Two Years Later: What Postpartum Depression Taught Me That I Never Wanted to Learn
Greer turned two this spring. Two years of a little girl who has no idea that the summer after she was born, her mother stood on a rooftop deck and quietly worked out the logistics of never coming down.
I’ve written about the darkest part of this before — the six-week postpartum checkup where I was told we’d “keep an eye on it,” the moment in Legoland that almost turned a vacation into a tragedy, and the Zoloft that brought the light back into my eyes. I wrote about the one-year mark, too, when I was still close enough to the pit that gratitude felt like the whole story: I made it out. I’m alive. Look how far I’ve come.
Two years out, I have a little more distance. And distance has a way of showing you things gratitude alone can’t.
It doesn’t just end when the depression lifts.
I think the version of recovery we’re sold is a clean line. You get diagnosed, you get treated, you get better. Nobody tells you that surviving something like that leaves a mark on how you mother afterward. I am a more anxious parent than I was before. I notice, more than I used to, the low hum of my own mood on hard days. That vigilance is exhausting, but it’s also a form of love for myself and my family. I’d rather check in with myself too often than not often enough.
I am angrier now than I was last year.
At the one-year mark, I didn’t have much room for anger — I was too grateful just to be standing. Two years out, I have room for both. I am still angry that at that six-week checkup, my doctor let me walk out the door in the worst moment of my life with a “let’s keep an eye on it.” I’m angry on behalf of the moms who don’t have a husband who can rearrange his week, a family five minutes away, or the kind of health insurance that gets you a Zoloft prescription filled in two days. Gratitude and anger aren’t opposites. I’ve learned to hold them at the same time.
The friends who show up matter more than I knew.
I’ve written a lot about the clinical side of this, but what I haven’t written enough about is the number of people who, once I finally said the words out loud, quietly rearranged their lives around me without making it a whole thing. The friends who showed up and didn’t ask a single question. Asking for help was the hardest sentence I’ve ever said. What made it survivable was the people who didn’t need me to say it twice.
Greer will never know how close it was, and that’s exactly the point.
Greer will grow up knowing a mother who is present, who laughs easily, and who is, on most days, entirely okay. That gap between who I was in that rooftop moment and who I get to be for her every single day is the whole reason I keep writing these. Not because the story is finished, but because somewhere out there is a mom standing at her own six-week checkup, being told to keep an eye on it, and she needs to know that two years from now, she can be exactly this okay too.
If you’re in it right now, please, please don’t wait for it to get bad enough to be believed. Ask for medication. Ask twice. Ask a friend to ask for you if you don’t have the words. You don’t have to be as close to the edge as I was for your suffering to count.
Two years ago, I was strong. But mostly, I was helped. Let someone help you, too.
