Have You Heard Of Post-Partum Anxiety

I saw a doctor a few months back.

I have a hard time looking people in the eyes, I talk too fast, I think I give myself away. I pretend its okay, but I’m drowning. Has that ever happened to you?

I saw my doctor for Post-Partum Anxiety.

I mourn things in my mind, before they ever even go. It’s crazy, I know, so I try to talk myself out of it and remind myself that we are still alive.

But, most days, I’m scared. To even go to the local supermarket. Everything has a new meaning now- is the person in front of me distracted or drunk? Will today be the last time I see her? Last time I strap her into her car seat?

But the thing is, you never know the last time is the last time, until it’s over.

So, I memorize like a mad woman. The way everything looks giant in her hands or the way her pigtails and teeth are lopsided. Just in case.

It seems unbearable this intense love I have for her, and what would happen if I lost her? Or him? I hear a story of a mother loosing her child, and I get sick. For days. And then I’m all screwed up in my head again.

It’s like a sick joke; going through life so naive, but not knowing it until you know it. You know? Its violating. Not realizing the fragility or pricelessness of a beating heart, until its outside of you.

Like that time I walked through a spider’s web and just kept skipping along. It wasn’t until I was back in the house that I realized I had been carrying the biggest spider I’d ever seen, right there on my shoulder. Something about that’s always stuck How you can think its one way, but really you haven’t got a clue. Like giving birth- nothing could’ve prepared me to know what I was going to know when I watched her take her very first breath.

Once you’ve carried life, you somehow understand its counterpart -death- so very intimately.

Post-Partum Anxiety.

I don’t, I won’t, I can’t think it’s too ugly.