Summertime Sadness

I feel like I just sat down to try and write a 30 page term paper on a topic that I know nothing about. Where do I start?? What should I say? The really tricky thing is that I can’t do any research… since I am writing about myself. You’d think it’d be easy.

So I’m just gonna start rambling, with no particular structure or storyline and hopefully you can make some sense of it all. I wish you the best of luck. ;)

For the past few months, I’ve felt… off. Not myself. Out of sorts. So much so, that I began questioning who I was to begin with. I knew I wasn’t feeling like “me”, but what does that even mean? Who was the “me” I was trying to feel like? Since I didn’t feel “normal”, what exactly does “normal” Autumn look like? It is strange to feel so detached from yourself… to know that something has changed, but what?

It was like having a bad day that lasted for months. The kind of bad day that only goes away after a good night’s sleep… where you wake up the next morning and have no idea why you were so grumpy because it’s just gone.

Except it wouldn’t go away.

And at the time, I didn’t even really want it to. I just wanted to stay home and be sad. I didn’t want to be around anyone because I didn’t want to pretend to be happy and fine, and I most certainly didn’t want to talk about how I was really feeling. Not because I was trying to hide it… I just didn’t understand it myself. I barely even talked to Ben about it, because I really didn’t know what to say. Obviously he knew something was wrong too, but neither of us knew why because nothing had really changed in our lives.

I just felt sad.

And I just wanted to be alone.

I went through the daily routines of being a mom & wife… breakfast, lunch, dinner… dishes, laundry, cleaning… That was all I could really focus on. And I could barely focus on that… I didn’t feel like cooking or cleaning most of the time so I got by on the bare minimums. The boys didn’t really seem to notice, and I didn’t feel any differently toward them. I was just less enthusiastic, less playful… They weren’t annoying me or making it any worse, but I looked forward to nap time and bed time so I could be alone again.

I watched a lot (A LOT) of Friends.

I love them.

 

Every episode, in fact.

I’d watch at least 2-3 a day, during nap time mostly. Or after the boys were in bed, if Ben was working late or at the gym or something. Ben even watched with me on (rare) occasion. (He pretends not to like it, but he always ends up laughing. Watching him laugh at Friends almost brings me more joy than watching Friends myself. Almost.) I was pretty much always thinking about when I could watch the next episode.

 

It was kind of sad really. But it got me out of my gloom and I felt happy during those 22 minutes. I felt a little bit like “me” again. At least until real life beckoned and I had to turn off the laptop and get out of bed.

So one day I was really, really down. And something in my brain finally said, “hey Autumn… you are depressed.” Like, actually depressed. (It was probably obvious to you, reading this story, but it was new information to me at the time.) I was constantly in a bad mood, had zero motivation, dealing with anxiety issues, didn’t want to be around people… Ben had suggested more exercise might help but quite frankly I just didn’t even feel like trying. Something was seriously wrong.

So I suddenly got super introspective, trying to pinpoint when I started feeling this way and what changed around that time, and it kind of hit me.

Like, smack-me-in-the-head-why-didn’t-I-think-of-this-sooner hit me.

I immediately got on my handy dandy iPhone and started googling. (side note: I am typing this in a Word document right now to upload to blogger later… and there are squiggly red lines under “iPhone” and “googling.” No, I don’t mean “siphoned” or “goggling”… C’mon Microsoft Word, get with the program!!)

Is this suspense just killing you?? Did you cheat and skip ahead? Don’t do that, I’m trying to tell a story here people. Patience.

After a few google searches and bouncing from website to website, I finally felt like I understood, and felt a huge sense of relief. I immediately sent a text message to Ben that said:

“I think I may be going through a form of postpartum depression related to weaning.”

I had never heard of such a thing. But the more I read, the more it made sense. I didn’t experience any sort of depression after either of my boys were born, quite the opposite really. I love being a mommy, and really actually do love the baby stage. Yes, I get exhausted from the sleepless nights and get tired of smelling like spit up… but I love the first year of that little person being totally dependent on me. So postpartum depression had never even entered my mind before.

3 weeks old. Me in my robe, him clinging to me like a baby koala. Perfection.



But here I was, with a 1 year old, totally depressed. And as I looked back, trying to figure out when my mood changed, it was very close to when I started weaning. Stellan was exclusively breastfed until he started eating solids… we supplemented with formula only a few times when I didn’t have enough milk stored up and he spent a night away from me. And even when he was eating solids, he really didn’t slow down with the nursing that much… the kid likes his calories.

Spaghetti at 10 months.

 

Cake. Enough said.

 

So when his 1^st birthday came and went, I decided it was time to start cutting back. I started off slow, cutting out the middle-of-the-day feedings and giving him whole milk instead. Which he loved. From a sippy cup. Since I am blessed to get to stay home full-time with my boys, he really didn’t spend that much time away from me his first year… which meant he didn’t drink out of a bottle very often. He went straight to a sippy cup with no problems.

It was so easy.

He didn’t even seem to care.

So we quickly went down to just 1-2 feedings a day… bed time and if he woke up in the middle of the night (which he did regularly). I thought to myself, “I bet the middle of the night feeding is going to be the toughest to wean him from…” Then one night he just didn’t wake up. He slept for 11 hours. And then he did it the next night. And the next night. And…

You get the idea.

So then he was down to bed time only. Once a day. It took 2 weeks to do what I was planning on slowly doing over a couple months. I was excited, but also shocked… it hadn’t been this easy with Read. Ben even put him to bed a few times and he didn’t even fuss about not nursing.

It was TOO easy.

Then the boys went to stay with my parents for a couple nights. I knew Stellan would be fine, and he was. And when they came home, we just didn’t start nursing again. He really didn’t even care.

It was over. Just like that.

It took a little more than a month. And I probably could’ve done it even faster, but I had intended on taking it slow and stretching it out over a few months. It was definitely harder on me than it was on Stellan, from an emotional standpoint (physically I had no problems since I didn’t just stop cold turkey. Hooray for painless weaning!). I loved that one-on-one cuddle time. But it was also nice to have my body back.

Or so I thought.

Stay tuned for Part 2... (or else this would've been a REALLY long post...) ;)