Sliding

#255: Into Madness

All this talk of baby blues and post-natal depression. Often, in the middle of the night, when I am barely awake but trying make the most out of my time with my baby, I wonder what it will take to push me into madness. Sleep deprivation is, after all, used as a form of torture.

At the hospital, pressures to breastfeed when I cannot produce a milliliter of milk even after hours of pumping, threw me into a real-life version of a scene in Girl Interrupted. (Thanks to the hospital garb and plain white walls too.) I was ready to go mad.

At home, Week 2, my parents arrived from Manila to help out... only for me to have a fight with my mother early into Week 3. My mother has the capacity to turn her heart into stone - to protect herself, or possibly to punish the ones who've hurt her. It serves her well, this approach. But it is a massive cross to me. We barely talk now and she has not communicated that she has forgiven me. I offer my child part of the day so she can play with her without me in the room so she would not think that her couple of thousand of dollars to fly here were wasted. It's good for her to have a relationship with her grandchild even as she cuts her relationship with her daughter.

In the early evenings, I give the child to her father so he can enjoy her after coming home from work. I am left with the dawn. Trying to make out my child's angelic face in the shadows of the dark while I play swords with weariness. Sometimes I fear that she'll make a sound to wake up her dad or her grandparents. I quickly rush her out of hearing distance lest someone gets roused to take her from me or lest someone gets their sweet slumber disturbed.

My baby's first month is slipping away and I am locked in my room now wondering if I should fight to recover part of it or take the path of a pacifist as I descend into a dark hole I've never been to before. I find BeyondBlue's red booklet in my hands - a foreign object making its presence known, encouraging my hands to find comfort in holding it.

My name refuses to acknowledge depression. The rest of me is threatening to embrace it.