Hubby and I got a bit of late start on having kids, not entirely by design. I found out I had PCOS when I was 22, it was mildly disturbing to hear, but not devastating. Yet.

So we knew going in that it may take us a little longer to get pregnant, but we didn’t know it would take us FIVE YEARS!!!!! Five years of tests, treatments, pills, shots, daily temperature taking, procedures, optimism, pessimism, defeatism. I gave up. I didn’t actually tell anyone else that I had given up, but my heart was tired of disappointment and giving up was a hedge against more of it.

Lot’s of other things happened during those five years: changing jobs, buying a house, moving to Chicago, moving back. All the while, I had that giving-up as an insurance policy against getting too invested in all the things that weren’t happening in my body. One of the things that happened in the course of moving was changing doctors.

In Chicago, I starting going to a doctor affiliated with Northwestern Healthcare in Evanston. The beautiful, wonderful, miracle-working Dr. Jennifer Kim put me on Metformin, a drug commonly used to treat Type II diabetes. When we moved back to Oklahoma, my new doctor here approved of that treatment and kept me on it.

Eventually, after some other bumps in the road, we got pregnant with Monkey. It was officially a high-risk pregnancy, but I suffered only the usual annoyances plus gestational diabetes. After the level hormonal playing field of PCOS, I was completely unprepared for the wild fluctuations pregnancy brought. Day after day, I would come home from the bank and tell Hubby, “I hate everyone but you.” And then Monkey was born.

His birth story is one for another day. What is important here is what happened afterwards. If the hormonal changes of the pregnancy threw me around like a rag doll, the ones postpartum were expontentially worse. And I had no idea what was happening to me. You see, no one told me that I was going to be sick and crazy for a year.

Oh, everyone knew about the “baby blues”; and postpartum depression and psychosis had been in the media but I never applied these things to myself. I could get out of bed in the morning and function like a normal person. There were no crying jags, no dramatic weight loss or gain, no sadness. But there was an underlying current of anger. Sleep disturbances come with the territory when there’s an infant the House, so does a loss of interest in sex. I was never suicidal and never thought about harming myself or others; I was just…crazy.

I was so angry at everything and everybody and I did feel worthless. Since the age of 18, I had worked full time, gone to school full time, or some combination of the two. After Monkey, I stayed home, something with which I had no experience. There was this huge chunk of who I used to be that was now missing. And a terrible isolation took over. With Hubby at work every day, no other SAHM’s that I knew, and only a drooling infant for company, I was starved for grown-up interaction.

Every day, I felt like I was at the bottom of a dry well or that I was twisting in the wind, alone. The twisting-in-the-wind days were bad; I was the last dead leaf left, buffeted about by the weather, clinging desperately to the end of the thinnest, driest branch on the tree. The dry-well days were oh so much worse. I could taste and feel the fetid, stale air like a noxious slime at the back of my throat. That well was too dark and close and deep for even an echo of my voice to escape. And even if I could’ve spoken aloud, I wouldn’t have had the words to describe it. Weeks passed, then months. Monkey turned 1, then Thanksgiving, then Christmas, then the new year all passed me by. Then one day, in the Spring, I came back. The person that I had been before, that I hadn’t been for so long, came back. I could, again, feel the familiar curvature of my mind. The dark, jagged, bitter thing that it had become was gone and once again my mind took on its usual gentle hills and valleys. Oh, my temper was still there, but the fury was gone. I bid adieu to the alien thing that had taken up residence in my brain and never saw it again.

I may never know why I was hit so hard. Perhaps it was the years of trying and disappointment and anticipation, followed by a cold splash of reality. Maybe it was my utter inexperience with hormonal changes due to the PCOS. Whatever it was, I didn’t have those problems with Pumpkin. All my problems with that one happened during the pregnancy. But that, too, is a tale for a different day.

There was one major self-discovery that came of all this: I’m not cut out to be a housewife. Don’t get me wrong, I love my babies and I like being a mom. But that can’t be all that I am. Once, before I had kids, I read one mother’s tale of much the same discovery of self. She came to the realization that she was a better mother to her children when she worked outside the home. Of course, being a pre-parent, I knew absolutely everything there was to know about raising kids. I simply couldn’t understand what she meant. But I do now.

It is an ongoing process, but every day, every semester, I get closer to my goals. And that makes me a happier, better person and mother-day by day and semester by semester.

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 24th, 2008 at 11:50 am and is filed under Junk Drawer, Kids' Room, The Process. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.