It all started with a most “non-traditional, traditional” birth story. Two marriages, a vasectomy, an egg donor and twins at age 43 later, and North Carolina mom Maloo would begin the task of tandem breastfeeding. And oh, what a task it turned out to be, tinged with what this brave mama calls “mortifying, humiliating, shameful, isolating” postpartum depression.
When I first connected with Maloo, I’d asked her to share with BabyCenter just about her breastfeeding journey. But I’d learn from her that it didn’t always look so rosy and happy as photos I’d seen, lead me to believe.
Inspired to open up about her own battle with feelings of “perceived failings and inadequacies” by the new mom who recently took her own life, Maloo told me about the early days with her twins that her depression was “so, so real.”
She passionately wrote in an email about, “Not knowing how to ask for help… on the rare occasion that I would see another struggling mother, I knew enough to encourage her to get help, that she was worthy. However with my own motherhood I felt it was different.”
The guilt over her feelings of desperation were especially acute since, as she told me about motherhood, “I asked for this, prayed for it, called it in in more ways than one, waited my entire forty-three years for it.”
“How could I ask anyone to help give me a break, to sleep a wink, or maybe relax enough to go to the bathroom?” Maloo wondered now.
Then, Maloo described what breastfeeding twins was really like at the beginning:
“I pumped before tandem nursing the twins to express the foremilk so the ‘reflux,’ aka projectile vomit across the room, would be lessened when it was mixed with the hindmilk expressed after the tandem nursing and immediately warmed in a bottle to ‘top them off’ so they were satisfied, only then to hold Alder, rocking him, caressing him, wiping his tears from his sad, sad bewildered eyes, as he could not understand this pain in his writhing body that was yet to be relieved, only by hearty turmoil in the form of voluminous spires of curdely white stuff projected out of this bundle of conundrum, at once precious and pitiful and repulsive in its tenacity and incessant mind-altering wailing, to the point of my own clenched teeth, loud pleading for whatever grotesque horror to be expelled from his little body just so we could breathe again… Just so we could breathe.”
Maloo’s vivid, gripping description of this moment is enough to take us all back. Back to a time when we were so overcome with every emotion new motherhood smacks us across the face with, we couldn’t. We just couldn’t. We wanted to scream. To disappear. To, quite frankly, throw the baby out the window. Or jump.
“For the first time I could truly understand and feel compassion for, heck I could even feel the mothers who could see as their only hope to load up the kids, the babies plural, in their car seats, open all the windows, and drive single-mindedly into the lake,” Maloo admits.
Given the deep, dark thoughts and moments Maloo endured, she urges other struggling moms to reach out, or help a friend in need. She says even bearing witness to what is going on, or simply saying “I know,” may mean a connection for somebody who desperately, desperately needs one.
“No need to pretend it’s all okay, smooth and beautiful,” Maloo urges. “Ask the questions or don’t. Just BE there.” She adds this surprising advice, “Don’t wait for the invitation, you won’t get it. Just show up and say ‘I’m staying.’”
Because her mother and a friend she calls “her angel” stepped in to help her, Maloo says, “I ‘only’ endured this in complete solitude for one month and six days, an eternal one month and six days. And even then, I still only had scheduled help for mere hours in a day. And, alas, this was life-saving.”
Thank you Maloo, for so beautifully, poignantly, and honestly opening up about your experience. Your words will no doubt help other struggling mamas see there can be light on the other side of the seemingly endless tunnel of PPD.
Can you relate to this mom’s feelings?
Share hereAll photos courtesy of Sarah Tunstill of Captured Birth Photography. Find her on Facebook and Instagram.
