This is not going to be a fun blog post. My anxiety did not magically cure itself. Instead, it’s something I keep at bay with a thousand redirections and intentional thought patterns and occasionally therapy. And while I’m so much better now than I was when my son was born five years ago, I still have to be mindful of what I consume and take steps to prevent and reduce anxious thoughts and behaviors.
I’m sharing my experience because for the longest time, I didn’t think I had anxiety, especially the postpartum kind. I thought this was all normal. Because for me, it was normal. I just never had someone so precious and worth protecting at all costs before.
I couldn’t sleep. Every night after my son was born, I slept on the floor next to his crib in the nursery and listened for sounds of his breathing. I was scared to fall asleep because every time I started to doze, I would see my baby blue and lifeless and jolt awake again, heart racing. I saw small coffins and crisp white funeral clothing. Every time I woke up before he did, I was sure I would find him not breathing.
SIDS prevention became an obsession. I read article after article. I pushed pacifiers because they were supposed to decrease his risk. I ran the fan in his room all night, even in the winter, because air circulation was important. Everything I did, I did it knowing that nothing I did would be 100% foolproof.
It wasn’t just SIDS. I didn’t kiss our son until he was at least three or four months old, because I had read that kissing a baby with a cold sore could be fatal. I had never even had a cold sore before. But absolutely no one kissed my baby.
And then there were the shootings. The El Paso Walmart terrorist attack had happened a barely even a week before my son was born. A man had driven 12 hours to a specific Walmart on the border of Mexico with the intent on murdering as many immigrants as he could. I didn’t feel safe outside my house anymore, I didn’t feel safe taking my son outside. My mom offered to watch the baby and let my husband and I go get diapers together, and I broke down crying. I couldn’t leave the house.
When we did leave the house, for doctor’s appointments or trips to the grocery store, I double and triple checked his carseat. The middle of the backseat is the safest seat in the car, and that is where he sat, with me right beside him to hold his head up, lest he doze off and his head flop to the side and his airway get blocked. I also had internal debates over which side of him I should be sitting on in case of a car crash. Would my body be an extra barrier protecting him or an extra blunt force hurting him? Sitting in the backseat while my husband merged into the highway was so anxiety inducing that I would get lightheaded and my vision would start to fade.
Then there were fevers. If you don’t know, a baby younger than 8 weeks old will need a spinal tap to rule out meningitis if they get a fever. One of my cousins is a NICU doctor and his advice was to not take the baby out into public for 8 weeks to avoid illnesses. That would have been easy enough had my husband not started teaching Spanish at two elementary schools. My husband was sick every three weeks. And every three weeks, I would banish him to our room when he got home from work and I would take on all the childcare myself. Towards the end of his sicknesses, I would occasionally allow him to hold the baby while wearing a mask because I physically couldn’t take it anymore. The baby finally came down with a fever around Valentine’s Day in February, when he was six months old.
When my husband or my mother-in-law had the baby, I still couldn’t relax. I could hear our downstairs neighbors arguing loudly downstairs, and was worried one of them would pull out a gun and shoot through the roof. If you went back in my text messages to five years ago, you would see me texting my husband at midnight, asking him did I think our neighbors would start firing their guns. I was also worried my husband would fall asleep holding the baby and the baby wouldn’t be able to breathe.
I was terrified of “dry-drowning,” where the baby aspirates something into their lungs and stops breathing later. No matter how rare this was, I was on the lookout. If he choked while nursing or if water splashed into his face after his bath, I was in hysterics.
His first year passed in a haze of sleep deprivation and anxiety.I was absolutely in love with him, but I missed out on so many things I wanted to do as a first time mom. We didn’t do newborn photos because I was too scared to leave the house, despite the fact that I started looking up photographers the moment I found out I was pregnant. I wanted to take him to the cafe and take him to browse around Target. My most cherished moments with my mom were us wandering around the mall, eating chicken nuggets and ice cream, and I couldn’t even take my kid into Walmart without crying.
I had to be reminded that it was okay to turn on the TV while holding him during his naps because I just wanted to memorize his face. I took thousands of iPhone photos of him, hundreds of videos, and every single time I took his photo, I had a sinking feeling that this could be the last time I got a photo of him. Every time I heard him laugh, I recorded it, in case I never heard it again.
So, how did I get like this?
I have been “anxious” for as long as I could remember, but it was normal. It was just part of loving someone. When my first little brother was born when I was four, my mother had apparently sat me down and told me all the things that could happen to a baby. I knew about SIDS. I knew about the dangers of infant fevers, probably because she wanted me to take a bath straight after school.
My parents thought it was so cute that I took it upon myself to tell strangers that they were not to touch my brother. I was The Guardian of the Stroller. And when my brother inevitable did get a fever at a couple of months old, I collapsed into a chair sobbing. I thought we were going to lose him.
Do I blame my mother? No. She has anxiety too, and it’s absolutely not her fault. Her mother, my grandmother, was murdered by her husband while in the process of leaving him. My mother was fourteen years old when this happened. My mother has parented us extremely cautiously and I don’t blame her at all.
I also grew up mixed race, which in my case, also meant I grew up with mixed religions. My mother is Christian. My father was uncommitted, but probably Universalist. This would have been fine had they not sent me to a private Christian school where I learned under no uncertain terms that my father, along with half my extended family were Hell-bound and that it was my responsibility to do something about it. I had “Hell Dreams” starting when my paternal grandmother got diagnosed with cancer and passed away in 2005, when I was eight.
Like any Indian paternal grandmother, my lived with us for a majority of the year, taking time to visit her other children and their families in India and Jamaica. But I had always considered her a primary caregiver, especially when I was younger. She used to keep me while my parents worked, and we had our own little routine. We would play in the yard sprinklers outside in our pajamas, I would “help” her make the special spinach puris she would feed me, we would sit in the hammock and flip out of it onto the grass, and she would get my hair tangled up in a round brush every night before bed.
When she passed away, I started having dreams of her being tortured in Hell, along with my father. Childish imagery of skeletons and fire, but I believed it. My mother had also told me previously that the devil would try to trick you by pretending to be family members in your dreams. Inevitably when I dreamed of my grandmother, it terrified me instead of comforted me. I had these nightmares well into high-school, except they were joined by new fears of something happening to my new brother, who was twelve years younger than me and my “first baby.”
This baby was different than my other brother. I was able to take care of him more, and I loved doing it. I changed his diapers, gave him baths, caught his throw-up in my hands, wiped his butt when he was potty training, and I kept him on Saturdays while my parents worked. But it also meant that when I was driving him to school, I was absolutely aware that his life was in my hands. I remember this elderly driver ran a stop sign once on the way to school and nearly hit us, and I was so shaken after that.
Therapy
I tried everything. I really did. For weeks, the only thing that let me go to sleep was this weird ritual where I counted all the babies that had survived SIDS. The rate of SIDS in 2020 was 38 to 100,000. So one night, I counted to 38. I counted slowly, knowing I was counting the infants that had passed away. And then I tried to count to 100,000. And every night I would pick up counting around where I had fallen asleep the night before. Eventually he was old enough that the risk for SIDS passed.
My anxiety was better, but I wasn’t near functional. I still couldn’t wear nail polish or makeup, because what if the baby swallowed it? Shoes inside the house was an absolute no, and I washed every toy that fell off his play mat and onto the floor.
I was still scared to leave the house, both because of shootings and car crashes. And then we had a pandemic. My son was seven months old when the world shut down. What little time I had outside completely stopped. I don’t think I left my apartment for months, except to walk outside our apartment complex, which was basically a giant parking lot with apartments.
I had intrusive thoughts about what would happen if I accidentally dropped a knife on his soft spot, even though I never carried knives remotely near him. I saw myself falling down the flight of stairs hold him every time I passed the stairs, even though I stayed a safe distance from them when holding him. I would be giving him a bath and see him drowning in my mind. Driving down the road and bracing for impact.
It was hell. My husband understood, but not really. Honestly, his patience with my inability to function was wearing thin after a year. I knew I was going insane, but I was completely fine making that choice if that’s what the price of safety was. More often than naught, I was in a state of panic. Something would happen. I would find out a new development with the pandemic, a hospital would fill up, or my son would make a noise in his sleep and it would start: my chest would tighten, my throat would start to feel restricted. And then all feeling would leave my body, I could see my body like it wasn’t even connected to me.
I started seeing a therapist online. We just talked over video call on my laptop. She gave me worksheets and homework to color. It helped. I don’t even know how it worked, but it did. I had her on speed dial and went ahead and scheduled an appointment with her for after my second son was born, just to make sure I wasn’t spiraling again. But I never got to that.
It seems weird that that’s all it took. All this mess cleared up in one paragraph. But that’s what happened. It was really frustrating at first. I didn’t see how her stupid little worksheets asking me if the thing I’m anxious about would matter in 10 years, because obviously it would matter in 10 years if something happened to my son. But she had other worksheets, and apparently coloring is magic.
How I Manage Now
I use the “Do not show me posts like this again” feature on Instagram. Social media does not care about your mental health. If you show interest in one anxiety-inducing video, they will show you another. I could not get on my Instagram without crying.
I hardly watched “heavy” things back then. No serious movies, nothing sad. I rewatch shows like Jane the Virgin, Mrs. Maisel, Derry Girls, Friends, and Gilmore Girls. Familiarity. Comfort. Repeat. I’m at a point now where I can watch something heavier, but I know to be cautious and limit myself.
I still keep an eye on the news, and I allow myself to recognize horrors and injustice. I don’t shut it all out by any means, but I don’t sit and look up terrible news article after terrible news article all day like I used to. The pandemic (and a growing political tension in the US) had me constantly checking the news so I knew if we needed to start pulling back on our outside contact again.
I recognize when I need sleep. My anxiety is heavily tied to sleep. If I don’t get enough of it, I get anxious. And now I know if it’s late and I start to feel anxious, I just need to go to sleep.
“Five things you can see. Four things you can hear. Three things you can touch. Two things you can smell. One thing you can taste.” My husband is the first to gently remind me to do this when I’m in starting get even remotely anxious these days.
I make time to see friends. Just taking time to be a person instead of a mom helps the worry from becoming all consuming.
Don’t Google. Google is my worst enemy. If I need information that could potentially scare me, I will make my husband Google for me. Even if he’s at work, I will text him and he will do it. Because he knows what will happen to me if I look it up myself.
Redirect. I still have intrusive thoughts about “what if” and have to consciously shift my focus somewhere else when I know I’ve already done the work of thinking through a safety situation when it comes to my kids. I can’t always shut it off though, and if you see my kids wearing helmets in the bakfiets, just know my anxiety is bad today. My husband is still not sold on the safety vs “fitting in” benefit of the helmets, but as long as the boys aren’t embarrassed to wear them, then I encourage it.
Do it scared. Before we landed in the Netherlands, we travelled South and Central America for four months. I had previously been too scared to take my child into Walmart. We took cabs up winding mountain roads and rode cable cars across La Paz, Bolivia. That trip was the most free and like myself I’ve ever felt since having kids. (Yes, I did have a couple of spiraling moments over bats, but I was also extremely sleep deprived in those situations and we later found out the malaria medicine we were on can cause anxiety and nightmares.)
A word from me.
This probably wasn’t easy to read. It wasn’t easy to write. I hardly went back to edit and reword like I usually do, because I just don’t want to re-live it again. The first year of my oldest son’s life was the worst period of my life. I don’t miss the newborn phase and I don’t want to go back. My only wish is that I had gone to therapy sooner. Even though my anxiety comes and goes, it has never gotten as bad as it was before I saw a therapist.
If you think you may have postpartum anxiety, please reach out to a therapist. In my experience, Dutch therapists don’t do talk therapy, but there are working expat therapists in the Netherlands that do.
I had coffee with Dr. Naomi Gibson a couple of months ago, and am happy to leave her website here.
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