Pregnancy and Depression

A sad raincloud. Image source.

I recently announced the birth of my son, Square Root! Here's something I wrote when I was 25 weeks pregnant.

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I guess I want to throw a disclaimer on this... I think my experience being pregnant was harder than average. Everyone is different! So if you are thinking about getting pregnant, don't let me discourage you; it probably won't be as bad as what I'm describing here.

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Being pregnant is THE WORST. I love my baby, but this is just THE WORST.

The first trimester was a parade of throwing up. Waking up in the night to throw up. Throwing up before breakfast. Throwing up if I haven't eaten protein recently. Throwing up after eating, sometimes. Gagging when I smell other people's food. Gagging when I walk past someone smoking a cigarette on the street. And the doctor said morning sickness should stop sometime around week 14, and yes indeed, around week 14 it got much better. Now I only throw up in the morning before breakfast, instead of like, all the time.

In the evenings I have heartburn. The WORST heartburn. So I've been taking 2 Tums before bed- only 2, because I need to ration them. Too hard to buy Tums in China, but I managed to get a mostly-full bottle from an American friend.

I also have been drinking a lot of almond milk, to help with the heartburn. But I kind of stopped because I'm just so tired of drinking almond milk.

The worst part is that every single damn day I have to somehow eat a whole bunch of protein every meal. This baby demands protein all the time. And at the same time, there are so many foods that I just CAN'T STAND the smell of. Can't stand to even think about food sometimes, because it makes me sick. But the baby demands protein. And every single day I have to solve this problem, try to figure out what I can eat.

For the whole first trimester I avoided tuna. Because, I read somewhere that fish is good for the baby's brain, but I read somewhere else that fish has mercury which is bad for the baby. So I avoided it, just to be safe. But then I broke. Because tuna is one of the only sources of protein I actually like. I tried so hard to not eat tuna, but I ... just ... can't ... live. Baby demands protein and I can't force myself to eat ham sandwiches anymore, I just can't.

So now I'm eating a tuna sandwich almost every day. It makes a massive difference for my mental health- now lunch is solved, and the daily struggle to figure out what kind of protein my body can eat is that much easier. I don't know if it's okay for the baby... at first I was carefully reading labels to figure out exactly which species of tuna it was, whether it's the kind with more or less mercury, but ... I gave up. I just can't.

Breakfast is a bagel, two hardboiled eggs, and milk. Except now instead of 2 eggs, I switched to 1 egg plus part of a protein bar. I just can't stand hardboiled eggs anymore. But they're so cheap, and the protein bars are expensive, imported from somewhere. But I just can't.

It's just so hard to eat every day, and it's just so hard to get off the couch and do the things I'm supposed to do. And ... and so I noticed that sometimes I start to have depression symptoms.

I've had depression before, and I learned how to pay attention to my emotions and identify what my emotional needs are and communicate about them. So I know that for me, when there are things I'm supposed to do (like get out of bed in the morning, or wash the dishes, or shower, or whatever) and instead of doing them I just want to sit around for a period of time of indeterminate length- that's a depression symptom. It's not "I will take a break for 10 minutes and then I will do the thing"; it's "every time I feel like I should get up and do stuff, I just have this giant mental block and I just can't, and that can drag on and on for who knows how long, and I'm stuck." Which is not healthy because then nothing ever gets done, and then I just feel worse.

So... I wouldn't say I "have" depression, but I am at risk for it. Sometimes I tell Hendrix "I feel like I'm getting depression." So I think it's so important for me to recognize the symptoms and tell Hendrix what I need him to do to help me so it doesn't continue to the point where I actually "have" depression.

Like sometimes I say "could you tell me to go get a shower?" and then he's like "honey, if you go and shower, then you can have ice cream after." Which is so nice and gives me the motivation to actually go do it.

Or I tell him I need him to stand there and say nice things while I wash the dishes. Or I need him to come rub my back when I'm trying to sleep. Or I need him to help me make a decision about what to have for dinner. Or I just want him to listen while I complain.

And he always does these things, to support me. Well, except that he has to work 8 hours a day (and I do too) so he's not *always* available. (And to be honest, I'm really struggling with how much I should ask him for help and how much I should just try to deal with it myself. How do I know if I'm asking for "too much"?)

Anyway I want to blog about this because somewhere around 14-23% of people experience depression symptoms during pregnancy, but usually no one talks about it. (And I'm at a higher risk because I've had depression in the past.) I guess people don't talk about it because it's expected that you should be happy about having a baby and how empowering it is to bring new life into the world or whatever ... and ... yeah while that's all true, it doesn't prevent the depression symptoms. I love my baby even though they're not even born yet. I've wanted a baby for a long time. The depression stuff isn't related to that. 

(The whole thing just makes me even more pro-choice, but that's a topic for another post.)

So... yeah that's the situation now. I sometimes recognize that I have depression symptoms, and that means I need to take action right away to keep it from getting worse, so I communicate with my husband about what I need him to do to help me. And he's great, he's such a sweetheart and he does whatever I ask him to. So hopefully this is good enough.