Prenatal Depression Is a Serious Issue That Too Few People Talk About

As the pregnancy progressed, I would stare at babies in cafes, or on the sidewalk, and wonder why I’d ever wanted one of those weird little loud things. Why had I longed so much to smell a small fuzzy head? A friend asked me to hold her baby so she could eat and I felt myself shrinking back. The baby was so heavy. My arms started to hurt. I just wanted to hand him back to his mother.

The worse I felt, the more I pretended. To my midwife, to my therapist, to my friends, to my husband. Even to my unborn baby, who I would talk to in forced chipper voices: “Hi Baby!” I became convinced that if I didn’t say out loud how much I didn’t want this child, the child wouldn’t be able to tell.

I was scared and I was running out of time, so I did what any crystal-loving horoscope-fluent millennial does in a time of trouble, I went to see a psychic.

She wasn’t a scarf-and-heavy-eyeliner psychic. She was a cardigan-and-sensible-shoes psychic. She worked in a boring office with generic art on the walls. I told her why I was there: I had always wanted to be a mother, and now that I was pregnant, I didn’t. She said nothing. She watched me. I began to regret the $160 this was going to cost me.

Then she told me that the first awareness I had ever had, as a tiny little seed of a fetus, was that I wasn’t welcome in the world.

Later that week, I went out to dinner with my mother and we started talking about my pregnancy, and then about her pregnancies. “I remember being six or seven weeks pregnant with you,” my mother said, “And I wasn’t sure that I wanted another baby. I remember feeling like I didn’t want to be pregnant.”

I finally had my proof. I was the unwelcome baby, now unable to welcome my own baby. The power of generational trauma was so strong, I told myself, that I was helpless to stop myself from traumatizing my child.

I probably would have continued to believe this—might even still believe it today—if I hadn’t done a late night google search on depression during pregnancy and found a forum where I read posts from hundreds of other women who were experiencing the same thing. People were depressed about babies they had longed for. Some people weren’t sure they wanted second children. Some people had had prenatal depression before and reassured the rest of us that it could go away quickly after giving birth. One post mentioned that if you have had a bad reaction to progesterone birth control, you may be more likely to have depression during pregnancy when your body is flooded with progesterone.