I first realized I had a problem a couple of months ago. Leah, my new baby, was 3 months old. I was still in new baby bliss, totally loving every moment with her. One part of me felt extremely happy… life was about as good as it can get. What began creeping up on me though was something I couldn’t explain. I started to become very anxious, almost like I was over-caffeinated (and I rarely drink coffee). My heart would race and I would feel shaky. I was extremely edgy. Every little thing my other kids would do would drive me crazy. I was yelling at them more than I ever had before, about even the tiniest of things…(not getting in their carseats fast enough, leaving their shoes out on the floor, hollering my name after they went to bed). When Ella would fall and hurt herself or cry, I would turn and walk the other direction because the tone of her cry was more than I could handle…like fingernails on a chalkboard. Simple chores, like unloading the dishwasher, were too overwhelming for me. It would take me all day long to do what should have taken me 5 minutes. Finally, one day, I snapped… Kelly, my 5 year old was doing her homework, sitting in a chair right next to me. She was writing and very innocently kept knocking her elbow into me as she wrote. I felt, at that moment, like I was going to crawl out of my skin and absolutely lose it with her. It took that moment for me to realize that something was not right. I needed help.

The next morning I was having breakfast with a good friend of mine when I decided to actually verbalize what I had been going through. I hadn’t mentioned it to anyone, even my own husband, because I honestly felt like I was losing my mind and was just a horrible mom. When I expressed to my friend, who happened to have had a baby just 2 months before me, what I was going through she nodded in understanding. Come to find out, she had just been to the doctor a couple months before for the same thing and she was now being treated for post-partum depression….

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