Month: April 2023

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Episode 94SN: Life Lessons Learned in Pregnancy & Birth: Molly’s Story, Part II

Conceiving, being pregnant, giving birth and then learning to be someone’s parent by immediately being responsible for the survival of a new being are all challenging experiences that contain within them, possibilities to grow.

Today I finish my conversation with Molly. In this episode, she compares her expectations at the birth with her experience and learns that the expectations she had about the first encounter with her baby after birth is built on a false narrative. She also shares her process for increasing milk production when she was breastfeeding and some useful tips for that process, and she shares the important lessons she learned from the 10 year runway that preceded the birth of her son.

To read more about Avoiding the Cry it Out Method in Sleep Training, see Valerie Groysman

MTHFR gene

https://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/folicacid/mthfr-gene-and-folic-acid.html

https://medlineplus.gov/genetics/gene/mthfr/#synonyms

https://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/folicacid/features/folic-acid-helps-prevent-some-birth-defects.html

Does stillbirth have a genetic component

https://www.marchofdimes.org/find-support/topics/miscarriage-loss-grief/stillbirth

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7604888/

https://obgyn.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1471-0528.17301

https://www.marchofdimes.org/find-support/topics/miscarriage-loss-grief/stillbirth

Audio Transcript:

Molly  0:02  

So they did the balloon to open my cervix, which was fine. It was like uncomfortable but it was it was fine. And that’s when what I wanted for my birth plan and what the hospital wanted for my birth plan decided to go two different directions.

Paulette  0:18  

Welcome to war stories from the womb. This is a show that shares true experiences of getting pregnant and giving birth to help shift the common cultural narrative away from the glossy depictions of this enormous transition that you can find on all kinds of media to more realistic one. It also celebrates the incredible resilience and strength it takes to create another person and release that new person from your body into the world. Oftentimes, this transition requires some heroics, which is where this podcast gets its name. I’m your host, Paulette Kamenecka. I’m a writer and an economist and a mother of two girls, and boy did I struggle with this transition. Today I finish my conversation with Molly. In this episode, she compares her expectations at the birth with her experience and learns that the expectation she had about the first encounter with her baby after birth is built on a false narrative. She shares her process for increasing milk production when she was breastfeeding, and some useful tips for that process. And she shares the important lessons she learned from the 10 year runway that preceded the birth of her son. We’ll pick up where we left off last week. Molly is contemplating how to approach the birth of her son.

Molly  1:27  

because I researched when I panic. It was what is my birth plan going to be I had seen my my younger sister had already had two kids. And so I had been there for one of them and things did not go according to any of the plans. And so I was like what if that’s gonna happen to me? And you know, I’ve talked to my other sister in law and I don’t want to be medicated and i don’t want to have this thing and I don’t want to do that. And I had really wanted a midwife and they didn’t have any in the city that we were in. There’s not a midwife in an hour’s distance to us. There was no birthing center, they just had a you know, a thing and then all of a sudden, I realized about halfway through. Oh, yeah, I’m moving before I have this baby. I need to figure that shit out. Yeah. And so I finished working at about seven and a half months. I quit and we moved and we moved to Pennsylvania. And that’s after I had an ER visit because I could not breathe. The pain was so bad and my stomach I didn’t know which part evidently I had gas.

Paulette  2:36  

Maybe was fine. Good. Well, good. That’s the best answer.

Molly  2:39  

We had come up to visit in May, which was shortly after we had moved but we came up because it was a bigger holiday to see all the family and I thought I was in preterm labor because I was having contractions so bad. I wasn’t the minute we got there. They went away, of course, but having to reestablish care. Nobody really wants it mostly. Yeah. Ready to pop. Mom. And again, we had no midwives. Next to where we were going to be there was there was midwives at a hospital in Pittsburgh, but that was an hour away and I did not want to risk that while in labor if that were to be the case. And luckily I found a clinic and they were fine and not fine. They did a good job and they reassured me they’ve answered all my questions. And I did forget to mention in the beginning when I first got pregnant, they gave me progesterone suppositories. So for six weeks, they were like, Nope, we’re keeping this woman she was so they tried to help keep all of that getting all the healthy nutrients that it needs. Oh, and on top of all of this, I have MTHFR so I can’t that I can’t process folic acid. Like

Paulette  3:49  

Oh no. Yeah, shit. Yeah.

Molly  3:52  

So they were like, we’ll just take extra which isn’t necessarily how that works, but nobody really knows about it.

Paulette  4:00  

So it turns out that MTHFR gene includes instructions to make a protein it helps your body process fully or vitamin E nine. Most people recognize the term folic acid that’s what I heard of before. It’s in dark leafy vegetables. And if you’re going to get pregnant, everyone will tell you that you need folic acid to reduce the chances of a fetus will develop neural tube defects like spina bifida, which happened very early in pregnancy. Some of the variants of the MTHFR gene inhibit the body’s ability to process bully

Molly  4:30  

or people do know about it, but they think about a different part of it. And it’s a whole thing. And there was some concerns about preeclampsia at one point because I was just so puffy. When we

Paulette  4:39  

saw the folic acid problem. That’s an issue. We didn’t Oh my gosh.

Molly  4:45  

I mean, I took prenatals that nobody gave me anything to kind of help with that. Even though it was something I was very much like, Hi. I’m pretty sure I need something here and there was never any help with that. And then I mean, there was concerns about preeclampsia for a while just because I was so puffy there was worries about gestational diabetes because I was just getting grumpy as heck because I gained 70 pounds and that came back negative although I got horribly horribly ill from the test but I still was sick I still if I had meet the nose me in it it still be getting sick and throwing up and and by the time I got at six and a half, seven months pregnant people who had never met me before kept coming up to me and they’re like any day now and I’m like three months left.

Paulette  5:35  

Yes. Oh my God, that’s such a bad game. That’s such a terrible there’s just there’s not just say you look great. Right? Right. It’s terrible to say you look too small because then you’re like, Is the baby too small is terrible to say you’re too big. We’ll just just say look great. That’s that’s the only right answer. Yeah,

Molly  5:51  

I It’s. I would always get so frustrated because it’s like, not only do you think I’m fat, I still have to get fatter. Yeah.

Paulette  6:00  

This is our sounding like a walk in the park is pregnancy.

Molly  6:04  

No, it wasn’t because I was alone for a lot of it. My mom was around but I was still at home alone. Packing the house. Yeah, dealing with the dog going to work dealing with the stress of stupid people at work. Not that all the people I worked with the stupid we just had to deal with some stupid things while we were there. And it was just a lot and I’m still trying to figure out the game plan and figure out the food and I don’t want to look at food but I have the food because I have a baby in my belly. And so we finally figured out what was going to happen we went to our birthing classes once we got settled in Pennsylvania, and that helped so much. It was a breastfeeding friendly. That was what they encouraged for people who couldn’t handle and for all the different reasons, not that breastfeeding is the right solution for everybody, but you can’t you know, and so we took that we took the breastfeeding class, so I finally felt prepared. I’m gonna go in air. Yes, yes. And it wasn’t till three weeks before the baby came or was supposed to come that we even bought a stroller about a crib bought a mattress because I was in panic of I don’t want to nest this can because I didn’t mention this before. But this can I was panicking because it could still go sour because my mom had had a stillbirth eight and a half months. And so I

Paulette  7:22  

was oh my god, of course. Sure. So this is a useful question. Is there an element of stillbirth that’s genetic. I found some journal articles about this topic. They define stillbirth as death in utero at 20 weeks of gestation. And these kinds of deaths account for 60% of all perinatal deaths. Most of them go unexplained between 25 and 60% of cases. It looks like the most common causes are infection, problems with the placenta or umbilical cord, and medical problems with the mother like diabetes and preeclampsia and birth defects in the baby. I found one study that suggested that inherited genetic risk might exist, but data is pretty limited at this point. You can check out the show notes for the links that I’ve included on this topic.

Molly  8:09  

And we did do genetic counseling like at the anatomy scan, they did genetic counseling, they didn’t do genetic testing. They just did the counseling. And we were told at that point, there’s good odds that our kiddo would be autistic and just based off of our family genetics and how things would be going.

Paulette  8:26  

I thought we think autism is the gene times environment thing. Is that not true?

Molly  8:32  

So not not when nine out of 10 people in the family are autistic. There’s we have a very, very neurodivergent heavy scenario and my family.

Paulette  8:45  

Do we care about that? We don’t care about the news or we do care about it or

Molly  8:49  

you just need to be prepared. Okay, care, my husband’s autistic and I am probably my therapist tells me she’s like 90% sure that I am too. But so I wasn’t nervous. And I have so many people in my life that are autistic. I work with the neurodivergent community. Yeah, you know, it was not. So we finally started nesting and putting things together. My mother in law came out early because we were like just can you just arrive early because we knew we would need support. I knew I couldn’t do it alone. Yeah. My husband is on sleep medication at night so that no hope and help there because knocked out so she came out which was wonderful. And blame my kiddo did not want to leave the womb.

Paulette  9:40  

So that sounds like you made it to 40 weeks pretty, pretty solid. Already one. Yeah. And then and then do we get induced or how does that the day that that they’re born? What does that look like?

Molly  9:52  

So we were induced to scheduled induction I walked my ass off trying to not have a scheduled induction I did. The last thing I wanted was Pitocin. And so we showed up at five o’clock in the morning. And I had already said I didn’t want any I wanted it to be as drug intervent like, I don’t want them touching things. And so they did the balloon to initiate the first little bit which was fine. A little bit to open my cervix. Yeah. Which was fine. It was like uncomfortable but it was it was fine. And that’s when what I wanted for my birth plan and what the hospital wanted for my birth plan decided to go two different directions because I knew that you can have the balloon dilation and not have Pitocin because sometimes it can just kickstart the labor process and I was already having contractions I was already having things and I felt in control at that point. And that is when they were like so we’re gonna start Pitocin

Paulette  10:54  

are they offering that to you as an option or they’re telling you that’s what’s happening

Molly  10:57  

and telling me that that’s what’s happening? Because I had already said I don’t want it and they’re like, Okay, next thing you know, it’s in my IV and I went from having manageable, tolerable contractions to within 20 minutes, not being able to control my body in any way, shape or form because the contractions are so intense. And I just had a nurse that kept telling me you’re not having this baby today. You’re having this baby tomorrow. You still got a good 20 hours ahead of you. Oh, good lord. And I’m sorry, that’s what they were used to seeing. And I wish I had used my brain to be like she doesn’t know me. She doesn’t know how my body is going to react and based off how I feel right now this is going to be over in a couple hours. Because at that point, even though I did not want any pain medication, I didn’t want an epidural. I didn’t want anything. I wanted to just do it because I knew it would. I knew it would come it’s just temporary and it would go away and that it didn’t need to happen this way. And recovery can go really quick for a lot of people. But she kept telling me it was going to drag on forever. And I was running out of energy and we were an hour in. Yeah. And so I said I need the pain meds. Well I barely could talk actually. Yeah, barely. And I finally got them to give me some pain meds. It was the worst decision I could have made for me, because what they don’t tell you is that the pain meds don’t take the pain away. They just make you incapable of advocating for yourself because you can no longer communicate.

Paulette  12:28  

That’s totally interesting. So that’s the thing is like how that epidural works in your body is different for everyone. Right? It’s yeah,

Molly  12:34  

well this was just the pain meds like normal pain meds not even federal yet. Not an epidural yet. This is just IV pain meds. I got to sleep slightly but not really because every time a contraction came it would wake me up and I couldn’t communicate. I was talking so slow. Even I was like why can’t I get my body or my mouse to do the things that I need? And I kept telling them, please check me, please check me but nobody was listening because nobody could understand me and I was just delirious and at one point somebody came in and said You’re scaring people because you’re yelling so much. But I was trying so hard to advocate for myself. But nobody could understand me and people would pat my arm. Oh my God. They were trying to be helpful but I had planned on being in control. I had told them that I wanted to walk around and I wanted to work through these and I was stuck in this bed because I couldn’t control my body because they had given me a medication that I didn’t want, which resulted in me having another medication that I didn’t want that was supposed to help which made things worse. And so a couple more hours went by and I eventually said because she kept coming in and telling me we still got a good 10 hours because they wouldn’t check me. You still got a good 1015 hours before you’re gonna go. And I’m at this point exhausted knowing that I’m going to have to push a baby out of my fucking vagina. Yeah, and you’re telling me I’m going to take forever there’s no way I don’t there’s no rest. There’s no Yeah, so Okay, give me the freaking epidural. Well, they had to check me before they gave me the epidural. I was at nine centimeters within five hours.

Paulette  14:10  

Wow, that is really fast for the first time.

Molly  14:14  

Which is why I was in so much pain. Yes. Yeah. I honestly think that if I hadn’t had the Pitocin and if I hadn’t had the pain medication, it would have been longer. But it would have been something that I could have kept up with and maintained and

Paulette  14:29  

yeah, I was gonna say also if your body doesn’t naturally there’s a symphony of hormones that play out together to help you get through it right. So right, which are cut off if you inject Pitocin just to clarify what I was saying about hormones and Pitocin. Pitocin is the synthetic form of oxytocin that your body naturally produces when you go into labor spontaneously. When you go into labor spontaneously, there is an internal conversation going on between your brain and your body about which hormones to release and when but when your body is getting signals from an IV, the brain and body are no longer in direct communication. So that can affect the hormone next, the endorphins you get a response to the pain of a spontaneous labor, for example, don’t work in the same way when Pitocin is used. Even though you’re still in pain.

Molly  15:16  

Right? So it was just very frustrating. In that point, it took two hours to push the kiddo out. We arrived at five o’clock and Blaine was born at three.

Paulette  15:27  

Wow. Oh my god. That is the fast lane for sure.

Molly  15:31  

Right. And the nurse never was like Oh, I’m sorry to make you think that this is gonna be forever and it only took you five hours. You know,

Paulette  15:38  

this is such a tricky thing about managing expectations, right? I’m on both sides of it. I think don’t don’t say it unless you’re sure there’s no way to be sure. Don’t leave me in the dark and say nothing. Right. I don’t know. I don’t know what the best way to do it is

Molly  15:53  

I think if I had been in a hospital, this hospital still had delivery room and then a room that you go to post delivery. Yeah. And it so it was in that sense a little bit older. They didn’t have a bathtub or really a shower big enough that you could get in to be in there. There was no what we would consider now more common place or thing, accommodations or whatever won’t call them. They didn’t have any of that. And so I come in wanting those things because I know the benefits to them and how they can help the mom do better in these situations. Because again, I’ve had 10 years. Yeah, think about this. You know, I’ve seen lots of people have babies, lots of friends have babies and talk to them about their birth story. So I kind of collected the best knowledge I had from all of them to create what I wanted and I didn’t get any of it. And Blaine came out and and was fine 711 So not even a diet baby. No. So hello. Right but the I will say I did not tear because I did not listen to the doctors at all. At that point. I was kind of coming off them that the pain meds because I was due for another round. But they were like Oh no, you’re about to push we’re not doing that because they you’re not supposed to give them so close to the BBB for and I think and so I was finally in my head and they kept telling me push harder, push harder, push harder. And I was like no because I feel like I’m going to tear and I was just trusting my body. So when my body was like no, don’t wait. I knew well enough that my body would do what it needs to do. And so it did take longer than they wanted it to I will admit that but Blaine was fine didn’t have any adverse reactions to being in the birth canal that long. But I am proud of that because I did listen when I could. And I asked my body where I could where somebody else wasn’t influencing what I was doing. And I luckily didn’t have a doctor that tried to do an easy on me or anything like that, because I’m not about that life. Yeah,

Paulette  17:54  

no, no. I think one thing that’s tricky. It’s hard to embody the person you’ll be in labor before you’re actually there and we all think we’ll be able to advocate for ourselves and that’s just it is such an all encompassing over sensory experience that you there’s no way you’ll be able to be your own lawyer in this right now. Yeah. And I’m imagining that you have an emotional attachment is the idea of being able to have a kid but you didn’t necessarily have an idea that the birth has to go this way or it doesn’t count.

Molly  18:28  

No, I didn’t. Now it’s like, I have things that I know now if for whatever reason I were to ever get pregnant again. Like I have things that I would do differently and I would advocate, I am a much stronger individual now than I was then. Not that I was a weak individual than either, but I know more. I know more and so I think I would do things differently but I don’t have this want to let’s try it again and get it right. Like some people do get that. I was talking to somebody who had a kid as a teenager, and they’re now an adult. And they were like, I just want to know what it’s like to have a kid as an adult and raise the kid as an adult. And I was like, oh, okay, that I can I’ll give that one to you. But yeah, and I will say I really thought that everybody feels this immense Disney like love for their child when their child comes out. And what I have learned after talking to a lot of people, that’s actually not the case. It’s actually the minority of people that are married with lovey dovey eyeballs with their for their baby. Not that I didn’t love my kid when they came out, but it was different. It was still like, that’s a new weird human that I need to get to know. Yeah, who is that thing? So I am now bound to

Paulette  19:44  

I don’t know this with any scientific certainty but I wonder if you go the Pitocin route and your body is not allowed to go through all the cycles of hormones and stuff. Whether you get that feeling and how much of that is a chemical reaction like oxytocin is released once the baby is born and right is that kind of thing. And if you don’t have a birth that looks just like that, whether you’re gonna get that outcome.

Molly  20:08  

Yeah, that makes sense. Because, yeah, I just felt like okay, you’re touching my boob. Alright, you know, what have, you know, my little kiddo looked like a little turtle. So that was, you know, you’re like, what’s with the head and you’re just analyzing your baby so much, because you’re like, Okay, you were in there and I imagined you one way. And now you slightly look like you came from an alien movie. Yeah. And I’m trying to make sense to you look like dad and me, you know? So, yes, but once Blaine was out, things were good. The hospital actually had like many photoshoots that you got to do with the babies and stuff. And so that was nice because I did not have a photographer lined up and so we did end up getting baby pictures because of that. And I was only there for 24 hours. They offered me a second night and I was like, I can’t sleep. Every time the baby’s finally asleep from breastfeeding. You come in and you wake me up to check my temperature like yeah, no, this is not helpful. They did have a nursery and there’s a couple times I actually did send blame to the nursery because I needed some sleep. And if they were going to pay more attention to the baby who didn’t need food right now. I could sleep without being a dolphin. Yeah, I you know because dolphin sleep with one eye open. Yeah, yeah. And then then that’s gonna be helpful. But then once we came home, and I guess it didn’t, it didn’t actually go smoothly. Once we got home. We got home. And breastfeeding was going terribly because we found out six weeks later Blaine was tongue tied. And so it was like having a cat tongue instead of like, it’s supposed to be like a squishy, soft loveliness. Yeah. And it was not. It was like a cat was like in your nipple and that was awful. And so things are chapped and terrible, and I didn’t give up I went the doctor was like, well, you need to not breastfeed for three days. I was like, well then I’m pumping because breastfeeding was what? I don’t like touch so it wasn’t like I need this because it’s going to be connected thing it was, I don’t want to pay for formulas. I’m going to make breastfeeding work, which was an option for my brain. It might not be an option for everybody’s brain. And so I pumped for three days ate all the oatmeal that you could imagine. And I pumped enough for the next three months in this house. Oh my god, I I got milk overnight and it came because I was pumping a whole bunch of all the things that help you. You know, I was eating everything that they said eat to have more milk production

Paulette  22:58  

was fabulous.

Molly  23:00  

Oatmeal. I would eat drink like the tea. There was some other cookies that you can get in the breastfeeding aisles that you could buy there. I don’t even remember anyway was a long time ago. I just remember was a lot of oatmeal.

Paulette  23:14  

Okay, but you were you were doing some kind of special breastfeeding diet and it seems like it worked.

Molly  23:19  

Yeah, I mean, I was just Yeah, I just incorporated anything that could help with the production into into my intake for those three days. And then I pumped every two hours on the clock. So if the baby was feeding, I was pumping and I had a double breast pump. I had an Adela and I loved it and it was wonderful. Definitely had the broad and make it easier. But and I just kept pumping and we kept freezing and for a good couple days I thought I had to pour out all the stuff that was pink note to self as long as you don’t have any communicable diseases that come through blood. You can you can let your baby drink that red blood milk all you want.

Paulette  23:56  

Oh, that’s just find out. Yeah,

Molly  23:57  

I did not know that at the time and I would cry and pour it out because it was taking me like I was everything I was doing. But on day three through day five Blaine didn’t stop crying once. And that’s when I knew something was not right. And so I took them to the doctor and they tested planes poop and it was milk soy protein intolerance. So not only was I not allowed to eat meat while I was pregnant, I now could not have anything with milk. So I at all, just so everybody’s tracking with me. That’s everything at the grocery store.

Paulette  24:35  

I pizza. I love you. I say you

Unknown Speaker  24:39  

buy white bread.

Paulette  24:40  

Yeah, soy.

Molly  24:42  

Soy isn’t everything. Yeah. And even for blamed was so sensitive. I couldn’t have soybean oil, which they say it’s hyperalgesia not for that sense. I should say yeah, I could nothing was soy lecithin, anything like that. And so we went on a very strict diet and laying stuff.

Paulette  25:01  

What could you eat? What did that leave?

Molly  25:03  

So I would just use vegetable. I would specify that things are not have no soy like if it said vegetable oil. I would make sure it said like things that weren’t soy as gradients. So like sunflower oil was usually the thing. A lot of things I just started shopping at like Whole Foods, because it’s much easier to find those indicators at stores like that or Trader Joe’s we just ate meat and vegetable. Yeah. And we kind of kept it at that. I did try signing up for like CompTIA for things like that and get the noise No soy no dairy options for things, which helped for a little bit but then we would get bored eating like literally a steak and a potato. But yeah, so we figured it out. Chipotle was another place I can eat and that was good. But then they also found out that Lane had three little holes in their heart. And so luckily they weren’t large enough that they need to operate but they were that we needed to go in pretty frequently to have it monitored.

Paulette  26:04  

Do they close themselves?

Molly  26:06  

They just did this year. Oh wow. It’s been five years. One closed up within about six months and then three little ones had clustered together. And so this year is the first year that clean does not show any signs of heart defects. So that’s all exciting. And then at six weeks, we had Blaine’s tongue clip because we finally figured out that’s why breastfeeding was so painful and I cried because I didn’t realize that that was how much different it was supposed to feel like it was a night and day difference. And I had mastitis four times in the first three months, sometimes I

Paulette  26:50  

get more likely because they’re not like sucking the right way.

Molly  26:53  

Ironically, I got it after that. And I don’t know why but I really it usually happened because we have missed a feeding and I just was really prone to it I guess because I would get in gorged like crazy. And it took me a while to realize I needed to release the milk no matter what. Yeah. And that was the part that I think was really hard because I’d never been around anybody who

Paulette  27:27  

guys

Molly  27:34  

was sleepless nights a lot because the soy protein intolerance if I ever had it, that would cause things and just there’s a lot of crazy crazy things that people say about baby sleep, but just that sleep deprived state that you’re in is so mind overfitting because like

Paulette  27:57  

I was gonna describe it as a different state of consciousness. Way to walk around in the world.

Molly  28:03  

Yes, and I I really wished I had not done the cried out thing or blame like it really. Now that I understand Blaine’s brain and I understand how blame thinks it’s a huge regret that I have, because it wasn’t necessary. And it’s we actually have backlash from it. So Blaine has huge nighttime separation anxiety and thinks that we won’t respond. If there’s an emergency and it’s all kind of linked together because of how their brain processes rejection. They think that from that it used to be an issue from it’s terrible.

Paulette  28:40  

All I would say the wily as a parent of older kids. Parenting is way fucking harder than it looks. At and then a marketing suggests, yes, you you’re going to make 1000 mistakes because that’s every at every stage, you’re learning something new. And the only thing that matters, I think or what you may have control over is the repair is to recognize that a mistake was made and say this is how we’re going to do it from here on I’m sorry, I did that. I’m learning but there’s no way to avoid the mistakes. I don’t think.

Molly  29:11  

No. And that’s the one thing that we’ve incorporated is apologizing. Yeah, as soon as we figure out that we’ve done something that has caused harm in some way is being like oh we didn’t know that. That happened. Yeah, we’re so sorry. That happened. And I find that Blaine really appreciates knowing that we make mistakes, and then we’re able to talk to him. I do my five year old is like going on 50 But

Paulette  29:39  

that’s probably even more important, right? If they’re an old soul, they appreciate that but I think it does make kids feel seen to have that conversation and they are forgiving and it’s you know, people will make mistakes and you’re showing them that it’s okay to make mistakes and this is what you This is how you recover.

Molly  29:54  

Yes, and blame is just some magical little kid.

Paulette  29:58  

That’s awesome. For the record I to regret daily.

Posted on

Episode 94: Life Lessons Learned in Pregnancy & Birth: Molly’s Story, Part II

Conceiving, being pregnant, giving birth and then learning to be someone’s parent by immediately being responsible for the survival of a new being are all challenging experiences that contain within them, possibilities to grow.

Today I finish my conversation with Molly. In this episode, she compares her expectations at the birth with her experience and learns that the expectations she had about the first encounter with her baby after birth is built on a false narrative. She also shares her process for increasing milk production when she was breastfeeding and some useful tips for that process, and she shares the important lessons she learned from the 10 year runway that preceded the birth of her son.

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Episode 93SN: A Path out of Infertility: Molly’s Story, Part I

When she was 18, a doctor told her that getting pregnant would be challenging, without offering any suggestions about how to improve her odds. She worked for ten years to prove this doctor wrong–and when she was on the brink of giving up, it happened–she got pregnant.

 In today’s episode my guest offers advice about what she would’ve done differently when pursuing the health issue that likely contributed to her trouble with fertility, she shares the dramatic story of finding out she was ,in fact pregnant after 10 years of trying, and suggests ways of thinking about medical advice that may alter how you take hard information in. What follows is the first part of our conversation.

General Information about Endometriosis & PCOS

https://www.nichd.nih.gov/health/topics/pcos/conditioninfo/causes

https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/conditions-and-diseases/endometriosis#:~:text=Endometriosis%20is%20an%20idiopathic%20condition,discuss%20it%20with%20a%20doctor.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6283441/

https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/pcos/symptoms-causes/syc-20353439

https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/endometriosis/diagnosis-treatment/drc-20354661

https://www.forbes.com/sites/alicebroster/2020/08/27/why-it-takes-so-long-to-be-diagnosed-with-endometriosis-according-to-a-expert/?sh=41ec7fb56967

Clomid

https://www.healthline.com/health/pregnancy/how-does-clomid-work

https://www.forbes.com/health/family/what-is-clomid/

Ketogenic Diet/Keto Flu

https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/articles/24003-ketosis#:~:text=from%20Cleveland%20Clinic-,Ketosis%20is%20a%20metabolic%20state%20that%20occurs%20when%20your%20body,energy%20and%20treating%20chronic%20illness.

https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/what-is-keto-flu-2018101815052

https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/keto-flu-symptoms#how-to-get-rid-of-it

False Positive Pregnancy Test

https://www.healthline.com/health/pregnancy/false-positive-pregnancy-test#user-error

https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/getting-pregnant/in-depth/home-pregnancy-tests/art-20047940#:~:text=A%20false%2Dpositive%20might%20happen,fertility%20medicine%20that%20contains%20HCG%20.

Audio Transcript

Molly  0:02  

To this day, there are still days of like, Wait, we have a baby. We had one, we’re good, we’re good because that that 10 years of being infertile . It’s a very specific concept that you have about yourself  it’s really hard to shake

Paulette  0:20  

Welcome to war stories from the womb. This is a show that shares experiences of getting pregnant. being pregnant, giving birth. To help shift the common cultural narrative, away from the glossy depictions of this enormous transition. You can find all kinds of media. It also celebrates the resilience and strength that it takes to create another person and release that  person of your body I’m your host, Paulette Kamenecka. I’m a writer and an economist and the mother of two girls and boys I struggle with this transition. In today’s episode, my guest offers advice about what she would have done differently when pursuing the health issue that likely contributed to her trouble with fertility. She also shares the dramatic story of finding out she was pregnant after 10 years of trying and suggests ways of thinking about medical advice that may alter how you take in heart information. That follows is the first part of our conversation. 

Hi, thanks so much for coming on the show Can you introduce yourself and tell us where you’re from? Yeah, so

Molly 1:32  

I’m Molly Hicks. And I am from Lincoln, Nebraska.

Paulette  1:35  

Oh, wow. What is it just completely winter there right now? 

Molly  1:42  

No, it’s like this weird mix between spring and winter where like it can’t really decide which season it wants to be. So we keep going to freezing and then it’s like being freezing.

Paulette  1:54  

Well, I’m both happy and sorry to hear that. Yes, exactly. So before we jumped on this interview, you mentioned that you are a podcaster.

Molly  2:05  

Yes. I co host a podcast with my friend Angela. It’s called Drudgery, Dreams and In Between and it’s for neurodivergent weirdos and

Paulette  2:15  

struggling to human. I like it and here’s an interview or what’s the

Molly  2:20  

sometimes we have a format where Angela and I come on and talk about subjects that need to be talked about, especially for later diagnosed or divergent events or late late realization fears. You know, either way that like just talking about that the struggle it is to come to terms with some of these things, and we occasionally have guests on I usually talk a lot from the parent component. And so we had an expert in teaching and we just interviewed a guest who is the founder of a neuro divergent focused company. So

Paulette  2:53  

wow, that’s very cool. Okay, so we’re going to talk about kids and families and sometimes the family you create is in some ways, either a reflectiojn, or a projection of the family you come from. So I’m wondering, did you grow up with siblings? And did you think I want kids how does that unfold for you?

Molly  3:13  

So I was obsessed with pregnancy as a kid. And I was raised Catholic. My dad’s convert, but my mom’s from the Catholic family. And my mom had five siblings. My dad had seven siblings. And growing up, there was three of us and now there we have an additional sibling. That was born when I was 20. And growing up, no offense to my siblings, but I did not want them.

Paulette  3:45  

Where are you? Where are you in the lineup?

Molly  3:47  

I’m the oldest. And so it was just like, my memories. of sibling interactions aren’t always positive. And I mean, it is what it is, right? You’re kids, you have opinions and they get stuck in your head. But like I remember when the next sibling was two, and I was eight, seven or eight and my mom’s like, well go play. Since you’re bored. Go play the two year old or you know, and it’s like, what? I’m What am I supposed to do with the two year old like, I don’t know what to do with a two year old. They just want to sit in a corner and scream. I don’t want to do that. You know, and it was just those types of things. And so growing up I always had this concept of like if I if I have a kiddo, I want that kiddo to not feel pressures from other siblings or feel held back because now there’s too many kids. No offense to people who have lots of kids like this fine. Just having been the oldest and as more kids came, I got to do less your I got less attention or I got less things. And I didn’t want that for mine. So if they were ever happened, and I remember a time where I was like, I’ll have four and then I went to I do not want any because I worked at a daycare and then that that taught me I don’t want to make this I don’t have patience. Like so. So for things like that. And I did grow up into a bigger family where we had lots of cousins and they were all around all the time. I don’t like people that much, so

Paulette  5:22  

It usually cuts one way or the other either. You think I want exactly this or I want you right. So, so you do have a child. So how do we bridge that gap? And and you were talking before we got onto record about other struggles. So maybe take us there.

Molly  5:40  

Yes. So my uterus and I never agreed, even as a young teenager, it wanted to do its thing. make myself feel like I was being you know, ruined from the inside out. I didn’t want it to do that. Differences of opinion. And so I remember I joined the military. I went to my annual pap exam and in the waiting room was a Reader’s Digest. And I had just we’ve been married for gotten married for maybe like six or seven months. And it said that if you haven’t gotten pregnant in the first six months of marriage, that you probably have something else going on. Even with all the odds, at that point. Usually something happened that you are aware of. So I went into my appointment and I said, Excuse me, the Reader’s Digest has told me this mind blowing thing, and she’s like, oh, yeah, yeah, you probably just Yeah, it’ll be a problem. And I was 18 and I took that as a challenge. Like, to my heart, I was like, Well, if you’re gonna tell me I can’t, I’m going to show you I can. This just underlines the neurodivergent brain thinking pattern. But

Paulette  6:46  

did she do anything specific did she say you have endometriosis or something? 

Molly  6:51  

no, they there was like no details. Oh, and I was in tech school, so I couldn’t really investigate too much. all of my symptoms were extremely heavy periods, severe cramping to the point of not being able to function, super long cycles that were asynchronous. they did not line up. So classic symptoms of endometriosis or PCOS that,

Paulette  7:13  

yeah. So, unfortunately volley. too many women fell into the abyss that is women’s reproductive health as it relates to endometriosis, and PCOS or PCOS. Endometriosis occurs when the tissue that normally lines the uterus, the endometrium grows outside. And PCOS involves a hormone imbalance that interferes with the ways the ovaries function. Both conditions are difficult to diagnose, and can contribute to infertility. Endometriosis can come with heavy or irregular periods or meaningful periods, and or spotting or bleeding between periods. It’s diagnosed with a pelvic exam ultrasound and maybe a laparoscopy. It can take on average between six and 10 years to diagnose PCOS or PCOS can come with irregular periods, eccess facial and body hair and infertility. According to the Mayo Clinic, there’s no single test or diagnosis of ethos that may fall from a discussion of your cycles with your doctor and ultrasound and or a blood test looking for hormone imbalance, what conditions they have a partially genetic basis. If women in your family have these conditions, that is sometimes a clue. But it looks like there’s no definitive explanation for why these conditions develop.

Molly  8:30  

My mom was just like, that’s normal. Now looking back on my normal I should have gone to the doctor. But so we ended up at our first duty station and I scheduled a consult with gynecology. And they said, Yeah, we think you have endometriosis. We’re gonna test this and they put me on Lupron

Paulette  8:52  

That’s like an estrogen blocker, estrogen blocker.

Molly  8:55  

And so for six months, I had chemical menopause, which is wonderful.

Paulette  8:59  

And does that mean you had like hot flashes and no sleep,

Molly  9:03  

couldn’t sleep,  hot Flashes the whole thing it was other than, you know, I would read my estrogen levels would recover and I would be a better term functioning uterus with ovaries. It was the legit menopause situation. And after that, they said yes, the symptoms went away. You do have endometriosis, but honestly nothing got better. I never got pregnant, we ended up doing several cycles of Clomid I think we did a year and a half of Clomid.

Paulette  9:35  

Okay, so what does Clomid do and how does it work? Clomid binds to receptors in your brain to block estrogen. This makes your body think that your estrogen is low and that makes it release normal FSH to increase estrogen and in this process, FSH helps oocytes grow into mature eggs.

Molly  9:53  

Lots of ultrasound, lots of everything. We did IUI which is inner uterine area insemination that had no lot.

Paulette  10:02  

I did that too. And before my first one, I assumed that the doctor would be in her clinic with a turkey baster.

Molly  10:08  

I know I had no sense of what it would look like. I know it was so odd. I was like wait, are we sticking a needle somewhere because then they get the tubes out that are like when they’re going to draw blood with the butterfly. And I was like, Wait, what are we doing? And it was all fine. But yeah, and after that, I ended up having a exploratory laparoscopy which showed that I didn’t have endometriosis I did have some type of weird webbing going on everywhere. And then I had parents who will assess so they took an app that out and they were like, everything should be fine now. It was not it didn’t change. But they did say at that point. They started looking at my tests for my hormones and realize actually has PCOS. And so then I started getting into Metformin, my weight started becoming a bigger issue because I was getting older. So then I was not a teenager anymore. You know, I’m actually an adult, actual adult now. And so all of my hormones were starting to level out and I was just getting a whole bunch of funk. And so by the time we get to this point, it’s been 10 years and never ever that we know obviously we could have gotten pregnant and miscarried and  never know. And I think that’s the point that people really don’t understand is that you don’t always know if it’s early. Like you couldn’t present it and I I hate when people ask me that question for all I know, I’ve been pregnant 100 times. I only know what’s you know, and so we moved. We finally both were out of the military both are medically retired for various things. And it had been 10 years and I was super heavy at that point. I’m five foot one. And I was up to 200 pounds. I was really unhealthy. I was not in a great mental state. Because again, bipolar disorder has issues. I didn’t know I was bipolar at the time. They told me I had something else and so I was on medicine that I should have been on

Paulette  11:56  

So I don’t really know how bipolar works, but it can’t have helped your mental state to have your hormones slingshotting all over the place. Right?

Molly  12:05  

No, I’ve always struggled with extreme depression and then go into these, these other cycles where I’m super productive, always on never sleeping kind of going and I have bipolar two specifically not bipolar one. And so I tried to explain it as you’re happy was my sort of sad because my range of well I’m assuming that you’re happy but my emotions were so far apart from each other. I just had this extended range. Yeah. And so when I went from one to the other, it was significant. And so now I medication they’ve they’ve lowered the peaks on both end. And so now I have a somewhat normal range but for a good two months when it first started I had to relearn my emotions because I had no actual gauge of what I was feeling anymore. And so yes, having hormonal changes does not help with that at all. So I ended up losing about 50 pounds because they stopped the medication abruptly and didn’t wean the off of it and I got extremely sick and I went through withdrawal. And so I lost 50 pounds in less than three months.

Paulette  13:16  

Wow.

Molly  13:18  

It was hard. People kept looking at me like are you okay? I’m like why is everybody looking at me like this? And then I eventually tried on my clothes I had I don’t know if I just wasn’t paying attention or something. But I was doing this with my clothes. Are you holding? I was holding out it was like one of those limbs fast commercials from the 90s Were they like in a pair of pants? It was like that.

Paulette  13:41  

So for people who haven’t seen it. Pants and the pair of pants was meant for someone else because the waist is so big.

Molly  13:46  

Yeah, right, correct. Yes. And as I was getting healthy I had signed up to go to a consult with a leading IVF doctor in the Syracuse, New York area. People traveled from around the world see this guy and I was like, this is the guy. This is the guy. But I’d also kind of come to terms with this may just not happen for us. If this guy talks to us and it’s the same thing that we’ve been hearing. I just keep I’m done. Crying while peeing on sticks is only something you can do for like so long, you know? So we went and they did an ultrasound and they found a polyp. And but they couldn’t get any blood out of me to do bloodwork because I always dehydrated and so it just couldn’t get it. And so they said okay, well we have a lot of success when our patients go on a keto diet. So we want you to go on this keto diet because for some reason, butter in your coffee gets people pregnant. Sure, okay. Fine, whatever. At this point. I haven’t tried this. This is the thing I haven’t tried so short. Yeah. And so that day I started keto. And we have a family picnic a couple of days later and I was eating a keto friendly meal and I was just like, I’m just not feeling it. And my aunt was like, Oh, you might have keto flu. I was like, Oh, okay.

Paulette  15:16  

Okay, so lots of people have heard about the ketogenic diet. The point of the ketogenic diet is to put your body into ketosis, which is a metabolic state in which your body burns fat instead of glucose. In general, ketogenic diets follow some form of a high fat, some protein and low carb performance. And it looks like scientists don’t really understand what causes the so called keto flu, but they think it may be a human reaction or a change in the gut microbiome or some kind of carb withdrawal.

Molly  15:46  

And so I went two weeks, and I was just sick all the time. And I was like, if I have to eat ricotta cheese one more time, like no, and everybody kept going, are you pregnant? And I’m like, No, I’m not fucking pregnant. Because I have never been and I’m just sick because the goddamn keto flu, and I just have to eat so much fat and dairy and it’s just not what I like, because I just want my goddamn vegetables. You know, so I kept saying this and I was throwing up I couldn’t keep anything down. I looked green. It was awful. And eventually, it was fine. Wait, wait,

Paulette  16:21  

I’m gonna stop you right here. Yeah. So I’ve dabbled in the whole keto world. My sense of the Keto flu is it’s like three days or something. Yes, but you’re still thinking is the Keto flu because you’re assuming there’s no way to be pregnant and residual makes sense?

Molly  16:37  

This the only thing that makes sense is that I have because obviously, after 10 years, I would need something more than a random fluke.

Paulette  16:45  

Yeah, you’re correct. And you haven’t done other than the IUI we haven’t done anything else, yet.

Molly  16:48  

Yeah, well, I’ll be like Clomid and like ultrasounds time we had did We did HCG snapshots and injections and things like that. But but we didn’t do IVF. That was and so I was like, fine. I went home and I was like, I need to go get a pregnancy test because we didn’t have any home because I had stopped carrying them in the house because why would you carry something in the house that always tells you you’re a bad person? At least that’s how I felt doesn’t really tell me. And my partner was like, I’m not buying another test. I said, but everybody thinks we’re pregnant. We got to prove to them that we’re not pregnant. So everybody will stop suggesting the test was positive.

Paulette  17:29  

But at that point, I oh my god, wait, let’s not run past this part.

Molly  17:34  

So you get the test is your program reading outside the bathroom? I sit outside the bathroom. My husband was in the bathroom. And he is the one that looked at the text and was like it’s positive and he’s an asshole sometimes. So I thought he was playing with me. And I was like, this is not fun. I agree. And like then the shock like then I realized, oh, no, he’s in shock. And I was like, Oh my God, and I just kept saying, Oh my God 400 times. And Steven goes, Do you want to call your mom and I was like, We got to look up how you could possibly have a false positive because this cannot be true. We were convinced this was still wrong.

Paulette  18:14  

I agree. Why are we at CVS right now getting more tests.

Molly  18:18  

So I had another test and I was like, I’ll take it in the morning. Maybe it’s a thing because it’s 12 o’clock at night because we stayed up to do this thing. And I should note that our dog had randomly started sleeping on top of my belly a week or two prior and I was like, you weird dog. So evidently, my husband stayed up that night, researching false positives and found out that common false positive for pregnancy tests is, is cervical cancer. 

Paulette  18:44  

Okay, so just a note here about false positive pregnancy tests. There are a host of reasons you can get a false positive, most of which are relatively benign. These tests are looking for hCG. If you’re taking medication that increases HCG that could throw the test off, in general, according to the Mayo Clinic are false positives are uncommon.

Molly  19:08  

And so we were convinced that I had cancer. Now, this is not to make anybody who has had cervical cancer feel like something. This is just how convinced we were that we could not possibly be pregnant or cancer was a more realistic alternative to us. So I took the second test in the morning it was positive again. So I immediately call the clinic that we weren’t going to the IVF doctor, and I was like, I’ve had two pregnancy tests. And I I think I’m dying, because of course, overreacting. And she goes come in now, because they did not expect me to say that I had a positive pregnancy. So we came in and it’s been two weeks. I had lost like four pounds in these two weeks. And so they are doing the ultrasound and my husband goes so what are you looking for? How do you know your baby and the lady goes? We got to see the baby on the screen. And that’s when they told us that the polyp that they found when we came in was the yolk sac. 

Paulette  20:24  

Wow, oh my God, plot twist but

Molly  20:30  

I mean, because I was supposed to to get a DNC to take the polyp out.

Paulette  20:35  

Oh my god. So so so I’m worried for you when you call the clinic worried for you on your way and you’re like they’re gonna confirm my cervical cancer this the worst day in the world. At what point do we break free from that and just there’s joy or something else.

Molly  20:51  

There wasn’t joy till the baby was born honestly. Well, that’s even mix. There are to this day, there are still days of like, Wait, we have a baby. We had one. We’re good. We’re good because that that 10 years of being infertile like it. It’s a very specific concept that you have about yourself. It’s really hard to shake. And you’re not like other people who get pregnant by breathing. And so they can’t relate with you and you really can’t relate with them because not everybody has. I mean, there are some people who have been exposed to miscarriage their friends or family or have experienced themselves and so they have a rational fear of that first trimester. But not everybody does and some people get pregnant in their life. And they just Yeah. And they’re happy and excited. And I was constantly just pregnant. 

Paulette

I imagine its a huge mindshift to go from not being able to get pregnant to being pregnant.

the first time I had sex with intention, I’d be pregnant and I was like oh, is this seems to work. Just keep going. Seemed

like we weren’t trying to get pregnant. No, it just told me that and actually I have a interview. A while ago, my daughter’s friends told her no one no one ever be told this. Alicia like missing the machine. Right? Because she said, you know, pregnancy often happens, right? Whether you want it to or not. And it’s great. I control it and I wish that no one had ever said that. Right there’s a lot of times

Molly  23:28  

and it made it so that was the only focus for a long time. Like it. It took all the fun away of being a newlywed. It took a lot of that those early years we were already under stressful conditions because I was in the military. We were on a team away from home. You were living in Monterey, and you know, family was several if not 10 states away. We were all of these things that like looking back and like oh, we needed to be alone and you know, let us learn how to be ourselves and figure out who we are as a couple and you know, our boundaries. Didn’t even know about boundaries that back then. But all of those things kind of add us to a lot of us. Yeah. All of those things that taken away. The doctor didn’t mean to do that. And it wasn’t like I was purposely doing that to myself. My brain just latched on to it. And it was like, this is the only thing we’ve

Paulette  24:27  

got to fix this. This is not okay. Yeah, yeah, of course I am assuming doctors have the best of intentions and they’re trying to prepare you for something. But I guess I think that’s a little bit of an unknowable thing. You know, more humility or more uncertainty about the prediction would be great.

Molly  24:47  

Absolutely. It would have it would have been better for her to reframe it for me as maybe you just have a uterus that needs more attention. You know, Oh, well. Do you have any of these other things, but you do. Let’s try and figure out that because that’s something we need to address before you get pregnant any way or anytime of reframe there. But, I mean, it turned out I’m not I’m not simply a person that things worked out the way they worked out. But in hindsight, I’m glad it took 10 years because I would not have been in the right state of mind or been as capable to handle all the things that I have to handle. Now. Especially with my, my specific, kiddo I mean, it would have been different specific it’ll probably then

Paulette  25:36  

I think I couldn’t boil an egg at 18. So like, there’s something to be said. So you’re pregnant now. And do you lose the sickness after you’ve crossed the threshold of the first trimester?

Molly  25:51  

No, it stayed the whole time. I could not eat any protein during the pregnancy. Wow. So I literally Well, I mean, I cheese but I can eat pizza and Brownie. Occasionally gonna have some pasta but even that was started when my partner and I got I got mushroom ravioli because they were supposed to be not one of the things that was an issue and I still got sick. And so I got but on site clean just which is a combination of two things you can get over the counter, but when it’s combined into this bill, it’s extra helpful or something. And so that at least made it so that I could keep things down and most of the time, I still had to keep to the rules of don’t eat certain things otherwise, nothing can save me. But I at least was keeping things down which is good. And I gained a lot of weight though because you know, and by the time I was five or six months pregnant, I was swollen. Just all over and I don’t know. At the time I didn’t feel that swollen and I felt fine and fabulous. But looking back at pictures I’m like, how did we not get concerned about the amount of water that is protruding from my feet?

Paulette  27:17  

Well, let me ask you a question because this was and this was the case for me that may not be for you but I my first pregnancy was a giant disaster. And that’s not entirely because of that. The second one I was panicked the entire time. I threw up every single day. I’m a vegetarian, the Olympia pull downs, hot dogs. Disgusting, but that’s what I could eat. So I totally relate. To your by state of my lane, which I’ve used to be things that have been all worked out. But I tend to think when, I look back on that pregnancy that part of that was emotional, or that was that I was freaking out internally. I don’t know that you could see it necessarily but I was really nervous. too. So do you think some of yours was also concerned that this pregnancy would go to the end? Or?

Molly  28:05  

Well, there was that and then there’s extra chaos? So I had been the breadwinner until I got pregnant. And then my partner and I had a conversation and we acknowledge that I was the only adult in the house that actually could handle children. And so I needed to stay home because that was I had the skills. And so he went and looked for a job and he got a job and it was in West Virginia, and we were living in New York. And so I found out I was pregnant. The first week of November by January 1, he was in West Virginia. I was three or four months pregnant. We didn’t even know anything. We didn’t do the anatomy scan or anything yet. And so that was an extra stress load on everything but there was also just the added fear of what if I slip What if I fall? What if this is going on? What is that going on? What about this? We have a genetic cocktail in my family that’s kind of not helpful for a lot of things. And so you know what, if any of those come to light and then because I research when I panic, it was what is my birth plan going to be I had seen my my younger sister had already had two kids. And so I had been there for one of them and things did not go according to any of the plans.

Paulette  29:27  

I’m gonna stop my conversation with Molly here. I totally appreciate her sharing her health conditions and neurodivergent viewpoint affected her life and her pursuit of pregnancy. Once you are pregnant, you know how much physical and emotional effort it takes to keep up with doctor’s appointments. Now add 10 years of doctor’s appointments to the front end of that failed pregnancy tests hope and disappointment. Molly’s is really an inspiring story about perseverance and grit among other things. Next Friday, I’ll share the rest of our conversation. Thanks for listening. If you liked this episode, please share it with friends and or write a review telling everyone your life was changed forever by the show.

We’ll be back next week with the rest of this inspiring story.

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Episode 92SN: When Postpartum happens in a Pandemic: Julia’s Story, Part II

Scientists often study extreme cases to learn about the mechanics of a phenomenon. Many women found themselves running this kind of experiment in their own homes. How would the postpartum period–a time marked by isolation–feel when the whole world was isolating?

In today’s episode, author of the Upstairs House Julia Fine, reflects on her experience having her second child in the heart of the pandemic, and how the difference between a pre pandemic postpartum and a pandemic postpartum taught her something important about the period.  She shares some advice she wishes she’d received before she had kids and talks about how having language around some of the dramatic challenges we face as caregivers in those early months can change our experience of them. I also include insights from Dr. Patel, a former OB who now focuses on helping women in the postpartum period, on how to combat cultural expectations around motherhood in this period.

Click here to find Julia’s work, including The Upstairs House

To connect with Dr. Patel for postpartum coaching, click here

Audio Transcript

Paulette kamenecka  0:03  

Hi, welcome to War Stories from the womb. This is a show that shares true experiences of getting pregnant, being pregnant and giving birth. To help shift the common cultural narrative away from the glossy depictions of this enormous transition, you can find on all kinds of media to a more realistic one. It also celebrates the incredible resilience and strength it takes to create a better person and release that new person from your body into the world. I’m your host, Paulette kamenecka. I’m a writer and an economist and the mother of two girls and boy did I struggle with this transition. 

In today’s episode, Julia reflects on her experience having a second child and the heart of the pandemic and how, the difference between postpartum pandemic postpartum or something important about the period. She shares some advice she wishes she’d received. Before she gave kids. And how, having language around some of the dramatic challenges we face as caregivers in those early months can change our experience. I also include insights from Dr. Patel on how to combat cultural expectations around motherhood, the postpartum period. We left off last week with Julia talking about being home with her firstborn just after birth.

Julia  1:15  

Then when my husband went back to work, it was really really hard. You know, I had gone from having my own life and my own creative work and teaching to like, you know, the baby was my full time job and it wasn’t sleeping. And my son still doesn’t have a six and it’s still awful. And that has been like from day one, which is a terrible sleeper. We didn’t even get those good. The first few newborn nights that people get with that fool you into thinking that oh, it’s not that bad. We didn’t even get those. It was just it was just exhausting.

Paulette  1:50  

Yeah, but that’s super hard. And did you have did you have breastfeeding ambition?

Julia  1:54  

I yeah, I breastfed. He latched very easily, but I was not prepared for how much it would hurt to start, just like how painful it would be to have that adjustment. So I remember saying, I’m only going to do this for another week or so. And I said that a year I said, I’m only going to do it for another week. And ultimately, because it was so much less expensive to nurse him if he could nurse we want a full year.

Paulette 2:18  

Yeah, yeah, well, good. Well, God worked out, but it sounds like you were not emotionally attached to them.

Julia  2:23  

Not really. I don’t know if I would have felt differently had it been hard to nurse but we had a fairly easy time. I did really resent it for a while. Especially I remember it was my first so he was born April 29. And so my first Mother’s Day would have been a week and a half later, maybe everyone should come over. We were gonna go to the farmers market because walking distance, but he just wanted to nurse and so I was just sitting on the couch breastfeeding. And finally it was like I guess all of you our place was pretty small. And it was my husband’s whole family was there so it’s like I guess you guys just go and I remember just sitting there feeling so resentful of the fact that they were there and I was doing this and I don’t know why. You know, it’s I I wouldn’t have wanted them to stay. But you know, there wasn’t there wasn’t a better solution, but I it was very frustrating and I think I felt very frustrated. For a lot of my early motherhood experience.

Paulette   3:23  

I took this issue to Dr. Patel. Julia talks about feeling frustrated and resentful in those early days because of you know, the demands put on her exclusively and the pain of breastfeeding and no sleeping and I think there are these strong cultural expectations around motherhood that it’s about selflessness. And so you know, we talk about taking care of mom, but we don’t really want mom to take care of mom is many people’s perception of it. That’s like a false suggestion. So what advice would you give to new moms? How do you navigate that?

Dr. Patel  3:55  

It’s a wonderful question and a very tough one because this is actually a lot of what I try to work with because it’s about mindset. And here’s the thing: 

4:07  

women are made guilty or ashamed of themselves especially in the learning period. to do is to think about where feeling coming from, is it because you are trying to do something that is expected of you but doesn’t feel right to you? Is it expectations you have for yourself? What are those expectations based on? And what exactly are your priorities and what do you really want? So by thinking about what are your internal priorities like whether it say okay, it’s really important to me that I breastfeed my baby. It’s not as important to me when I think about it deep down that my house be perfect for guests or that I look perfect. If that were the case, I would ask mom to really think about the other things that she is being made to feel guilty or selfish for and to just let it go and accept that your priorities are your priorities. And you are doing what you feel is right and that is perfectly fine.

Paulette 5:17  

Yeah, I feel like there is no analog to how dependent a baby is so you don’t have any experience of being that necessary and required for someone else.

Julia  5:27  

Yeah, and nobody else can do it, especially if you’re breastfeeding because it’s not like like eventually we started I pumped a little bit and my husband would take one shifts. And that felt a little bit better but then you still have to pump. I don’t know it’s a lot.

Paulette 5:44  

It is. It is unbelievable. I mean, this is why you live with extended family. Right? This is yeah, it turns out that was a genius idea, which we did not

Julia  5:52  

know now. My youngest is now two and a half and we’re only just it’s like they’re only just coming up for air in terms of not  being stressed about raising kids. Constantly. Now, we’re only stressed about raising kids like 80% of the time.

Paulette  6:09  

Yeah, I want you to the time is required, of course. So it sounds like your husband also didn’t didn’t flag maybe you have depression.

Julia  6:19  

He? Yeah, I think we just didn’t know. I mean, he definitely he also was working long hours immediately come back to work and when he was around, he’s a great he’s a very good co parent and especially at this point sort of post pandemic in work from home. Life. He is absolutely it just was night and day with my daughter of how involved he could be in those early days. And that’s something that I think about COVID in the pandemic we wouldn’t have gotten but with my son it was. I was just by myself a lot because he had to work and he was the sole breadwinner at that point because I had left my job because it didn’t make sense to adjunct and pay for childcare and try to work on this novel that I was working on. So it was it was really rough actually. So this is funny too. So when we had the baby, we were living in a two bedroom but it was a lofted two bedroom so the second bedroom only had half of a wall and that wall was shared with the kitchen and I just remember it was fine when the baby was in with us. But we set up that second room we set it all up as a nursery and we were like finally we can put him in his own room and have our time and our space and like get back to our relationship. And then we realized nobody nobody warned us again. This is where I’d maybe if I had had friends with kids that could have been like you can’t put a baby there with that shared wall with the lights gonna get it in the sounds gonna get in and that’s not how it works. So the first time we put them in there and we were like Did we just like hide on our tiny balcony do a pull up in our bedroom. We’re in such a small space. So we ended up breaking our lease and moving because it was just untenable. But yeah, so that’s something we’ve everyone’s like, what advice do you have for your kids? Well, if you’re in an apartment, make sure you have four full walls for the kids room.

Paulette 8:06  

Totally, totally. That is totally true. And I asked about your husband in part because in your book, Megan’s husband is pretty quick to accept her suggestion that it’s nothing because yeah, I mean we all want it to be nothing right? That’s that’s like a completely human reaction. But when I was reading it, I found myself yelling at him. I was like Ben, no, dont’ believe him!

Julia  8:31  

he’s not great. He’s the he’s not that is not modeled at all. After my experience. I had so much more support the family I had to live my mom read the book too. And she’s like, this is it and as a Tory, these are not my parents. These are not my in laws. This is all fiction. But yeah, I sort of I in order to tell the story I want to tell I needed him to be a little more out of the picture. And I needed him to believe her and it also a lot of the book too is sort of about inauthenticity and relationships almost are about sort of how you know an ideal idealized view of what a relationship should be can sort of ruin what your relationship actually is. So I think in that particular relationship between Megan like she has never especially been herself and open with him and so it’s like, why would she start now, Bear?

Paulette   9:21  

On this topic of the difference between what you feel in this process and what you think you should feel? I’m going to read an excerpt from the upstairs house. In this scene. Meghan the main character has just given birth and is in the hospital. Julia writing in the voice of her main character says there’s nothing like the bond you will feel upon first meeting said Mrs. What to expect the Rush of  love will be overwhelming. I looked at Clara puffy little larva mouthful sang and I waited for the bond. I waited for the rush of love. There were needles still stuck in my arm. Maybe they were interfering and one more excerpt a few pages later, Megan is still in the hospital and feeling off. And she says to the nurse. Wait, I said I think there’s something the matter. The nurse pressed down on my abdomen. It all feels fine. Totally normal. No, I mean, Ben was coming into the room rolling the bassinet in front of them. It looks so happy so perfectly content. Nevermind I said. I must just be tired. The nurse smiled again parted the curtains and walked out the door. Do you want to hold her for a minute before the family gets here? finessed passing Claire over before I could respond. I wanted to want to hold her. So I nodded even while realizing that I didn’t want to hold her. There she was in my arms. 

Paulette: There were a lot of things that you wrote that I thought this is a perfect description of what it is of what it is as opposed to what what we’re imagining it should be or you’ve been told what we’ve been told to expect. So so it sounds like your older son is two when you get pregnant again, because they’re three years. 

Julia: Yeah, he was two and change.

Paulette  10:53  

And is it easy to get pregnant again? Super easy. Okay, good.

Julia  10:57  

We were so lucky. Yeah, we I think it was two months and then I was pregnant and it was difficult. Again, I had I think I had a normal level of national probably about the same as it was but because I also was caring for a toddler. It was harder, but then I was five months pregnant in March of 2020. And that was very, very, very hard, just emotionally and access to my OB. And I mean, it was hard. Sort of the question of like, are you higher risk, what would happen and I was so hormonal, and I think everybody was breaking down and crying. So in that in that respect, it wasn’t that different. But it was, you know, my idea of, oh my gosh, I’ve done this before I’ve got it. It’s going to be so easy this time around and it just, you know, went out the window.

Paulette  11:52  

My kids are older so I didn’t face the fears you described as a pregnant woman in COVID. But when COVID hit I thought immediately of pregnant woman I thought oh my god, it’s such a vulnerable place to be as a pregnant woman. It’s so it just makes COVID 1000 times harder, especially with a toddler because 

Julia  12:09  

It was very hard. You know, the one nice thing like I said, is that my husband was sent home and so at least he was there, you know, physically present even if he was working. I wasn’t alone alone, but it was. Yeah, I feel like I I have a few very strong memories of that time and then the rest I feel like I’m just like, blacked it out.

Paulette kamenecka  12:34  

So how imagining you’re going to the doctor by yourself?

Julia  12:36  

Yeah. It was I had I think it was about 20 weeks. So I had my 20 week. No, because he wasn’t there it had I think that people were there were like whispers at my 20 week scan. And he personally I think there was some kids meeting or something. So I’d been there by myself. But then after that meeting, I had to go by myself. It was like you went through. You waited in your car. For them to say that it was time to go into the building and take the elevator up and it was like you went through sort of the hazmat and everybody and it was yeah, it was very weird. And then there were a few appointments to that. I think they were like we’ll just do this virtually because if you say you’re feeling fine, then we believe you because nobody knew. 

I remember the first time that I went to the OB sort of once we knew what was happening post lockdown and it was just terrifying to be like, am I going to get COVID and kill my child by going to try to get help for my child in utero. It just was a mind trip and I hadn’t left the house in four weeks to it was very weird but yeah, what really was amazing was the fact that the nurses the OB is and the staff at the hospital were going in and coming in there and made it feel like it was weird, but it was i don’t know i They were really just such superheroes. It was really amazing.

Paulette   14:03  

It is what healthcare workers did for the pandemic is completely amazing. And, you know, whatever anxiety you might have come with has now been turned up to 11 because

Julia  14:15  

the worst part so my daughter was actually four weeks premature. She was right on the cusp of being an official preemie baby. If he had waited a few days, she would not even have technically been a preemie. But she was like four weeks, three days or something. And my inlaws at that point, it was June and my inlaws had started venturing out of the house and we still were just like, we went nowhere. We started nobody. We were just very, very careful. And so my in laws were like going to start quarantining so that if the baby came early, come and be our child care for my older child. And the day they were going to start quarantining. I just started bleeding and they said, come in and they’re like, up, you’re having the baby now and so there was a period there where we weren’t sure the baby, her heart rate was accelerated. And there were some weird complications of like, we don’t know if it’s going to be a C section or what’s going to happen when they weren’t sure because my husband was with my son. We weren’t sure if we were gonna get childcare and he would even be there for the labor and I was waiting on the COVID test. So I didn’t know if I was going to be in the COVID Waiting, in which case my husband couldn’t come regardless, there was all of those things all at the same time, and like this 25 minute period, which is probably the most stressed I’ve ever been in my entire life, and they all ended up falling in our favor. I didn’t need the C section. My dad at 1am picked up his phone and volunteered to stay for a night with my son, and I didn’t have COVID but it was just it was a vastly different experience because I wasn’t having contractions because it was just an early like random  bleed, but emotionally it was really wild.

Paulette kamenecka  15:57  

Yeah, that sounds super stressful. So was the bleeding and indication that the labor was on?

Julia  16:02  

Yeah, so retrospectively my doctors maybe your water started to break or maybe something they don’t really know what it was. But yeah, I had called thinking they’d be like, come in, and then they’d send me right home and so they’re like going over and bidding you if you’re gonna have the baby. That was my that was a shock because especially if we had woken up, my dad just turned green and we can walk him up and put him in the car. It was 830 or something and he had been asleep for like 45 minutes and we woke him up, put them in the car, took them downtown, and he’s like, what is happening? And then we thought I would, I thought I was going to come home. So they just drove around down in downtown Chicago, like they drove around in circles until I called them was like I am staying here. I guess you better take him back and figure out what to do with him because I couldn’t have any visitors. I could just have my one sort of support person, which is my husband. So in previous times, maybe we would have had him come into the hospital with us until someone could pick him up. But it was. Yeah, it was it was weird though, too because the hospital seems so empty compared to the first time around and all the times I have been there before. And then after. I was there for a few days because she was a preemie so I had I think an extra day because I had tests to run and no visitors really quiet very it was actually sort of a soothing and it felt almost like after being at home for such a long time. It was kind of nice to be somewhere else where was waiting on me. But it was very, very surreal.

Paulette  17:31  

And did she spend time in the NICU? 

Julia  17:34  

No, she didn’t. I claim she was fine. They’ll give her some steroids and she was tiny. She was only five pounds but healthy. So she’s just very little. She’s finally caught up. She’s a normal size now but it took a year and a half. 

Paulette: So they don’t know what kicked off the birth?

Julia:. No, they don’t know what kicked it off. So it it was a lot harder. And I this is I think you know I had already at this point written upstairs house and it was already off the publication but it sort of confirmed everything that I had read about birthing people needing someone to advocate for them like I find myself during sort of the period where I was by myself in triage and then they admitted me and I was by myself for a while and I remember looking over at one point interesting blood on the floor and I couldn’t it’s so hard when you’re in that state to know what’s going on and to make decisions for yourself or ask the right questions. So yeah, they ended up inducing me because they didn’t know what was going on. But my doctor came in and was like, Well, we know the baby’s gonna be born soon right? Let’s just let the baby like, you know, let her come out. And so it was such a relief when my regular doctor finally got there. But yeah, it’s um, I think I just went into early labor for whatever reason.

Paulette  18:47  

And that birth I’m assuming was shorter than your son.

Julia  18:50  

Oh, it was so, so quick. She Yeah, they so I was not having contractions or anything until they put me on Pitocin and again, I got the epidural right away, which I’m glad I did. And then I fell asleep and then I woke up to that being like time to push and I pushed four times and then she was here. So she’s so because she was so little, so it’s just like she came and then afterwards that was a little bit scarier because with my son, there was no reason to think that everything wouldn’t be totally normal, but with her it was like okay, well why was she early is her heart rate. Okay, did she pass all of these various, you know, premie tests, and again, she was just so so small. It was really wild. I don’t know if that had been my first kid. I think it would have been just very, very hard to not think I was gonna break her every day. 

Paulette   19:40  

Yeah, yeah.

I mean, five pounds is a second sugar. Yeah, she was tiny. She was tiny. And so what’s it like when you get home the second time?

Julia  19:48  

Oh, man. So in a way it was. It was definitely hard because so my mom who lives on the East Coast didn’t even get to meet my daughter until she was six months old. So that whereas she had flown out when my son was born, and she didn’t say long, she just came to meet him and then left but we had family there and there were people and people bringing by it was just the four of us, but it was nice. There was something really really special about my son meeting his sister for the first time and I think because of he had not been around other kids for a long time. So I think it in a way, made that transition almost easier because he was like, thank God. It’s not just mom and dad in the house. Again, it’s something new, but I also felt like I have learned from my son, we used a pack and play bassinet because I was like, oh, we’ll save money. And I’ll just use the bassinet part of the pack and play and that really didn’t work really well for us. And with my daughter, I had the my sister in law’s nice swivel bassinet. And I knew sort of, I knew what to expect in terms of how much sleep I would be getting and I knew to have a protein bar for the middle of the night and I knew to you know, budget time for this. So in that regard, it was a lot easier even though we didn’t have help. I think that for my husband who was on Oh, and the other part too is my husband who same company you had 10 days of maternity leave the first time and then they changed policy and he now had two months.

Paulette: Oh wow. 

Julia: So he was with that three year old and I was with the baby I mean basically did it like that. And then by the time he had to go back to work, back to work just you know work for him still. I sort of had the heart, the heart we were through sort of some of the more difficult parts and I was getting a little bit more sleep than

Paulette   21:44  

I was gonna say I hope your daughter is a better sleeper

Julia  21:46  

that she is. Yeah, she is. Yeah, and she was right away too. Yeah, it was so it was a very it was very weird because on paper, everything should have been so much harder. But the second kid just the circumstances were so much more difficult. But I think because I was already a parent, it was easier for me than that transition from sort of belonging only to myself to being somebody’s mother.

Paulette  22:15  

Yeah, I mean, I’m sure that you’re hoping this too, but I’m hoping that books like yours, the upstairs house will broaden the way we talk about postpartum so people know to expect you know challenge.

Julia  22:27  

Yeah, and I think because I think what’s even harder and it so much of what we see is this, you know my perfect nesting cocoon experience. And so you think, Oh, I’m having these particular feelings. And so then not only is it hard to have the feelings but you also feel sort of like guilt or shame about having the feelings and the more we can normalize it. You still might be having the feelings but at least you know, like this is normal. It doesn’t make you a bad parent. It doesn’t mean that you’re not going to have a great relationship with your kid. It doesn’t mean that things are not going to be as good as they are for anybody else. But because we talk about it in such an infantilizing way with term baby blues. just kills me. Would you say that to anybody else about any other illness or disease or diagnosis? It just is so for me personally, I felt very well. Why can’t I just shake it up? It’s just baby blues and then it’s no that’s not how it works.

Paulette  23:21  

Julia talks about how what we perceive as quote a perfect cocoon normal and postpartum is based on what we see around us. And if you look on Instagram, you may see pictures of quote, a perfect food. And it really does bring people a disservice because it makes them question their own experience and makes it seem as if this transition is easy, but it’s not for a lot of people.

Dr. Patel 23:40  

Exactly. And as soon as babies out of mom mom’s kind of left to herself and all the focus is on baby with at least the rest of the family right and yourself. And she’s dealing with all the physical whatever she went through for childbirth, the mental the hormonal changes and plus the loss of control the loss of her own identity. She’s now just known as mom, you know, she’s not necessarily who she was before and it’s it’s very difficult. And so the one thing that I always say to to new moms is if you feel weepy or upset or irritable, allow yourself to feel what you’re feeling. Right? Just because it’s baby blues doesn’t make it not real or silly or because it’s going to go away in a couple of weeks doesn’t mean you’re not feeling it right now. Talk about it, let it out. Let your feelings show share your feelings with others and get the help and support that you need. And then take care of yourself get the fresh air get the exercise, change the scenery. Try to get as much sleep as you can try to get healthy food and let go of the need for control because nobody’s perfect and nothing is gonna go exactly according to plan and it’s all okay. It’s okay to feel what you’re feeling. I feel like so many women fight that just makes it worse

Paulette  25:03  

That’s totally true and a critical thing to highlight accepting that as a lifelong project, right. Your kids will teach you that in 1000 ways in the next 18 years, but the initial indoctrination is so extreme. 

Dr. Patel  25:18  

It is it’s extreme and it’s sudden, in a way and no one tells you right? So if you’re blindsided

Julia  25:24  

and I think if I had had different language for it, I might have just been gentler on myself and less, you know, get over it. You’re fine.

Paulette  25:34  

For sure I there’s a lot of language around pregnancy and maternity that really needs to be revoked and renewed, really to the geriatric pregnancies 

Julia: oh my gosh, 

Paulette: 

So there are a lot of terms that need to be both more accurate and more useful, because those terms don’t help. They’re things like the incompetent cervix. How is that helpful, or accurate or useful or you know, there are no very to other things where you use that kind of adjective with a body part in a way that makes you feel like a failure. 

Julia  26:13  

I know there’s there’s enough to feel bad about that. You shouldn’t have to feel bad about these things that are just biological phenomenon.

Paulette   26:21  

Yes, yeah, totally. Agree. Am I leaving something out from your book or your experience that you’d like to highlight?

Julia  26:30  

I don’t think so… I think we have touched on all of it. I mean, it really, I think most most importantly is it left me and it feels like you were left with this to after your experiences. I just my own personal experience left me very frustrated with the way that in the US especially we provide or don’t provide for new parents and just ready to do whatever I could to try to change that until I’m writing the book. You know, I hopefully it was like, Look at look at how little support we aren’t giving people how can we change that? And I don’t know that I’ve have had the answer to how can we change it but I hope it shines the light on the experience that something people have.

Paulette  27:11  

Yeah, I think calling it the fourth trimester suggesting that you should be done. With that difficulty in three months is insane. And there’s so many other like you mentioned biological processes that take so much longer to recover than three months is just for your uterus to shrink. So that can’t be the whole story. So it is important to enlarge this conversation to include lots of other things. 

Julia: Absolutely. 

Paulette: Before you go into our talk a little bit about your Yeah, sure.

Julia  27:39  

So my my third novel is coming out June 13. From flat iron books and it is it’s funny because it is vastly different superficially, but at heart it’s about a lot of the same things, which are sort of gender roles and the patriarchy and you know, women and girls specifically sort of not being believed or having an opportunity, but what it’s about is it’s a book about so the composer Antonio Vivaldi who wrote The Four Seasons taught and wrote music for this sort of all girls orphan orchestra in Venice in the 1700s. And so the book takes place in 1717 and it is about two girls, one a violinist and violist who are sort of competing to be in this top tier women’s orchestra and they make a deal with this unknown creature in the canals of Venice and sort of has dangerous repercussions. So it’s very much if the if upstairs house was like me writing from a lot of my personal experience, this was what do I wish I was doing instead of being stuck in home with two kids in the pandemic But yeah, comes that it’s called Madalena and the dark.

Paulette 28:53  

Thank you so much for coming on and sharing your story.

Julia  28:56  

I’m so glad you’re doing this is really wonderful. Thank you for the opportunity.

Paulette kamenecka  28:59  

Absolutely. And the book again, upstairs house. I thought it was really good.

Julia 29:04  

Thank you.

Paulette   29:06  

Thanks again to Julia for sharing her experiences and how they influenced her to take up the often intense challenges of postpartum period as a subject worthy of exploration and a novel. If you think of the weight of the dramatic changes that happen instantaneously after you come home from the hospital or birthing center, it’s astounding. You’re immediately required to mother a newborn and figure out what the job entails how to do it and heal in real time. And oh, by the way, a life depends on it. It makes sense that we all feel like it’s a lot but doesn’t make sense is that we don’t talk about it more. If you’re interested in other stories of how people manage postpartum depression, you can check out episode 60 and 61, where I talk with a psychiatric nurse who experienced postpartum depression. And in Episode 58, I include the insights of a researcher who worked on the trials of the first FDA approved drug needs specifically to address postpartum depression, which was both shockingly because it’s so recent, and not shockingly because Women’s Health rarely gets top billing 2019 in the show notes, you can find links to Julie’s work and to Dr. Patel. Thanks for listening. If you like the show, please share it with friends. We’ll be back next week with another inspiring story.

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Episode 91SN: A Postpartum that inspired a Novel: Julia’s story, Part I

“Need is an albatross. To be needed is to wear the weight of stones across your chest . To be wanted. That is different. To be wanted by a child is the cleanest of desires. To still be wanted once the child is fed and rested; once the diapers are fresh and the snot has been siphoned from the nostril and the gas has passed through. To be recognized not just as a body, but a person, a comfort to be loved.”

That’s a brief snippet from the novel The Upstairs House by Julia Fine, my guest today on war stories from the womb.

In today’s episode the author Julia Fine talks about how her experience with the significant challenges of the postpartum period inspired her novel, what she’s learned about the experience now that’s its in the past, and how she hopes it will foster a more realistic public discussion of the challenging months that most mothers encounter in the weeks just after birth. I also include the insights of a former OB who has become a postpartum coach about signs of PPD and her advice to help women manage this often stressful, exhausting, lonely period.

Here is a link to The Upstairs House, Julia’s book about the Postpartum period, and to Julia’s other work

You can can find Dr. Geetika Patel‘s workshops, newsletter, Birthing Mamas group, and postpartum coaching here. Feel free to contact her through my website.

Audio Transcript

Paulette  0:07  

My guest today on war stories from the womb. This is a show that shares true experiences of getting pregnant, being pregnant and giving birth to help shift the common cultural narrative away from the glossy depictions this enormous transition you can find out all kinds of media to a more realistic one. It also celebrates the incredible resilience and strain it takes to create another person inside your body and release that new person into the world. I’m your host, Paulette Kamenecka, I’m a writer and an economist and a mother of two girls. And I struggled with just about every aspect of this process.

In today’s episode, the author Julia fine talks about how her experience with the significant challenges of the postpartum period, inspire her novel, The upstairs house, what she’s learned about the experience now that it’s in the past and how she hopes it will foster a more realistic and honest public discussion of what it’s like for most mothers in the weeks just after birth. I also include the insights from a former OB who’s become a postpartum coach about signs of postpartum depression as opposed to baby blues. And her advice to help women manage this often stressful, exhausting, lonely period. What follows is the first part of my conversation with both of these women.

Hi, thanks so much for coming on the show today. We are lucky and excited to have author Julia fine on the show. And we’re going to talk about many things, one of which is her recent book, I think 2021 2021 Yeah, called the upstairs house and I want to describe it and you can correct me. Okay. So generally speaking, I’d say it’s a book about the challenges of the postpartum period. One of the themes is how cultural expectations about love and relationships can profoundly shape our actual experience of them. And what I’d say about the book is it follows two threads. One is the story of the main character in the present day, whose name is Megan, who’s working on her I’m guessing English dissertation,

 

Julia  2:40  

right? Yeah, it’s a history, but it’s sort of some overlap. Yeah.

 

Paulette  2:43  

And she has her first baby and is stepping into the postpartum period. And another thread starts off as a story of two women who are featured in Megan’s dissertation and progress and talks about their intimate relationship in the 30s and 40s. And one of the women featured in the dissertation is what I would call shadow famous, which is that we all know Margaret Wise Brown because every parent has read Goodnight Moon 4000 times, but we don’t know her know her which is coming through in the dissertation. And these two threads get tangled when Megan returns from the hospital with her firstborn and starts hallucinating that the women from her dissertation have moved in above her flat, there is no apartment above her flat. So that’s one of the signals that there’s this isn’t necessarily really what’s happening. And Megan is negotiating the intense challenges of this period of isolation, the exhaustion, the emotional flux, while her dissertation characters have invaded her home and in her mind are sort of stirring up trouble.

 

Julia  3:41  

Yeah, that sounds about right to me. Okay, excellent.

 

Paulette  3:43  

So I in some ways, on your perfect reader, because I did my dissertation at University of Chicago. I lived in Chicago was pregnant for that. I felt every single thing I lived in a walk up. All that stuff felt so real and familiar to me. I love this book. I thought it was really powerful. And for me, one of the marks of a good book is does it make you feel something and I felt panicked. I 100% I 100% felt it and I and I it is one of those books that you can’t put down so congratulations on this amazing work. And I know that you talk about in the book how you want to bring attention to the postpartum period. So we’re going to talk about that because I want to hear about your experience. How old is your

 

Julia  4:26  

i So My oldest is he’ll be six at the end of April. which just sounds nuts to say but it’s true. And then I also have a two and a half year old.

 

Paulette  4:34  

Okay, so you’ve been through this today. So let’s talk first about your experience. And then we’ll talk about this book and the one that you have coming out in June. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. So with most people we talk about is how the family that you create is in some ways linked to the family that you came from, in terms of your ideas about what you want a future and what you think it’s going to look like. So did you grow up with siblings?

 

Julia  4:56  

Yeah, I have. So this actually is very, very apt because I’m the oldest of three I have two younger brothers, one of whom is three years younger than me, and it felt like everyone we knew the sibling, my age, and then there was younger. So when it came time to have a second kid, I was very much like, I want it to be three years younger, which I think ultimately means nothing, but to me felt very, very important. And it was funny too, because in order to have my kids three years apart, and one of them had to be born in June of 2020, which is like a terrible time to be giving birth. So if I had, if I had not felt so strongly, perhaps it would be different, but it definitely impacted you know, wanting my kid to have a sibling. I’m not sure that it would have been as important to me who I not grown up with siblings and sort of felt the value of that

 

Paulette  5:41  

Okay, so now let’s fast forward to your children. When you go to get pregnant, is it easy?

 

Julia  5:48  

Yeah, so my first is a surprise baby. I mean, we knew that we wanted kids, you know, within sort of like a three year window, but when I got pregnant, I it was not planned. And we were sort of like what now what do we do? And it sort of goes back to the book too, because I had just written but not yet sold. My first novel, you just signed with a literary agent. And I felt like I want to have a career before. I have kids because I had seen my own mother. How difficult that was. My mom had been a lawyer to work for the Justice Department and she had a career and took some time off to raise her kids and then tried to go back to it and it was so difficult. So I could only imagine how hard it would be if I had not yet really established myself because I was hoping to establish a career as a writer, which sounds nuts in any regard, especially nuts with a small baby. But we were sort of back and forth about like, is it the right time for us? And then ultimately, I think I felt like okay, well what if, you know, we decided it’s not the right time now. And then it’s hard to pregnant later or what if I regret it and so that was enough. For me to be like, This isn’t my timeline necessarily. We’re like two years off, but it’s gonna make sense for us. But what it meant was that in my circles, at least, I was the only one really having a kid I was 29 when he was born, I have just turned 29 which I know you know, in certain places is like, Oh, my goodness, why don’t you have five kids already? Among my friends and family. I was the first one and that made it, I think, more difficult because there wasn’t really I didn’t really know anyone who I could meet up with. afterwards. I didn’t know anyone who could sort of like explain pregnancy to me or sort of reassured me about things like I found myself in the role sense and but at this point in my life, like a lot of my friends have kids, but I found myself like as my college and high school friends were having kids. I was the one who’s like, Oh, this is normal. Oh, don’t worry about that. Oh, that’s weird. Maybe you should call somebody you know. It’s just nice to have that person. So I think that despite the fact that I had a very supportive family and very good friends who you know were there and what ever aspects they could be I found pregnancy and postpartum periods specifically to be very lonely. And I think that is what led me then to write a book about a very lonely woman who does not have the support that I had. And it also sort of led me to look into like, wait a minute, why is this the case? Like why as a country are we so obsessed with making women give birth and then giving them no resources? No preparation, I felt just like totally sort of thrown in the deep end. Because you read all the books, you know, like, you know, in six months of pregnancy, this is what your baby’s doing, and here’s how you should feel but then the baby comes out and it felt to me at least, like there were no real resources. There was a lot of like your baby should be eating and peeing this many times. But there wasn’t anything like for me necessarily. It felt it felt very isolated, very lonely. I felt like I was doing something wrong. And it took me probably like eight months to make friends who also had kids, and we were all like, oh, I felt that way too. And hence sort of feeling like Alright, there’s room to write more about what it feels like to become a new parent. Like, what it actually feels like.

 

Paulette  9:08  

Yeah, so I’m picking up two things from what you said. The first is this attempts to mesh a family life with a career as I said, I missed my grad school graduation because I gave birth and then I was racing to recover because I had to start a job within three months. And this that, you know, the the career system is not set up for birthing people in any way. And I am sort of hoping that since COVID, kind of grasp the work environment and shook it hard, that we’ll get different ways to progress in a work context because it doesn’t make any sense and like you, I want it to be established before I had kids and and that’s just those are too many things to juggle and balance and the current system we have does not actually strike the word balance because that’s a silly word that doesn’t really apply to this experience. If you’re lucky enough to get to control your fertility. It’s hard to know what to do with that. There’s no There’s no good time. There’s no right time to do it. And the second thing that you mentioned was that there is no emotional investigation of what it is to be a mother when you give birth to a baby now, two things are being born the baby and a mother. Absolutely. And those things are both brand spanking new. And I feel like the books that are out there that describe it are a little bit more medical or clinical then is useful.

 

Julia  10:34  

Yeah, I think so. And it’s cut off at the Automate because I’m not the type of person who sits and reads parenting books as much as I would love to. I sort of feel even today. All right, well, I spend all day doing it. I’m not going to read about it, which is probably to my disadvantage, because I’m sure I would learn things from read articles. I don’t you know, there there definitely are things out there too. Because when I started to dig in to do research for the upstairs has to I found into Memoirs of women and birthing people who’ve written about their postpartum depression. or psychosis or just sort of ambivalent or whatever else it was. And it’s funny too, because as I was working on the novel, I felt like there weren’t very many novels about what it was like or a bit sort of included. That part of random and even since 2021. If you think about sort of the lifecycle of a book I think I sold the book in 2019, early 2019, and it came out in 2021. And in that time, there have been a lot more books that I think interrogate society’s idea of the new mother and if what to me feels like a more accurate depiction of what it feels like and people who are not afraid to be talking about breastfeeding, you know, for like 50 pages in a row because that is what absorbs you. And for such a long time. I think we thought oh, one it only is relevant to new moms, which I think is absolutely ridiculous. I think in the same way that we would need to learn about other people’s experiences, the experience of a new mom is equally valid, as you know, a world war two pilot that you’re reading about. They’re just different people, different minds. And also this idea that the things that women do in the domestic sphere is aren’t all literary, I think has also been sort of a pervading myth. In the past, however, many more probably from the very beginning of sort of like modern fiction, and I think that’s something that a lot of people are pushing to change that, you know, we could read about a man’s midlife crisis and be like Pulitzer Prize winning literature, but for a woman it just nobody, no one would want to quote unquote, buy it. And I think that is something that I was really, really pushing back against, because it sort of invalidates the experience. There’s nothing more nuanced, I think, than those first few early days of parenthood in terms of just your the way that your emotions are so mixed, and the highs are so high and the lows can be so low, and it’s so new, and it’s a reinvention and the idea that that would not be literary enough or that there wouldn’t be interest in that just struck me as so ridiculous that I felt like how can I write this as a book that sucks people in and forces them to acknowledge when it’s valid to feel however you feel about new parenthood and to, you know, this experience is just as deserving of literary treatment as anything else.

 

Paulette  13:25  

This issue of our cultural view of postpartum to an expert today we have Dr. Kate Tikka Patel on the show. She’s an OB by training, who saw and experienced some of the significant gaps in medical care for mothers who’ve given birth and is now focused full time on helping women manage the postpartum period. Dr. Patel, thanks so much for coming on.

 

Julia  13:45  

Thank you very much. Thanks for having me.

 

Paulette  13:48  

So I think part of Julie’s mission with this book is to normalize the experience of how difficult it is this early postpartum period. What are your thoughts about that, in your opinion? How does our current medical system handle this and what could it do better?

 

Julia  14:01  

There really is not a lot of reliable consistent guidance for women in the postpartum period. So I think it is really important to get the word out about the lack of care I mean, the current medical system is basically absent from this time period. And it leaves women adrift and looking for answers on their own. And unfortunately, I think in previous generations, that support may have come from expertise within the family or community but the way our culture is now we’ve kind of lost that. And early postpartum is full of changes and struggles and whether it was generational support community, they would provide the extra hands, they would provide the expertise, and they would provide the companionship, which which many women are lacking in the postpartum period.

 

Paulette  15:02  

So I totally agree with you and I think it should be a day Lodz. And just if we’re talking about statistics, let’s imagine it’s only women who care about it. 86% of women at some point in their life give birth. So that’s nearly half the population surely that’s enough. At the risk of suggesting this blaspheme. I think this is a movie. I think it’s a beautiful book. And one thing I like about it is I’m a little bit of a little bit of a snob for pretty prose, and it’s but but I think it is, this is a large story. This is a real story. You know, this woman in the book has postpartum psychosis. I think my legs say that. Yeah, yeah, it’s

 

Julia  15:41  

I mean, it’s sort of unclear throughout the book, if it’s like she’s, it’s an actual ghost or postpartum psychosis and that it sort of comes down like the medical establishment comes down on the side of postpartum psychosis, but I sort of hoped that the reader could interpret it, you know, however you wanted to, but definitely the sort of realistic way to interpret it is like she’s having a psychotic break.

 

Paulette  16:01  

This kind of psychosis is pretty rare. But, but, you know, I was looking at statistics for it. Let’s say there’s about 4 million births a year 350 to 9400 9400 is a lot of people. If you would think these sorts of things. It’s a small fraction, but there’s enough there are enough births, that it’s that is significant, but postpartum depression is like a half a million with women a year. Like that’s just a huge number of people who I’m sure can see their own experiences in this because this postpartum period is such a fun house. It’s just it’s such a weird transition and your view of reality gets so exactly warped by exhaustion and I totally agree with the isolation which I had no, I did not give birth during COVID at all, and and it was totally isolating in a way that I had was not prepared for

 

Julia  16:50  

how I Yeah, so it was funny because the isolation of becoming a new parent. So my son was born in 2017. And my daughter was born in June 2020. And it should have been so much harder to give birth and COVID We had no outside help. We were all crammed into this small condo couldn’t go anywhere. No one could come to the hospital with me, you know, and she was early there were all these complications. And it was still harder for me the first time around with all of the social support and trends like not in a pandemic just because that transition is so hard.

 

Paulette  17:23  

Yeah, it is. Can you speak specifically to the issue of isolations? Like what suggestions do you give to others to help us adjust to the dramatic shift in priorities when the social structure doesn’t shift with it?

 

Julia  17:37  

Yes, so this is so important. I can’t even emphasize it enough. And I think that the first step is awareness that we have to talk about this it has to be more normalized and understood, not just among women who are getting pregnant or had been pregnant, but also their partners and the entire community in general. We have to talk about it. And because it happens so often in our culture, and if you think about why it’s happening, it makes perfect sense, right? We’re going from these social beings completely in control of our schedules and activities. In our lives. We are going to work or you know, hanging out with friends. And then suddenly we’re new moms, and we are constantly have a little helpless infant who can’t survive without us. We can’t sleep when we want. We can eat when we want. We can even use the bathroom without being interrupted. Much less go out, go to work, hang out with friends or have a normal phone conversation. Right? So so there’s none of that interaction that we get before having the baby and so it’s it’s only natural that it would lead to isolation. The partner may also feel the same isolation. If you know, the mom and the dad or mom and partner are both just taking care of baby on their own and they’re again neither one is getting out for a while or whatever. So they may feel it as well. And they also may not be aware that mom is feeling it if they’re going to work all the time and they don’t feel it at all right. So the partner is an important person ought to also be aware, along with extended family and friends. But once there is awareness, I think the other thing to emphasize to Mom is that this is a change that is not going to go go back to what you believe is normal anytime soon. So a good idea is to accept it to accept that these are changes that have to happen right now because this little one can’t survive without you. But you can also figure out ways to reduce the isolation. You can try to get support. You can join support groups, you can share your experiences with other new moms that are going through the same thing. You can ask for someone to come and help and maybe take baby for a little while so you can spend some time doing things that you want to do. I think it’s natural for us to try to fight it right to be like, Well, no, I’m supposed to be happy. I’m supposed to be joyful. I’m supposed to be fine with this and and everything will just be fine. And but I think that fighting and that sort of negative outlook on it doesn’t help either. We have to just say okay, this is what it is. And it’s really hard but let me see what I can do to alleviate it.

 

Paulette  20:30  

So let’s get your son’s story so you get pregnant easily on and I you know thank goodness for that story because that’s the story we all have in our head. The first time I connected sex I was like I’m pregnant. Thank you very much pregnant, which was not how it works for a lot of people so I’m glad for that. And and it is hard to be the first in your friend group to be pregnant. So what is your pregnancy look like?

 

Julia  20:53  

Oh, it was fairly easy. I had a decent amount of nausea, especially when I compare it to doing it a second time around with a three year old versus doing it just Oh, I could just lie in bed and watch movies and I was working as an adjunct professor so I had a lot of downtime. Where I didn’t need to be in an office. I only had to be on campus three days a week. So I literally was just eating grilled cheese and watching romantic comedies in bed thinking this is so hard and retrospectively I wish I could go back there. But yeah, no, it was a fairly uncomplicated, pretty easy, you know, up until like even even labor and delivery was pretty easy like I pushed for a very long time but that’s normal for you.

 

Paulette  21:36  

But let’s go a little bit slower. So even the nausea would you want me to walk past that and be like oh so easy. I was throwing up every day. Like it is. It is I’m it’s Yeah, it is normal, but it is your first kind of wake up call that you are renting out your body and you are no longer the owner, the owner, the only owner. And it’s a little bit shocking. I mean, I was in grad school. So I also had a lot of flexibility. But I remember falling asleep on my keyboard. Like I think of it as like natural chloroform. Like you just all of a sudden you just can’t you just can’t write which is not what I expected. The overwhelming fatigue and the and the nausea of I again I was lucky in the in the scheme of things because I only threw up in the morning. It wasn’t like all day nausea. Yeah, but but that’s still a pretty big thing to undertake.

 

Julia  22:28  

Oh, it was a lot and I think I just mentally when I think back to pregnancy, the first time around. I just knew it was so new. And again, I didn’t have any close friends who had been through it. And so every little thing. It’s like oh my boobs hurt is that normal? Oh I’m you know bleeding. Is that normal? Is this normal? Should I be throwing up this offense? You know, I was on the What to Expect When You’re Expecting message boards where you just ask every single question it’s everybody’s asking all these questions like Is this a normal thing does this look at this like does that and I feel like it says something culturally, we’re gonna get 10 xiety inducing just carrying a child is but also like how unprepared we are because we don’t really talk about it in any circles other than that particular circle. Imagine if growing up, I had talked to people all the time who were pregnant about the specifics of pregnancy, I feel like it would have been a very different experience.

 

Paulette  23:27  

Totally, totally. And so it sounds like the pregnancy went along pretty normally. And then before we get to the birth, did you have an idea of what you hoped it would be like or how

 

Julia  23:37  

so I am such a baby when it comes to pain. I was like I want the epidural. As soon as possible. I knew I wanted to be in a hospital where I could be as zonked out as possible from it. I’m trying to remember if I had a playlist I might have had. I might have made a playlist, but it was not very precious at all about what I thought would happen. I just wanted to help the baby and I wanted to feel the least amount of pain that I could possibly feel.

 

Paulette  24:05  

Okay, totally fair. So take us through the day. How do you know Today’s a day?

 

Julia  24:10  

Oh man, so I my son was born on his due date. So it was I had gone in for all of the checks where they’ll what do they call it where they write down your cervix or whatever they do? Or they stick their finger up there, you know? And I kept thinking, oh my god, I was so I was so uncomfortable. Everybody is in those final days and weeks of pregnancy that I was just like, come on, come on, come on out. And I can remember I eat spicy food and had sex took a walk and did all the things and then it was 9pm the night before my due date and all of a sudden I started having contractions, and I was there. I’m in general, a fairly prompt person. I like to be like Okay, now it’s time to do this. Now it’s time to do that. So it’s like now it’s time to the hospital. And they’re like, No, it’s not you know, you stayed stayed home for a while to remember I finished the book I was reading. And it was a 200 pages of a book that I read between 830 and I sent my husband as you go to sleep because you’re going to need you know, I can’t sleep right now and one of us should be well rested. And I remember I woke him up probably at like 2am to be like this really really hard. And when made called they say the thing of you know wait for the contractions are five minutes apart and lasting however long and when a time that it wasn’t quite so we tried to put something on TV and it’s like I can’t even sit here and watch us we have to just go. So we got super lucky because we live in we’re in Chicago and really in the middle of the city and our hospital was downtown. And I had been like oh my gosh this traffic What will we do but it was 3am so it hurt it was terrible like every pothole felt like I was gonna die. But there was no traffic so we got there really quickly. But when you get to the hospital at 3am There’s just not as much good they cannot move quite as quickly. So we were in triage for three or four hours or Wow by which point because i They admitted me at first and they were like you’re not dilated enough. And I said how is that possible? And they sent me to walk around in the halls for a while. So I did and then I came back I was like, please check me there’s no way and then they checked in like oh wow, you’re now which sounds like is that fair? Like? But then yeah, I just remember being in triage. We got to the hospital around three and I was admitted around 7am or 730. At which point I was like it felt like heaven to be moved from the tiny little triage room with the blurry TV and you know, there’s no space at all into the big birthing room. And then I got asked for the epidural on the way up for you guys like I’m ready for it now and then it was great both times I had I’ve had the epidural and has worked. So it’s not even true with my daughter. They couldn’t find the nerve for it. So that part was awful. But for my son, they found it right away. The epidural kicked in. It was great. I was great. I was calling my mom texting my friends. You know, so ready, maybe napped a little bit. Although I do remember my husband was like, I’m gonna go get something to eat and I’m like, don’t leave you might miss the baby and the nurses were like, go get by. Yeah, so I it was a nurse that I liked. I remember I was chatting with the nurse. I started All right yeah They’re like two hours into pushing. Maybe we’re all of a sudden it’s like a switch flipped and all of a sudden is like, this is actually terrible. I’m in so much pain. It’s really bad. And it went from being like if he had just come come right on out, it would have been such a pleasant experience. But then I think he was crowding for 45 minutes. And wow. It was awful. They had to bring in the mirror, which I think I have in the book, too. They brought in a mirror because they were like, look, look at him. He is progressing, but I just use the big headed kid. And it wasn’t my OB either because it was so early in the morning, I guess or I’m not sure exactly what it was, but that would be there. I’d been seeing it was somebody else too, which felt very weird. But yeah, it just took it took a while but then he was out and it was fairly uncomplicated after that no carrying no bleeding. So in retrospect, I got very, very lucky but it was at last hour and a half of pushing. It’s all Oh, I’m actually

 

Paulette  28:23  

there’s no fear.

 

Julia  28:24  

Oh, I was really scared. I think that

 

Paulette  28:29  

I accelerated Prentice

 

Julia  28:30  

Women’s Hospital which is just I felt very I have a few friends who work there, which I think helped. But I also felt very I just felt very secure very safe very much if something goes wrong. That’s why I’m in a hospital which in a way, I was so nonchalant about the birthing process that then when I had a baby to take care of I was like, Whoa, this is the end result of this, you know, but yeah, when I hear other people’s stories, I’m like, Oh my gosh, I maybe should have been more afraid. And my mother actually when I asked her what her labor with me was like she’s like I’m not even going to tell you so bad. I’m not going to get it in your head. I still don’t even really know that story. But for my son it was. Yeah, especially then when I think my second time around was much more complicated. And so it was just sort of your textbook, labor and delivery.

 

Paulette  29:31  

That’s great. That’s great. So they hold you for 24 hours after vaginal delivery.

 

Julia  29:36  

I stayed for two days. I think I hadn’t started nights and I wasn’t checked in until I showed up at 3am. So do count as a night so I got an extra one.

 

Paulette  29:50  

Okay. Okay. And then what’s it like when you go home?

 

Julia  29:53  

Oh, gosh, that was hard. That was I mean, I that was almost directly what I what I wrote about where I remember I sat in the backseat with him. So terrified to have this child float. Drive slower. Oh my gosh, drive faster.



Julia  0:07  

That was I mean I that was almost directly what I what I wrote about where I remember I sat in the backseat with him so terrified to have this child flow that drive slower oh my gosh drive faster you’re driving too slow cars gonna hit us it was just very very intense

 

Paulette  0:23  

if it makes you feel any better when we came home from the hospital my husband dropped me off in front of our walk up and then crashed the car in the air. I’m tired. Like it’s so stressful. So drive your egg around, right it’s just it’s

 

Julia  0:40  

yeah, no, I yeah, I remember we got in and this was good too, because this was not a COVID delivery. So my sister in law had come and I saw many of these details ended up in the upstairs house. She had come and she had cleaned up for us and she had put food in our fridge and made a little fine. And it was me she was so so sweet. And then I felt terrible because then when she had kids, I was like, I can come do this, but I’m dragging my one year old along so it’s not quite the same. But yeah, she had prepped everything. It was great. I had totally set and then I think it was that first night we’ve had actually I just remembering this now so he was circumcised at the hospital but you were supposed to wait after the circumcision. They want you to wait until he has a wet diaper. I think before you go home but because of insurance and timing and everything and the doctor’s schedule, they were like you can just go home but check for it. And I remember being so anxious. I mean, like I can’t tell heads up what’s happening. I’m calling I remember I called the doctor at 1am That first night and they were like well hold on hold on. I remember I was on the phone with a doctor. He looking straight up at me. You know, it’s like Oh, thank God, but it was Yeah. It was very surreal. And it I think I feel like it was like fun sort of at first because you’re still kind of loopy and then it very quickly. So my husband had at that point he had like 10 days of paternity I think good luck and enjoy your five minutes. So yeah, he had 10 days and so for those 10 days i do i very clearly remember my in laws coming over and I didn’t I just wanted to lie on the bed and cry. I was just like I retrospectively clearly this was not you know, I should have been talking to someone for this but at the time I think now I can look at it and be like yeah, I probably did have postpartum depression, but at the time I felt like well, it’s not that bad. And like baby blues suck it up. You know,

 

Paulette  2:29  

first of all this term of baby blues, what can we change that? It’s silly. That feels patronizing.

 

Julia  2:35  

Well, how much of how much of medical care is not paid for? But baby blues is I don’t even know who coined the term but it’s become a term that’s accepted and so changing it might be difficult, but I agree with you. I don’t I don’t love that term. I also feel like it doesn’t really describe what’s going on. So can

 

Paulette  2:53  

you can you describe like what actually is happening that we’re labeling the baby blues? Yeah, so baby blues

 

Julia  2:59  

can happen at 70 to 80% of births, which is a really large number, right? And the fact that people don’t talk about it, like as a routine thing is kind of crazy. But so the symptoms of baby blues are basically very similar to depression. You may experience sadness, sleepiness, irritability, insomnia, impatience, anxiety, fatigue, poor concentration, all the things that you associate with depression. It usually starts within the first few days after giving birth and lasts usually about up to two weeks, but it goes away on its own, and symptoms come and go. They’re intermittent. So you might be super weepy. And then 510 minutes later, an hour later, you’re feeling perfectly fine. So the symptoms usually lasts for a few minutes up to an hour or two. But usually not longer than that in one go. And we don’t know the exact cause of baby blues, but we believe it. It’s related to the large hormone fluctuations that come with delivery and also combined with the lack of sleep that mom is having at that point, the changes in her routines, a lack of control all the emotions from her childbirth, experience, all of those together can lead to baby blues.

 

Julia  4:23  

But then when my husband went back to work, it was really really hard. Even with visitors adjusted you know, I had gone from having my own life and my own creative work and teaching to like, you know, the baby was my full time job and I wasn’t sleeping and my son still doesn’t sleep through the night. He’s almost six and is still awful and that has been like from day one to use a terrible sleeper. We didn’t even get those good. The first few newborn nights that people get with that fool you into thinking that oh, it’s not that bad. We didn’t even get those. It was just, it’s just exhausting.

 

Paulette  5:03  

I’m going to end my conversation with Julia here. I’m grateful to her for both the beautiful novel she’s produced and for her willingness to share her own experience of this enormous transition. The suggestion that these early days weeks months of becoming a parent, especially from the mother’s point of view is not worthy of literary investigation. That’s something anyone wants to read. About. Sounds like a quote from a TV villain version of a publisher. Although I don’t doubt for one second that Julie is reading the landscape is accurate. It just feels very distant from reality. Hope her book sales bear that out. I also appreciate Dr. Patel’s work and her suggestions. Next Friday. I’ll share the second half of my conversation with both Trulia and Dr. Patel. You can find links to Julie’s work and Dr. Patel in the show notes available on the war stories website. Thanks for listening. If you liked the show, please share it with friends and subscribe. We’ll be back next week with the rest of Julia’s inspiring story.