Two mothers share their harrowing postpartum stories — and how they got help

THE GIRL WITH THE GRAY HAT

Yehudis Shields

E

verything started out so normal, so blissfully normal, that I still can’t believe how drastically and quickly it all unraveled.

B’chasdei Hashem, I gave birth to my beautiful, healthy eight-pound bechor nearly five years ago. After the delivery, I was overwhelmed with hakaras hatov. I remember thinking that my life was perfect. All the pieces of the puzzle had come together, and now my husband Gavi and I had become a real family unit with the birth of our son; a perfectly exhausted set of parents with a new life to take care of.

After the high of my birth experience, I was moved to the recovery section of the hospital for two days. The care there was abysmal. I barely slept during my hospital stay — doctors and nurses were constantly in and out of my room, interrupting any semblance of routine.

Instead of checking on me and my welfare, the staff focused all their attention on my son. I was suffering from severe leg edema, swelling that’s caused by too much fluid trapped in the tissues, but the nurse wouldn’t even give me a pillow to elevate them. There was blood on the bed railing and when I mentioned it to the nurse, she disregarded it and said she already cleaned it.

I didn’t feel cared for; I felt like a number.

Even worse, the hospital didn’t have a nursery. I was barely functioning, yet I was tasked with tending to the needs of a tiny newborn without a break and without proper assistance.

What I remember most was the utter exhaustion. My whole body ached with fatigue. The sleep deprivation bled into my mental health, too: I was flooded with anxiety and doubt about my ability to care for my newborn.

Gavi wasn’t coping either. He has always struggled with anxiety, and he didn’t anticipate how much his condition would be triggered by the stress of becoming a first-time father. I’ve never been an exceedingly anxious person, but it was as if my husband’s anxiety set off a chain reaction — instead of supporting each other, we were  exacerbating each other’s symptoms.

Finally, my son and I were discharged from the hospital. Gavi decided he wanted to spend our first Shabbos together alone as a family. “You don’t need anyone else,” my husband told me. “I can be your rock.” We accepted everyone’s offers to bring us Shabbos food, but we turned down their offers to visit. We thought we’d be okay.

We were not.

That first Shabbos was a literal nightmare. I was in such an anxious state that I couldn’t think clearly. My sole focus was trying to follow the pediatrician’s orders: feed the baby every few hours and even wake him up to feed. Even when my son did sleep, I couldn’t. I had an almost obsessive need to make sure he was being fed properly. My son cried at all hours of the day and night, and between the clustered feeding schedules and the mountain of soiled diapers, I was falling apart.

That Motzaei Shabbos, we called in reinforcements because it was clear we couldn’t handle this on our own. My mom came over to help immediately. But by then, it was too late. I had already started showing signs of psychosis.