Slate: The Other Pregnancy Depression

Why is it so hard to talk about? Dr. Rebecca Lesser Allen & I discuss on Slate.com

If you’ve ever had a mood disorder, you know that desire and logic have nothing to do with one another. They are strangers in the same room. So you can imagine my confusion when, upon receiving a positive pregnancy test last year—after eight months of actively trying to get pregnant—I was walloped with regret. I’ll spare you the experience; it’s not a good feeling.

I spent the next several months doing what I always do to make sense of nonsense. I wrote about it. Because WTF. And thankfully, when it came time to pitch, Slate agreed: Why aren’t we talking more about prenatal depression?

“I was officially middle-aged, a mother for three years now, and I didn’t consider that I could be this sad during my pregnancy. Especially a pregnancy I planned—and thought I wanted. I was drowning in the emotional quicksand of my own making.

Begrudgingly I’d deliver the news to friends, knowing they’d respond with squeals of joy and congratulations. I didn’t know how to explain that I did not feel like celebrating. I simply told them the truth, that I was sad, that it wasn’t like this last time, that I’m working on it, because people need resolutions. Then one day, a friend sent me a life raft.

“I got on Zoloft as soon as I hit the second trimester. First time in a decade,” she replied in a text.

You can do that? A small, invisible weight was lifted from my shoulders.

Another friend said something similar. She didn’t take one photo of herself pregnant, she told me. She cried often and struggled to be the mom she wanted to be for her 2-year-old. This friend also happens to be a clinical psychologist. I was relieved to hear her personal anecdotes, but I also wanted to know her professional point of view: Why aren’t more people talking about this? Are they? And I’m just left out of the conversation? I asked her to speak with me, not as my friend, but as Dr. Rebecca Lesser Allen.”

Originally, I wanted this piece to be slightly different. Bigger. I wanted to interview women who had dealt with prenatal depression and anxiety. I wanted to speak with a feminist scholar about the ways we have or have not evolved in feminist ideas about motherhood. I wanted to shout so loud, with a piece so robust, that this conversation could not be ignored. But I had to be real about my own time and bandwidth. As I was working on this, I was pregnant, working full time, writing this newsletter, and caring for a toddler. I did not have the time or energy to write and effectively edit a piece of that magnitude. But I did have the bandwidth to tell my own story.

I’m thankful for women like Rebecca Lesser Allen, women who shared their stories with me, and friends who supported me during a time when I felt like I was sinking, but didn’t wholly understand why. I hope you’ll read the essay here and join me in normalizing the complicated nuance of depressive disorders, especially as they relate to women, pregnant people, and new parents.