Better parenting through Zoloft

I wasn't going to be that mom.

The sad mom. The angry mom. The anxious, crying, frustrated mom.

Sure, those first four weeks were rough. So rough that it's hard for me to remember them now: the tenuously good days that fell into increasing dread as night approached. Sitting on the couch sobbing at 2 a.m. during yet another unsuccessful breastfeeding session. Eating nothing but meat, water, and a covert loaf of zucchini bread because the pediatrician told me to give up basically everything else. The night I handed the baby off and walked the neighborhood at midnight because I didn't think it was safe for me to stay in the house another minute.

But then things started to get better. After that awful week at Children's she started sleeping through the night. Our days fell into a rhythm. The physical therapy was a minor setback but I managed to keep it in perspective. She even started napping.

Maybe if she'd been born at another time of year, things would have been different. By the time we started to emerge from the cocoon, it was already winter. I went back to work in December, just in time for the stress of the holidays. In January we started trying undo all of the bad sleep habits we'd unwittingly taught her--first rocking, then swaddling, then the pacifier. She started daycare and immediately caught a cold. In February my mom had surgery and what had been advertised as a couple of weeks of hospitalization and rehab turned into several months. M. Defarge's boss continued to dangle a promised promotion over his head in exchange for extra, unpaid responsibilities.

For some reason it was the sleeping thing that broke me, though. I don't know if it became a symbol, or just something to fixate on. In the midst of all the other stuff, the most important thing in the world became three good naps and a full night's sleep. And as the books and the doctors reminded me, sleep begets sleep--so good naps are a key to sleeping through the night, and a good night's sleep yields good naps--a vicious sleep circle that my days revolved around. Making it to 5 a.m. was a triumph, and a half hour nap was a personal failure. An unsuccessful nap attempt could ruin the best of days.

Who knew that sleep had to be taught, or that imparting this lesson was so fraught with potential missteps? That correcting one bad habit could unwittingly lead to another one? To get her to sleep unswaddled we had to put her down with the pacifier. To get her to go back to sleep without the pacifier we started picking her up. To get her to go back to bed we started feeding her. Now when she wakes up at 1 or 2 or 4 a.m., she lunges toward the table where we set her bottles.

Throughout January and February and March and April I kept telling myself, once we figure out this sleeping thing, everything else will fall into place. Once I figure out the magic key to soothing her back to sleep, I will teach it to M. Defarge and allow him to get up at night with her. Once I accomplish the elusive put-to-bed-awake trick, I can leave the house in the evening and let someone else put her to be occasionally. Once I unlock the secret to timing her naps, and get her on a schedule, and ...

In late April I saw a blurb on the public library website for a memoir called It Sucked and Then I Cried, a popular blogger's account of her postpartum depression and eventual hospitalization. I read it and felt the camaraderie of a fellow war veteran and wrote a review on Goodreads about how I wished I'd read it during those first four weeks, back when I too was depressed. And then I got up at 2 a.m. and fed my baby and lay awake for the rest of the night berating myself for failing as a parent. I put her down for a nap and sat on the couch sobbing while she screamed.

The weekend before Easter I met my parents out for lunch to pick up the Easter dress I was too disorganized to purchase and my walker-bound mom was able to get. The weather was awful and the baby had a cold. By the time I got to the restaurant I was in tears apologizing to her for taking her out on such a horrible day. I could barely speak to my parents. I could hardly sit still.

The next week I was supposed to have a routine appointment with my ob/gyn. My mom talked me into rescheduling it. He and his wife had a baby the week before I did. He came into the room all smiles, expecting to swap stories, I guess. But he's great. I told him what was going on, and he said, ok, let's fix this. I left with a prescription for Zoloft and the number of a therapist.

That was about three weeks ago. I wish I could say the Zoloft was a miracle cure, but I suppose it never works like that. I think it's starting to kick in; we had a bad nap day a couple of weeks ago and I went for a walk instead of dissolving into a puddle on the floor. On the other hand, a couple of nights ago I randomly decided I would make her go back to sleep without feeding her, and the 32-year-old vs. 8-month-old battle of wills ended with me sleep-deprived and defeated and her with a bottle in her mouth while I revisited all my failings as a parent.

When I was reading the aforementioned memoir I kept dog-earing pages because I knew exactly what she was talking about. I even made photocopies of some of the pages before I returned the book to the library. This was one of them:

And I know that what I'm about to say is completely obvious, and it will be the least profound thing I have ever written. But to those who have suffered the unmerciful pangs of an angry biological clock, who have felt weak in the knees at the sight of a newborn baby, who daydream like I did about what your own kids will look like, what the biological clock isn't telling you is that the job of motherhood is nothing like what you think it will be.

In my Goodreads review I wrote about wishing I'd known about this book when I was going through that first horrible patch, just so that I wouldn't have felt so alone. I don't know if it's an evolutionary memory defect designed to ensure the perpetuation of the species, or if it's just people trying to be nice and not scare new mothers, but this really is the stuff that no one talks about. When I was on maternity leave a coworker who has two grown children sent me some paperwork with a note attached that said "Enjoy every minute!" Now that I'm (slightly more) rational, something tells me she didn't enjoy every minute of her children's newborn lives, but at the time all I could think about was what I was doing wrong, because I wasn't.

In the end, I think it amounts to this: I didn't expect to love her so much.

Not that I didn't expect to love her. But I remember reading that book on equally shared parenting and not wanting to breastfeed so that M. Defarge would have to take on more responsibility and not pass the buck to me. And then I found myself not wanting to let him put her to bed or get up in the middle of the night when she cried. I have to bite my lips and clench my fists while my mother-in-law is holding her. I still have a hard time imagining doing things like going out to dinner or a movie, even though I know it's not only possible but would be good for me.

In the past 8 months I've become a person I don't always recognize when I look in the mirror. I think that part is irreversible, and I don't know that I'd change it if I could. We'll see if the Zoloft and the rest help make me someone I can live with.