#thisishard

9/26/21- Week 5

There's a part of me that is tempted to gloss over this week, and only focus on the good things. And there were a lot of good things:

- a beautiful 10 km run on a sunny Saturday morning

- getting coffee and studying with a new friend

- getting to be the one to disconnect and take out the lung in GA lab!

-my snuggly lil hedgie

But this was a really hard week. I ended it feeling deflated, exhausted. I still don't have a good system for my studying, and with our first midterm only 3 weeks away it's really hard to keep down my anxiety. Talking with my family on Friday about this did help, but it can be easy to feel so alone in this stress.

(As embarrassing as it is to admit), I think I always thought I would be an 'exception', and that med school would be difficult, but not anything I couldn't handle. Now I am realizing that there's a reason why people say medical school is the hardest thing they've ever done!

I’m not sure how the human race has survived this long.  Maybe it’s just me (I hope it’s not), but my experience of pregnancy, childbirth, and mothering a newborn would suggest that it’s a minor miracle that humanity has lasted as long as it has.  During the 20 weeks that I vomited every day while I was pregnant with our son, I repeatedly asked my wife (an environmental scientist) how this model of gestation had been a good evolutionary solution, and she repeatedly told me that evolution wasn’t about finding the best solution for survival of the species, just a solution that worked most of the time.  Well, fine.

But to be honest, I still don’t see how this has worked most of the time.  After all, it’s hard.  And biology aside, at least in modern American history there’s a trend of silence when it comes to the difficult side of mothering.  We may not whisper in hushed tones and use euphemisms to discuss miscarriages anymore (oh wait, yes, some of us still do), but we also don’t necessarily talk openly about the good, the bad, and the ugly of raising a kid.  We don’t necessarily share our negative individual experiences of parenthood like how terrifying I found the simple task of going to the grocery store alone with a baby so we lived off of leftover Christmas cookies and canned goods for a while or how I definitely held the kid wrong and he might have gotten whiplash because his head flopped backwards when I sat down.  In fact, before this moment the only people who knew those two things about me were my wife and my therapist - and it was tempting not to tell them lest they think less of me as a mom because of them.  

And I think that’s at the heart of why we don’t talk about these things - or more serious issues like just how hard breastfeeding can be or just how much devastation postpartum depression can bring about.  I think when it comes to babies we either have shame or fear being shamed when it comes to what goes wrong - or what goes not-quite-right or not-quite-as-expected.  Which makes sense, since the issue of ‘mom shaming’ (when someone - especially another mom - shames a mother for her choices or actions in raising her children.  For example, saying to someone who’s bottle-feeding their baby, “You’re going to make your baby less intelligent because you aren’t breastfeeding!”) is big enough that the magazine ‘Parents’ wrote an entire article on it.  

On the last day of childbirth classes, the nurse practitioner who was leading our group took the final fifteen minutes to talk about postpartum depression (PPD).  We were sitting in a circle - just four couples and our leader - as she shared what signs to look for.  My wife and I were holding hands because this was a topic that inspired very real fear for us.  I’ve lived with depression since I was an adolescent, so the postpartum variety seemed like a life-threatening plausibility in our future especially since I had already had a significant bout with its prenatal sibling.  After giving her spiel, the nurse asked how the pregnant women in the room were feeling about PPD.  One woman raised her hand and said, “I’m not worried about it.  I’m used to having a lot of things on my plate, so I don’t think I’m going to feel overwhelmed.  And I can just relax if I’m starting to feel stressed out.  There are a lot of ways to fix that - like going for a walk or listening to music.  I’ll be able to handle it.”

I bristled.  It felt like she was telling me that I should have been able to put in my earbuds and power walk my way out of my depression.  I felt like she was judging me, even though I knew that she had no clue that I lived with the illness.  Lauren, my wife, leaned over and whispered, “Do you want to say something to set her straight, or should I?”  

At first, I shook my head.  No, don’t do that.  No, don’t say anything.  No, don’t you dare raise your hand.  Why?  Because I was ashamed of the fact that I’d already fallen victim to this thing that she thought was nothing.  

And that’s the problem.  I felt shame for this condition that tons of other expectant mothers have because of something another soon-to-be mom said.  It almost kept me silent - which would have made me feel even more like I was alone, like I was a failure, like I was defective.  And it would have robbed me of discovering that others in the room had had similar experiences.  And it would have denied all of us the opportunity to share stories of how we coped and what we were going to do after our babies were born.

Fortunately for me, I’m bad at keeping secrets - at least, secrets like that, secrets about me.  So I told my story.  What I found out was that I wasn’t alone and that other women were grateful to have the silence broken.  It felt a little like freedom.