My name is Cecy, I'm 29 and have a beautiful two year old daughter. I am Mexican and live in Guadalajara Jalisco where the culture of motherhood is built around being a perfect mom, wife and employee, no matter what.
My baby was born in October 2011 after a pregnancy with no complications. My symptoms began on the second week. I started to feel sad and was asking myself if becoming a mother was a good idea.
At first I had problems sleeping. I couldn't. When I tried resting, I thought I was sleeping for 3 hours at a time, but I realized I was only sleeping for 15 minutes. At first this only happened during the day. But quickly it was happening at night as well.
The first two people that noticed something was wrong, were my dad's friend, a psychiatrist and my baby's pediatrician. Both asked me if I was ok and the psychiatrist told me that I needed treatment. He also said I would have to stop breastfeeding. I told him, "No, it's only baby blues".
Soon I found I was crying a lot everyday and had bad thoughts about hurting my baby and myself. The worst happened when I was in my room nursing the baby when I saw myself throwing her down the stairs, breaking the window in the front door. I was terrified, seeing myself killing my own daughter. I felt like trash but never said anything to my husband or my parents. I was so scared. After that, my daughter got a rash on her face and had severe acid reflux, a result from an allergy to the formula I started giving her. She would cry for more than eight hours. That day I didn't sleep at all. Thirty-six hours later, I finally tried to rest while my baby was sleeping but I heard the sound of her crying inside my head.
I got up, went tho the living room where my parents were sitting and I started to cry. I said "I can't do this anymore. I want to die. I need help."
I had my first appointment with the psychiatrist. I was diagnosed with "postpartum depression". When I went to my routine checkup with my ObGyn I told her about the diagnosis and she said "Postpartum depression? That doesn't exist, all you have are crazy hormones. What you're experiencing is motherhood. That's what being a mom is and all the moms in the world go through the same thing. You have to get over it".
Oh my god!, I felt so disappointed. It felt like she shut the door in my face. How was this possible? She is my doctor! And I feel like shit. This is not motherhood, this is hell. All mothers in the world cannot feel this way. I cursed her inside me. I was so angry.
I started the treatment and had an appointment once a week and took a combination of sleeping pills and antidepressants. My mom and my mother in law took care of the baby because I couldn't.
I was in treatment for one and a half years with both medicine and therapy and during the process I had terrible meltdowns and a suicide attempt, but at the end, I was happy and finally felt the beauty of being a mother. Today, I feel strong enough to raise my little girl and I enjoy her more than any mom in the world because I'm recovering the time I couldn't be her healthy mom.
I am sharing my story because I cannot keep this to myself. I want to tell my experience to everybody, to get people to open their minds and understand that we are SICK mothers not "bad mothers". This is a disorder and I was so lucky to get attention on time.