Giving birth was like being peeled apart from myself. The pregnancy was far from what I had imagined. High blood pressure made the last weeks a constant trip to the doctor’s office, and my body retained so much fluid that I couldn’t fit into my husband’s shoes, let alone my own.
It never even crossed my mind that I might get postpartum depression. I’m the person my friends call for positive energy. I’m the optimist. I’m the happy person, or at least I was.
My cancer diagnosis began a whirlwind struggle. Word came in March, I had surgery in August, and I got the “all clear” from my doctor in September.
The birth of my first child, Charlotte, was picture-perfect, and I was an anomaly of postpartum recovery. Less than a week after she was born, I was cleaning house, getting up early to see her, and walking every day while pushing her in the stroller. Things couldn’t have gone any better, which is why I was so caught off guard by the challenges I faced the second time around.
Six years ago, as we moved from South Carolina back to Georgia with our five-month-old daughter in tow, I was in the midst of an epic battle with darkness.
The words humble and humiliate start with the same three letters but are quite different in meaning. The overlap in how they sound in some ways signifies the overlap in how they feel.
My husband Andre and I had been married six years when we decided to start a family. Already a bit older than the average parents-to-be, we began trying to get pregnant even though I was still in law school at the time.
From a young age, I have suffered from anxiety and panic attacks. As a child, I merely dealt with them, not really knowing what they were, and went on with my life. As an adult, despite being able to finally affix a label to what I had been experiencing, I found myself with more questions than answers.
I was twenty years old when I became pregnant with my first child. Although my partner Robby and I had been living together for less than a year, we were in love, and wanted to have a child together. We will all be fine, we thought.
I could practically hear the reels clicking away in my head as the film played over and over. I’d seen horror movies that terrified me before, but this one left me completely paralyzed and wondering why I was the star.
