Being Kendra_ Cribs, Cocktails, and Getting My Sexy Back - Kendra Wilkinson [32]
My exhaustion and depression gave me a complete understanding of what it meant and what it took to be a mother. It’s nothing you can ever understand until you’ve been through it. Though I was never actually suicidal, I certainly thought about suicide. I knew full well I’d never actually do it; it was more on the level of pulling my hair out of my head, the Britney Spears–type stuff where you are just having a complete DEFCON 1 meltdown.
When I was younger I would cut myself, pull my hair out, self-mutilate, and do a lot of hard drugs to either numb the pain or feel the pain. There was a time when I was suffering from postpartum when I felt that low, and all I could think was, “Oh God, am I right back to that?” It was like I came to a fork in the road again and had to choose (though I know all too well you don’t choose it, it chooses you) whether I needed alcohol and drugs and a knife to cut me to make me feel better. But I didn’t need those things anymore, thankfully. There’s no place in my life for that kind of harm and selfishness; I have a family now.
That’s why I cry so much now. I don’t have the substitute for my downs. I don’t drink, I don’t smoke, and I don’t do drugs or harm anyone or myself. I’m sober to the point where I barely eat fried foods or sugar! Clean as can be. I don’t have anything to use to cope with my pain and depression anymore, just good old screaming and crying. Three weeks after having the baby, I felt just as low as I did the days when I was doing drugs and was suicidal. The only thing I could do was cry and scream, “Fuck you!!!”
Completely alone and unprepared, I had no one to talk to about it all. When you are down, it’s even harder to reach out and ask for help. Plus, people are afraid to ask the question “Are you okay?” Because it implies you’re not. Postpartum depression and anxiety is something that mothers have had to deal with for a long time but someone like me only talks about it after the fact. When it was happening I just kept it all bottled up inside. But it’s no more prevalent now than in the past, we just talk about it and discuss it more now. The only reason we are paying more attention to it now is because of the media and books.
What angers me the most as I look back is that during the post-birth checkups, none of the doctors asked me how I was feeling emotionally. They’d check my vitals, they’d check my reproductive system, they’d check my blood and my weight, but they never checked my brain. That should be part of the release process in the hospital. New mothers are taught to pump breast milk, so why can’t someone come in and pat us on our back and ask if we need someone to talk to? I wouldn’t even have cared if it was a doctor or a social worker, or even if someone just sent in another mom to say, “Hey, how are you handling all of this?” That would have made a world of difference. Instead the only thing I left the hospital with was about a dozen stolen diapers, a package of burp cloths, and as many “free” boxes of wipes as I could fit into my suitcase.
On a scale of 1 to 10, 10 being the most severe, I would say my postpartum “depression” was an 8. That’s pretty bad if you consider that my drug days would be about a 10. I will never forget the pain that I was in back when I was younger and doing drugs. I wanted to end it all. My drug days and then the days of the postpartum are two times in my life where I could honestly say that people around me really had no clue what I was going through. Only a small percentage of people