Long ago and far away, I was married to a family physician. I had two sparkly-eyed, adorable daughters, aged almost 2 and 5. I still breastfed the younger and was privileged to stay home. Both girls were born at home, in rural Oregon with a nurse-midwife. Our house was perched atop a hill overlooking a valley ablaze with flowering cherry, pear, and apple trees in spring, with lush and weighty fruit ripening in summer. The neighbors spanned the next hill, wine grapes covering their verdant turf. This was the early ‘90s, and that house was my beautiful prison.
I felt anxious, obsessively so, and miserable— depressed. I woke each day after my husband left for clinic, my daughters clambering up to my bed in frilly cotton nightgowns, ready for their day and full of energy. I wondered how I could make it through each endless dreary hour until bedtime came that night.
As a nurse-midwife, I knew most of what there was to know about women’s reproductive health—or so I thought. But no one had taught mental health. At Yale, where I graduated with a master’s in nursing, one of my most brilliant faculty had faced mental health issues following a first birth. Her illness (or its treatment) proved so severe her face became lax and erased of expression, and she appeared zombie-like and eerie, compared to her prior vivacious spirit. Then, she disappeared from teaching with scarce a trace. Swssh swssh, it was whispered, no one knowing the true story. Postpartum mood and anxiety had all but no evidence base or treatment back then. Ergo, in modern medicine, it didn’t exist. There was little room for women’s experience if it hadn’t been “proven” by the (mostly white, male) canon of medicine.
Anxiety, insomnia, and depression wracked me in the last trimester with Rivkah, my second (I’d later learn late........