundaries of human fertility, this sort of news can catch people off guard.

We are a baby-deficient family, however, with only two children now on my mom’s side, one of which was born just two weeks ago. My husband’s parents have a total of three grandchildren. My own parents have one grandchild and no others in sight until now. They share the 95% excitement.

Estate planning

I just couldn't resist, sitting here responding comments on my big announcement post, drinking seltzer and thinking about ice cream: On May 21 Baskin Robbins is giving away soft serve ice cream to pregnant women so I hear from Slashfood. They are calling it "Bump Day," a play on the phrase "Hump Day." It is a Wednesday after all and I assume you need to show your "bump" to qualify.

But before you run out for the free treat, soft serve ice cream is actually on the list of foods to avoid when you are pregnant which makes this campaign seem a bit nutty. The soft serve machines aren't always squeaky clean and apparently there is some chance of getting zapped by listeria. Perhaps this is just one of the many pregnancy myths and the Baskin Robbins machines will be squeaky-clean next week. Perhaps Barf Blog or some food safety watchdog will let us know if we should just put out a couple bucks for the scoops of ice cream instead or make our own. It would sure be ashame to risk listeriosis over soft serve ice cream, but that may be because I am a scoop gal.

Diane posted days ago asking for an update and, finally, I’ll pop out my head to say that I’m still here and actually doing fairly well. I work two to three hours each day on my data business. On occasion I work zero hours on data. The rest of the day I work on yard work, lie in a hammock, or watch the latest from Netflix. Most days in my pregnant state I do wonder how the human race has ever perpetuated itself.

My mental state is pretty good but I expect that is in large part due to my schedule. On the one time each month that I venture from my place here in the Sequoia National Forest to civilization, I do get a bit frazzled and overly tired. My solution: don’t go.

After months of “not going,” I have had a bit of cabin fever, a strange thing to have in the summer. I’ve been complaining over the last week about being a shut-in. I suppose we should all be careful what we wish for. We are actually packing the car now (I’m on a break) to find fresher air in the Los Angeles basin. That is a sentence that I would have never thought I would ever form, but here we are.

I’ve mentioned that forest fire is our biggest natural threat here and that the local rangers tell us “It’s not a matter of ‘if’ but ‘when.’” We a due west of the Clover fire burning in the Golden Trout Wilderness and further east to highway 395. Weather patterns are bringing us quite a bit of smoke and socking it in. The Clover fire is no threat to us now and it is unlikely it will become one. However, we did have some excitement early yesterday morning when a grass fire started about three miles away on Forest Service land. We could see the smoke plumes and the air got much worse. We had our evacuation list ready but luckily did not need to pack the cars. The fire was within a mile of a ranger station and half of the local population (all employed by the Forest Service) descended on the fire within minutes. The fire lasted for about three hours before it was put out completely. It did add a good bit of smoke to our smoky air.

My weather-watching uncle called us this morning and offered us refuge from the smoke. He says it may clear by Saturday and we considered waiting it out, but my lungs hurt a bit, my son has sudden allergy symptoms, and my husband has a mild case of asthma. I figure we can cure a few symptoms and cabin fever at the same time. My uncle and aunt live north of San Diego and should have great air tomorrow. Today we’ll seek refuge in the Los Angeles area. I hear they have places called "restaurants" and "stores." I'll have to check those out.