Hello, dear sister in Christ.
I want to share a piece of my story with you, and I don’t want to share it so that you feel better or worse about your life. I desire for you to praise and glorify God for His goodness and provision no matter what you are walking through, and I have prayed that you will seek to understand the richness of joy and character that God is bringing to you through whatever you are experiencing. God used this specific time in my life to change the way that I look at what He wills, and I hope God does something similar for you at some point.
To make a very long story filled with an excruciating volume of what I feel are important details shorter, I had a terribly disappointing entrance into motherhood. I used to dream about seeing the pride on my husband’s face as he held his son for the first time. I believed that bearing children would be a significant sacrifice with my life and with my body, and I felt that I would surely feel accomplished and fulfilled in motherhood, or that the sacrifice would at least be worth the love that I would feel toward my child. I was ready to be flooded with emotion, the pleasant kind that makes you cry when you see little socks or something along those lines. I had a very hard reality check when I actually got pregnant.
My pregnancy
During pregnancy, I was very sick and in a lot of pain quite early. Morning sickness did not stop after the first trimester, and I spent most of my pregnancy alone because I had just graduated, and my husband had not yet. I ended up having an emergency C-section, without an epidural, four weeks early, due to preeclampsia and a possible virus. I didn’t get to see the first time my husband saw our baby; we thought that my son could possibly die after he was born from a viral threat that no one seemed to understand; my baby was on ten days of IV antivirals that ended up not being necessary (the C-section ended up not being necessary either); and I wasn’t able to kiss my baby freely for the first couple months of his life. I felt far from fulfilled. I felt traumatized, and I grieved that motherhood was so full of suffering. There are so many more nuances and details to share, but the only reason to go into the pages I could write about those details is to defend what happened to my mind after the birth…I lost it. I lost myself.
I lost my mind for what most might say were understandable reasons, but the truth is that women have been through much worse without their minds giving out. Not feeling free to kiss and touch my baby did odd things to me. I wanted to bathe in rubbing alcohol, I washed my hands until they bled, I picked at every blemish on my body until I was a scabbed-over mess, I developed OCD, I barely slept, and I had incredibly intrusive thoughts of my baby in horrific nightmarish situations constantly. The pictures and thoughts in my head would have been too sick to display in even the worst of horror movies. No movie would have made it to any public screen displaying the full brunt of what my mind battled not to visualize constantly.
My mind was in an unseen battle
I was prescribed an SSRI (antidepressant), which brought incredible relief from my overwhelming battle almost immediately. That kind of medication builds up in your system over a couple of weeks, but I felt some relief within a couple of days that just grew. Though I had relief from the intensity of my struggle, I settled into what I now know as postpartum anxiety and depression. For example, I still sanitized my phone every time I left the house, but that was an improvement from sanitizing it multiple times a day. I wasn’t living in a nightmare anymore, but I spent days in bed with my baby whom I could now kiss and enjoy 2-3 months later, and I just didn’t really leave bed often. I seemed to start struggling more whenever something other than just relaxing in bed was required. If I got sick, or we had to visit family, or when family had to visit us, I started losing control over my thoughts and actions a little bit again and struggling with the horror movie thoughts. I upped my dose and found a little more relief, but I still struggled when I was out of my normal routine.
At around 6 months postpartum, my husband graduated, and we moved across the country for his job. We were staying the night with my parents right before we moved, and I experienced my first urge to “unalive” myself. This was a completely strange and foreign experience to me because it did not feel how I imagined other people must have felt when they struggled with that. I did not feel overwhelmed by my life during those hours. I did not believe that my family would have been better off without me or that I was worthless or that I hated my life (those thoughts came later). I simply was flooded with the feeling that it would be such a “good” thing to die in the particular way I was fantasizing about at that moment. In my mind, dying in that violent way would have been an artistic and wholesome end that just seemed beautiful and right. The Holy Spirit would not allow me to dwell on the fantasy without screaming out the truth, “you are created in God’s image, you are loved, you are needed, your life is amazing, you are redeemed, you have a beautiful son, you have a beautiful husband, etc.” I told myself over and over, “just don’t walk to the front door, just don’t get out of bed, that’s easy, you can just not do that small thing.” It was exhausting, and it is terrifying to think about now.
I was told by the nurse practitioner who prescribed me the medication that I could come off of it whenever I got to a stable place, so a month after we moved to Texas, my husband and I decided that I should try to stop the medication. We thought that maybe the medication was the cause of the issues I was having because I just wasn’t myself. I (and my husband) thought that I shouldn’t have been struggling in the ways that I was, so we thought my issues must have had something to do with the medication. That was not the case, and I need to preface what I’m about to convey with some foundational facts.
Humbled
I lived my life as a single woman as excellently for the Lord as I could, and I believed that people who were depressed simply did not understand the Gospel and what God had done for them through Jesus’s death. I was convinced that people who struggled with mental health must have a flaw in their theology or doctrine, or that they just didn’t understand and weren’t resting in the sovereignty of God “enough.” I would have told you (and still would) that I didn’t/don’t believe in a “health and wealth” gospel, but I did/do believe that you “reap what you sow,” and I did my absolute best to sow excellence and wisdom in my life from a very young age. I did my best to honor and obey my parents, my husband was my first everything basically, and my first kiss was after my wedding vows. I expected the “sowing” that I did earlier in my life to result in the reaping of a somewhat normal birth experience at the very least. Don’t get me wrong, I was prepared to possibly lose my child, to not take any pride in the way I delivered my child, and to suffer during the delivery. I was prepared to experience my part of “the curse.” I just did not expect for God to allow me to be humbled to the degree that he did.
When I attempted to come off of my medication prematurely, I desperately wanted to destroy my life and be with other men for no reason. I want to clarify that this was not exactly lust. I did not want to be with any particular man or any men that I knew, and I was not aroused physically at that time because I was breastfeeding and on antidepressants. I did not desire something satisfying or pleasant, but I wished in my head very badly to throw my life away and experience something obscene and debased for no reason. At one point, I ran to a field nearby our house in the middle of the night, and I had the impulse to walk to continue to the interstate to try to find someone who would get me hooked on hard drugs, traffic me sexually, and eventually kill me. That seemed like a great idea, and a good way to end my life again. I laid down in the middle of that field, and the Holy Spirit just came and ministered to me again and simply said “walk home, just walk home” over and over, and I did.
In that month or two of attempting to wean off the medication prematurely, I hallucinated, I had intense hours-long to days-long battles with wanting to harm myself and others in bizarre ways, and I wished desperately for a different life, even though I was safe, protected, and loved. I felt like I had at least two people or versions of myself in my head constantly. I eventually visited more doctors and got some better direction medically, but the battle over my mind and spirit lasted another couple of years at a much more functional and safe level. I like to tell people that God humbled me like he humbled King Nebuchadnezzar (the king who lost his mind for 7 years and ate grass like an animal in the Bible). Though I never succumbed to the urges to commit suicide, or to harm myself, or to run away, I have an incredibly deeper level of understanding and graciousness towards those who have.
He changed my view and drew me closer
This painful postpartum experience changed the way I look at scripture and God’s will in wonderful ways. Before my pregnancy and postpartum season, it was easy to believe that I or others were holy because of something that they had done or because of how they acted. I looked to actions as proof of holiness too often. It was easy to imagine myself and others as immune to certain struggles or sin because of our track record, but I have learned, sweet sister, our holiness is not our own, and it’s not by our own might. Holiness can be stripped from us as easily as it is bestowed and freely given to us.
We have nothing of value to offer God that was not His already to take or to direct differently, not our first relationship, our first kiss, our purity, our piety, our first child, or our experiences in life. No matter what we “sow,” we cannot earn or deserve anything good from God, no matter how we have attempted to serve Him, and though we hope and pray for good… good does not mean easy and pleasant or even painless.
The goodness that God had in store for me via motherhood came through suffering. He intimately taught me what it means to be “poor in spirit,” He stripped me of my hope in myself or in my own mind, and He brought me to a deeper understanding of what He offers us. So I encourage you to look to the truth in scripture as food, medicine, and life that God wants to administer to your soul and not as a way to earn something pleasant in this life if you are somehow able to figure out how to make God happy enough with you. The work of earning God’s favor has been finished for us on the cross, and we need only to drink in the “Living Water.” God will work out the rest in us as He deems good, and it’s okay if that’s difficult and painful. Your roots will grow deeper, sweet sister. Jesus and Jesus alone is the blessing that we get to reap, no matter what else He enables us to sow.
P.S. (An Update)
Two and a half years after I started taking the SSRI, my doctors and I started adding other medications into the mix in an attempt to improve my struggles. That season is a whole other story for another time, but at this point (4.5 years later), I have weaned off of all medications and supplements, and God has restored and renewed my mind. Removing medication is not a one size fits all decision, and I would be happy to chat about my journey through that with anyone who would like to know more about that process. This is not the end of my journey and struggle with motherhood and the suffering that we experience through it, but I feel it’s a joyful resting place for the moment.
