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12 months of my son ’ s life and there were times when I thought my husband was either going to leave or have me committed . I remember clearly feeling pretty low one day , and no matter how hard I tried , I could not muster any enthusiasm for anything . In frustration my husband pointed out that I was pulling everyone around me into the tunnel , that same darkness . It was a wake up call .
I wanted someone to see what was happening to me and to show me how to get back to the light . I didn ' t fit the textbook definition of postnatal depression so I never went to anyone and said , " hey , I think I ' ve got PND , can you help me ?" I never talked about what was going on , I just couldn ' t verbalise it . Things really turned around one day when my doctor ( who was frankly sick of seeing me ) asked if I was happy . I burst into tears and admitted that actually , no , I wasn ' t . From then on I had to make a conscious effort and seek professional help to pull myself out of the tunnel and back into the land of the living , one step at a time . But it wasn ' t until I fell pregnant again that I started to feel like I had really walked away from it . The anxiety was brought on by a combination , and a culmination , of factors around the time my son was born , and I was so scared towards the end of my second pregnancy that I was going to go to that dark place again , that I was determined to " get it right " the second time .
For the first few days after our second son was born I was riding high on oxytocin and adrenaline and I felt like I had finally put the tunnel behind me . Then came the crash . Being on standby as a milkbar 24 hours a day had taken its toll and I ached all over . I wasn ' t able to spend as much time with my two-year-old as I would have liked and he punished me for it . I hopped into bed with him one night to read stories and he screamed for Daddy and hit me in the face . I pushed on and read to him through my tears but it left me feeling like it was all just too damn hard . I had a similar thought the same night at 3am when my newborn was simultaneously vomiting and pooping on my chest ... I felt that same familiar stone in the pit of my stomach , pulling me downwards , that urge to run and hide . But I talked about it . I told my husband what I was feeling . I organised a
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