Being Kendra_ Cribs, Cocktails, and Getting My Sexy Back - Kendra Wilkinson [27]
When you are knee-deep in it, you just don’t get why everything is aggravating you. I blamed my anger on the fact that we had no place to call home, I blamed my anxiety on the fact that we were cooped up in tiny little living spaces, and I blamed my lack of sleep on the baby. Those were probably all true and certainly played a role in my meltdowns, but really it was all just my brain not being able to adjust to my new life: motherhood. If I was just a wife and all I had to do was travel the country with Hank, from hotel to hotel, city to city, I probably would have embraced it. How fun! But throw a baby into that mix and it was just a recipe for disaster.
I’m not sure if I can accurately say I had “postpartum depression.” I was never diagnosed officially, but I’m going to go ahead and self-diagnose myself: I had it. I think once you’ve had the dark days—and I had them bad—you realize that depression is only one minor part of everything going on in your brain. Yes, there is a lot of depression involved, but I also experienced bouts of anxiety, anger, insomnia, and hatred—really a little cocktail of every bad symptom I’d never want on its own, let alone all of them mixed together.
When baby Hank was born, we were living in Indianapolis in a nice gated community and it was beautiful. It all began during the first few weeks after the baby was born. While it was always snowing and freezing cold outside, for the first three weeks there was a sense of calmness and beauty. The skies were gray, the ground was snowy white, and there was silence everywhere. That’s where the beauty ended though, and the weather and being trapped in the house began to take its toll. I am not a cold-weather person; I wear sweatshirts during the summer. We were fighting winter in every way because the house wasn’t made with weatherproof windows or doors, so in addition to the constant whistling of the cold wind, we always had portable heaters going. We had about fifteen of them set up throughout the house and we even kept one going in the bathroom 24/7.
The house was made in the sixties (we were temporarily renting it for the show) and furnished and designed with really ugly stuff. It wasn’t the least bit comfortable, but then again I was kind of used to that type of lifestyle at this point in my life. We were sleeping on someone else’s bed and showering in someone else’s shower—a foreshadowing of things to come for the next several years of my life. With cameras, TVs, wires, lights, and a production crew set up in the basement, our house became a mini production studio, which meant we always had the camera in our faces.
It was beautiful outside with the snow, but you never wanted to go out because it was just too severe of a winter. Trapped inside the house, I developed bad eating habits and stopped caring about basics, like personal hygiene. It was hard for me to quit eating poorly because I couldn’t exercise, I couldn’t get outside much or go anywhere, and I didn’t have the time to cook anything healthy. I ate nothing but junk food. I was in survival mode. Dinner was sometimes carrying around a bag of popcorn while I did laundry or arranged the baby’s toys, clothes, and essentials.
With studio show lights in every corner and every hallway and on every ceiling, no matter where I was the spotlight was on me. Even when I closed my eyes on the couch just to get peace, there were lights. Comfort was hard to find under about two feet of snow and in the glare of the TV lights.
At this point I was showering about once a week, a far cry from the twice daily I used to do. You can always tell how depressed I am by the number of times I shower and brush my teeth. The better I feel, the cleaner I am. If I’m down, I’m going to be dirty. So during