It happens some time in the third week of parenting a newborn child: the moment when you start to feel like you’re below deck on a quickly sinking ship. With a double-digit number of interrupted nights under your belt, but without a sense of routine, your grasp on time becomes tenuous. Minutes in the middle of the night hold whole reams of barely connected thought streams. Your hormones shift in spurts and gushes, with waves of euphoria following hours of dazed, robotic movements. Visits from well-wishers have died down and a new reality sinks in: You are going to be this baby’s parent forever.
My tumultuous third week came with two particularly difficult addendums. First, it wasn’t just my hormones slip-sliding up and down, I also had to contend with my SSRI-reliant body—I’ve been taking Citalopram for more than five years— adjusting to each new surge and loss of dopamine. And second, quick breaks from peeking at my daughter’s sleeping face and washing breast pump equipment were filled with some extremely alarming news alerts. See, my daughter was born on January 22, 2017—the day after I marched with a half million other women in Washington, D.C., and two days after Trump was sworn in as the forty-fifth president of the United States.
Those weeks were a feverish nightmare of protest, upheaval, and panic. Psychiatric experts were espousing to the world that Trump suffers from “grave emotional instability.” Thousands were gathering to protest at airports as families worried that the hastily composed travel ban would tear them apart. The President was already flexing some autocratic tendencies by firing acting Attorney General Sally Yates and not firing Michael Flynn. Would America slip that easily into an oligarchy? What new other restrictions and nasty surprises did the new administration have in store? Every New York Times push notification brought more nail biting and agita.
I knew even before pregnancy —and Trump’s election—that after childbirth my panic disorder might rouse itself from relative dormancy. After years of sometimes daily or hourly panic attacks, they’d mostly abated, but my psychiatrist warned that even a potent SSRI dose isn’t always enough to combat the changes brought on by a hyperactive endocrine system—the wash of hormones that floods your bloodstream after childbirth can leave even the most emotionally balanced woman struggling. I thought I might be in the clear, because the first five days after my daughter’s birth passed by uneventfully—even her several-day-long stay in the NICU for breathing issues didn’t set off any undue panic—but on our sixth night, home from the hospital, as I snuggled the baby to my breast in the coldest hour of the day, panic started to tiptoe back into the edges of my brain. Panic of the acid-flashback, snarling-monster-under-the-bed, reality-seeping-off-into-the-distance variety.
There isn’t much to do while nursing in the middle of the night. I could watch TV, but I liked to sit in a particular armchair in my bedroom and the noise might wake my sleeping husband. I envy any woman who says she can read a novel at 4 am with a finicky newborn attached to her chest. And so, to the Internet I went. At first, scrolling through my Twitter feed and catching up on the day’s news felt refreshingly normal. See? I’d tell myself. Even with a baby, I’m still me.
But the weight of my news binges caught up to me—quickly. Every time I settled into my armchair and toggled through my New York Times and Facebook apps, a physical jolt of fear lurched through me. North Korea was celebrating successful long-range missile launches and the President was responding with bluster and insults. Trump was hosting weird and wild press conferences, sounding more authoritarian with each turn. The head of the military’s Special Operations Command was professing worry that “our government continues to be in unbelievable turmoil.” Mr. Trump’s Wild Ride came crashing into my bedroom three times a night. I’d clutch the baby against me, try to regulate my breathing, and imagine myself cozily back in bed in an alternate universe that didn’t involve a wannabe despot and a needy infant. It rarely worked.
My anxiety took on a particularly political flavor. What the hell, I would ask myself, were we thinking by having a baby while the world is ending? It feels silly to recall now, but I would replay various scenarios—in which the military took over my home city of Washington, D.C. or North Korea launched a missile at us—over and over in my head, imagining what things I would need to quickly grab for the baby, or wondering how we would fortify the house and keep her quiet so we wouldn’t be found. In a particularly desperate moment I (a virulent gun opponent) asked my husband if we should buy a gun; for thirty minutes I pressed the point so forcefully that he nearly conceded. Because I live only a mile and a half from the White House, these fears felt real, even urgent at the time. If an uprising were to erupt anywhere in the nation, it would be here. And I had gone and nailed myself to the wall by adding a baby to the mix.
I don’t think that these anxieties were only experienced by people with a preceding diagnosis, like me. But do I know that my anxiety took on a life of its own. It crept out of my late-night nursing sessions and into the daylight, usually accosting me in the precise moments when I should have been able to unwind—during corpse pose in yoga class, or just after the baby had drifted off for a nap. The only time I remember truly relaxing was, oddly enough, in the emergency room after I hemorrhaged a not insignificant amount of postpartum blood. Lying there, surrounded by medical professionals and under a heap of warmed blankets, I felt irrationally safe. More precisely, I felt like I had given up control to a group of people who I knew could care for me—I didn’t need to make any decisions, and nothing bad could possibly happen to me.
Panic disorder, like most anxiety-related issues, is an inherently selfish mental disease. The moment of an attack, the rest of life recedes into the background—and if it doesn’t happen automatically, you push it there. The most urgent need becomes survival. Of course, your life is never in any danger, but with your brain quickening to a frantic pulse, and your skin flashing hot and then cold, death feels like it’s sitting on your shoulder, waiting to reach in and stop your heart. And if we subscribe to the most dominant notion about parenting, it’s that selflessness is required in all things; your life, post-child, ought to be entirely in service of that child. But panic attacks upend that natural order—the only thing more powerful than our parenting instincts is our survival instinct. And panic attacks trick our brains into believing that survival is at stake.
One late spring day, on a little trip to some botanical gardens with my husband and the baby, I had a particularly egregious panic attack. It’s no exaggeration to say that we somehow were given the perfect baby—she eats like a dream, has slept twelve hours a night since 12 weeks, and whole days go by without anything resembling a cry—but that day her mere existence scratched at my skin. Every moment that I was in her presence felt like torture. With her around, I couldn’t focus entirely on me—and in the midst of panic, when your body systems are quite literally in fight or flight mode, self-care feels dire. A baby, with its abundant needs, demands far too much attention for a panic-addled brain to . I remember fleeing to my bedroom like a sulky teenager and telling my husband that under no circumstances was he to bring “that baby” in until I was ready to see her. I pulled the covers over my head and cried for three hours.
Even then I recognized the inherent contradiction in my psyche. The panic induced feverish worry that some apocalypse-sized event would threaten my daughter’s safety—but it also made me push her away, to prioritize myself before her.
At the end of the crying jag I made a deal with myself. Each week I could give my panic one hour of time. One hour to hoard old glass bottles in case I needed to preserve water in the event of a government overthrow. One hour to Google “Why are so many helicopters flying over D.C.?” One hour to just sit and pick my cuticles while I let scary thoughts flutter across my eyelids. One hour to sit and stew in my guilt over worrying about such absurdities when some mothers don’t know where their next meal will come from, or how they’ll pay the rent, or whether their partners will come home too drunk to control their emotions. That hour eventually became less and less integral to my week: by setting up a system where I knew I could worry about something later, I eventually just plain forgot to worry about the thing. But more than anything, it was the knowledge that my daughter, even in her infancy, could sense the emotions swirling around her that helped me curb many—though certainly not all— of my impulses.
I come from a long, illustrious line of worriers—worriers who don’t merely fret, but wake for long stretches of the night, stiff and unsteady, cycling through minor fears about cavities or unbought sheets or upcoming long drives. Worriers who fit the mold of a classic anxious person. In fact, my sister is such an accomplished worrier that we ask her to worry about things for us so they won’t happen. “I need you to worry about something for me,” is an all too common text on our family thread.
It’s only logical to assume that my daughter might inherit some of those tendencies, too. With a panicked mother hovering above her, that risk will only increase. Now, when that New York Times alert that North Korea has announced that it has a nuclear missile capable of reaching the East Coast pops through but I’m stacking blocks with my daughter on our living room floor, I breathe and tuck away the worry for later in the day. She may end up inheriting my anxiety, but I’d also like her to learn from my newly zen approach to dealing with it. Tending to my anxiety has become an act of preservation—not just for me, but for both of us.
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