Mother Shares Powerful Truth About Postpartum Depression & Knowing the Signs: 'She Told You'
It can be demoralizing to scroll through Facebook or browse Instagram posts and see picture after perfect picture of other people’s enchanted lives. There’s definitely a push in social media to present what is idyllic rather than what is real.
There’s nothing wrong with striving for perfection — the problems creep in when that drive consumes you and when you feel crushed for falling short. Life is messy. Not every moment is supposed to be slapped with a filter and framed.
Many people have responded to this phenomenon by fighting back with raw posts about their own very real struggles. Some of those issues have become mainstream topics, but some of them are still rather hushed.
Postpartum Depression is kept pretty quiet. There’s this mentality that motherhood is perfect, that mothers will love their newborns no matter what, and that being a mom is the highest form of fulfillment, and yet PPD spits in the face of all of that.
It robs a mother of her joy. Trying to keep up appearances for appearances’ sake only makes matter worse — but many women would rather do that than admit they’re struggling.
Fortunately, young mothers have started stepping forward to share their pain and make others aware of this heartbreaking disorder. Madison Watkins wrote to Love What Matters to share her own words of advice and explanation.
“I get it,” she starts. “I finally get it. You see moms committing suicide. And I couldn’t understand it. How do you leave your kids behind like that?”
“Postpartum depression is what they call it. And then everybody posts, ‘Oh, I never knew. She didn’t say anything. She seemed okay.'”
“She told you. And it seemed small to you, you didn’t get it. Behind on life, can’t get anything done. She’s told you, ‘I can’t today. I have too much to do.'”
Watkins urges people to look beyond the face value of these words and see the hurting woman behind them. She warns readers not to brush off these excuses, but to offer practical help.
“If you want to check on somebody, stop by and visit, let her take a shower, help her some way so she feels like she’s not so behind,” she writes. “There are your signs. Stop saying you didn’t know. Because she told you.”
Another young mother, Krysti Marie Motter, has echoed those words and added her own sentiments after dealing with PPD herself.
“You don’t feel like the world would be better off without you, you feel like you’d be better off without this world,” she explained in a Facebook post on Nov. 1.
“Everything is expected of her and she’s drowning. She lost herself taking care of others.”
Many people have leveled the finger at Motter, accusing her of plagiarizing, and she explained that she did take some of the content from another post but never claimed to have written it herself.
“But whether you agree with it or not, 101k people have shared this,” she continued. “That means 101k people are finally TALKING about it. And that’s huge! As moms, we need all the support we can get.”
The important takeaway from both of these mothers is that we need to reach out to those around us. We need to take the time to get to know them, really know them, so that when they’re suffering, we know they’re hurting — but also so that we know just how to help them.
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