Faces of Postpartum Is Four Years Old

Writing Depression

On April 7, 2017, at 8:57:17 am, I purchased the domain facesofpostpartum.com on Hover.

Six days later, I voluntarily admitted myself to the Perinatal Psychiatry Inpatient Unit at the University of North Carolina.

I've always told the story that Faces of Postpartum was born one night on the unit, as I laid on the uncomfortable hospital pressure mattress, unable to sleep and experiencing high anxiety and suicidal ideations. This genesis had always been so clear, so obvious that, for some reason, I've never felt the need to fact-check the exact date of Faces of Postpartum's origins. 

The chronology didn't matter as much as the assurance that this project was the beginning of my healing process, a sure sign that I was on the right path. Turns out, its conception wasn't merely a symbol of my health improving, but one last attempt to hold on to life. 

I did not create Faces of Postpartum because I had finally gotten help: I created it because I thought all was lost, and it was the only thing left to do in order to survive.

Creation has always been my salvation. I vividly remember being a kid in elementary school and sneaking my sparkly diary into my bed at night to write—the glitter would spread everywhere under my pillow. On one particular evening, my stepfather heard me walk over my dresser to grab it and opened the door swiftly, commanding me to go to bed.

"But I want to wriiiiiite!" I whined, crawling in bed backward, clutching my diary under my butt.

(Being a kid sucks.)

I thought that because I was writing about "girl stuff"— aka my crush on Nick Carter, school drama, my deep longing to be kissed—my teenage effusions weren't real writing, writing of value. I should have been creating plays about freeing animals, instead of poems about how I resented my friend Patricia's big breasts. 

April 12, 2017 — Love, in spite of.

But once again, like today, "the only thing left to do" was to write. To a certain extent, the act of creating wasn't as much an act of thriving as a desperate attempt at containing the emotions that were overflowing from my pubescent mind and, later on, my postpartum one.

Say what you will, but I believe that every "spark," every "birth of an idea," comes from an act of desperation.

Desperation (noun)
1: loss of hope and surrender to despair
2: a state of hopelessness leading to rashness

If sustained creativity demands discipline, patience, and a high tolerance of boredom, then the initial inspiration for a creative act is utterly hopeless and rash. 

In the case of FPP, the hopelessness came across as suicidal ideations while laying down on the carpet between our master bedroom and my kid's bathroom. Physically speaking, the acuity of my depression and anxiety was such that it would cause my stomach to burst into flame and paralyze me from existing on a day-to-day basis. I spent hours in bed with a heat bag on my abdomen, wondering how I was supposed to nurse, do laundry, prepare dinner, take a shower, and work, all in one afternoon. Living became an exercise of survival, and since slowing down was not an option, burning myself into the ground—quite literally—had the advantage of not allowing me the time or energy to think. Suffering was part of the motherhood package deal. So suffer I would—and I would perfectly.

April 20, 2017 — Mike sneaked the camera in the hospital room for my discharge. This is, and by far, my favorite portrait of Lou and I.

I became so committed to "dealing with it" gracefully (whatever the fuck that meant) that I developed a routine so rigid it wouldn't allow for any kind of flexibility: the lullabies I sang to Lou before bed had to be in French and in one order only. I began to wake up at 5 am like I used to "before," to try to work on a novel I never finished, even though I would only have 2 hours of uninterrupted sleep the night before. Naps were never a real option, so anxious was I that she would die from SIDS. I monitored her breathing like we monitor broiling cheese on HI in the oven. When she began losing weight because my milk supply had dried up due to stress, I would read everything and anything on the internet, then pump frantically to increase my production, breaking skin and seeing the blood on my nipples as "warrior wounds"—they were self-inflicted injuries.

So when a careless pediatrician told me, at her four-month-old appointment, that my "milk was not enough," and that I needed to supplement, my bell jar of rigidity shattered into a million pieces. I happily walked over the broken glass and inflicted myself with some more scars, biting the skin of my knees and visualizing myself hanging from the ceiling above Lou's crib.

I had the presence of mind to google something useful for once and found a psychology practice nearby that took new patients. In a matter of a week, I had met with two caring therapists, including Elizabeth Wilkins-McKee, a licensed clinical social worker who later became a dear friend. I met with her on a Friday afternoon. The following Thursday, a nurse at UNC was checking my clothes to make sure I hadn't hidden sharp objects in their hems. When my husband and Lou disappeared behind the heavy steel door of the psychiatry unit, I felt like I could breathe again.

July 15, 2017 — Becoming better. Not perfect.

To create commands to change shape. To morph into something else. To kill what was there before (or who you were before) in order to embrace what is on the verge of being born. In some ways, desperation is an act of trust. Trust in the future and your ability to carry on; the frenzied belief that what lies ahead is worth fighting for.

FPP is four years old. The age of my oldest daughter, Lou. Forever she will be attached to this project, as the cataclysm that made me a mother and an advocate, a business(es) owner, a writer and a photographer: a creator. Not that I was not one beforehand, but I came out as such because of her. This is the gift she bore with her. 

FPP is four years old. The project has been built between nursing sessions, sleepless nights, heaps of abandoned ideas and scrambled pennies. It has helped me welcome another child, more brain fog and battles against the patriarchy and social media. 

FPP is four years old, hopeful, wagging like a puppy, chewing on everything and anything, peeing a little from excitement, and passing out at the end of each day, wondering where the hell the time fled.

FPP is nothing without its readers, supporters, donors, patrons and, above all, participants. It's nothing without the first bunch of friends, family members and amazing humans who entrusted me with their stories—Sindy, Alex, Jennifer, Mélanie, Marie—and said, "Sure! Why not?" when I told them about this crazy idea of mine. 

An idea born out of sheer despair; a tiny but mighty spark, in the darkest of nights.