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1/4 “It is said that bipolar is partly hereditary, and can be triggered by trauma, acute stress, physical and psychological abuse, and substance dependence. It often manifests in a person’s late teens to early twenties. HEREDITARY: My mother’s side of the family is solidly Irish Catholic with a history of psychological issues and a bold streak of denial and shame. My father was adopted by his stepfather, who was coarse and abusive. I know nothing of his roots. TRAUMA: When I was 17, my father passed away suddenly while my family was on vacation. I wasn’t there, and received the news over the phone. The last time we spoke, we had a spat and I cursed him as they drove away. Incoming phone calls now make me anxious. PHYSICAL ABUSE: When I was 18, I learned that I had been raped when I was between the ages of 10–12. The abuser lived in our neighborhood and was never brought to justice for those crimes. Stress: When I was 19, I was held at gunpoint as two young men robbed the restaurant where I worked. Moments later, the person who held the firearm less than 5 feet from my heart accidentally shot himself during the getaway. When the assailants were captured, it came to light they were people I knew – and other people I knew were also aware and said nothing. PYCHOLOGICAL ABUSE: When I was 16, I recognized early symptoms of mood swings and depression. My parents dismissed it. My older brother was already costing my family large sums in psychiatry and medication with zero effect. I love my parents, but they were both violent in their own ways. My father had a temper, and my mother was verbally domineering and occasionally slapped and hit me. I spent lots of time standing in the corner during dinner. My older brother was sometimes kind, but often cruel and bullying. I would seek out safe spaces outside of home; exploring public spaces, wandering everywhere, spending extended time at friends’ houses. I would stare out the window and daydream, listening to music, drawing, reading, playing sports, cultivating fantasies. Anything to escape.” 1/4

12/12 "This pregnancy was better than the first one because I knew what to expect. I knew I was going to hate being pregnant, that I was not going to look the way that I wanted to look, that I was going to gain weight. I planned for my 2nd C-section. I told them, 'I want to be knocked out after you take the baby out. I don't care if I don't remember the beginning of this time, I need to take care of myself and that's what's important. So please just knock me out.' That worked really well. I almost feel like doing that reset my brain. I had all these really good positive experiences with Emilie that has healed me from the trauma that I had with Noah. When Emilie came out of me, I immediately wanted to hold her. I have this beautiful memory of holding her in the C-section room. Just right off that was better. She latched instantly to my breasts. I had such a strong connection and such a strong bond with her, which was such a relief, and really, really nice. I did a lot of research and took every step to reduce postpartum depression: acupuncture, therapy, and encapsulating my uterus into pills. The theory is that you go from having all these hormones to absolutely nothing. If you take small doses of your placenta, it's supposed to reduce your risk of postpartum. I took the placenta pills, and I can’t say for sure if they made a difference, but I took them for three months and I had zero postpartum depression. My wife ran down to the front of the hospital with my uterus in a bucket so that she could go and capsulate it and bring it back to me. She's like, 'Jamie, this is really weird. Am I really handing your uterus to somebody?' I’m like, 'Yes. Go, go. I need the medicine. I need my placenta back. Go, go!'" 12/12

11/12 "I think I really started to enjoy being a mom fully when he was probably 10 months old. I had stopped breastfeeding. I returned to work. I started to slowly feel a difference at 8 months old, and by a year I was a completely different person. I loved being a mom. And I wanted another baby. There was a little bit more pressure with the second pregnancy because Emilie is my wife's biological daughter. Noah is my biological son. Emilie was our only girl embryo. I felt like if I miscarried and I fell down the stairs or I ate something I wasn't supposed to eat, I was like my wife is trusting me with her embryo. During my second pregnancy, I told my doctors that I’d had severe postpartum depression. Not a single person asked me about it at my follow-up appointments. I needed someone to check on me. I needed to be asked about it. I need someone to say, 'Hey, are you okay?'" 11/12

10/12 "No one thinks they're going to have postpartum psychosis. I thought that was for crazy people. I would have never thought that would be me. Prior to this, I had never seen a therapist for anything. I’d never been on an antidepressant. I’d been able to cope, I'd been able to adapt. If I was feeling upset, I’d go for a run. It wasn't my fault I had postpartum depression. It's something that happens often to women after they have babies. I really feel people don't understand the severity of it and that it can be really bad. It's not just oh you're a little sad. All those people that came to meet my newborn just assumed this was the best time of my life – I felt it kept pushing the knife in more and more and more. Every time somebody would say that to me, it would just sneak the wound deeper. If someone had said, 'Hey, I know this can be a really hard time. How are you doing?' instead of assuming this is the best time of my life – if someone had just asked me how I was doing –it's very likely I would've said, 'I'm not good.' I don't really remember the first eight months of my son’s life. I don't remember his first bath. I don't remember feeding him. I talk about pumping, but I don't actually remember doing it. I was in this fog. I think if just one person would've asked me how I was doing, I think I would've done better. Maybe I could have enjoyed being a mom at month three rather than month ten. It still makes me a little sad when I look back and think, Oh my God, I spent so many months not enjoying my time with my son. I wish I could go back – but I can't. There’s a lot of things in parenthood that you only get to do once." 10/12

9/12 "Getting back into a normal routine helped. Going back to work reminded me that I'm not just a mom. I have a career still. I have friends here at work, and there's more to life. I'm not only a mom. Rita – I call her my work mom – she's this amazing mom with two daughters. I told her a little bit about what was going on and she said, 'That's normal. A lot of people feel that way after they have babies,' which reset my mind a bit. Some of these feelings are normal. I'm not a psychopath. I slowly started to climb out of it. Rita was telling me about her niece who had a baby and had a traumatic birth experience. She actually lost her entire uterus and they had to do a total hysterectomy on her. Rita was saying her niece wasn't doing well emotionally. I had never heard of a pregnant person or a woman with a baby saying, "Hey, I'm not okay." It was the first time anyone has ever really shared that they weren't doing well. So it opened the window for me to confess, 'I'm not doing well.' You only hear about these beautiful stories: 'The mom is doing so well, look at her! She's such a great mom!' and sure everyone knows about postpartum depression, but you don't really hear women's stories of postpartum depression. Rita gave me a venue to talk about it." 9/12

8/12 "I knew there was something wrong, but I was refusing to identify it. Is this just what being a mom is? Is this how every woman feels? Does everyone feel this way and they just don’t talk about it? Everyone would come over to the house and hold the baby and say, 'Isn’t this the best time of your life?! Isn’t this the greatest feeling in the world?!' I would just want to die inside, like, What’s wrong with me? Everyone would say how beautiful, how perfect he was, and 'Isn’t being a mom the best?!”' I’m thinking, No, this is not the best. I’m not sleeping. I’m not eating. My body’s terrible. My life is different, I have no idea what I’m doing. But you have all these people just saying how great things are and you’re like, Well I can’t tell them that it’s NOT great, so I guess I have to say, 'Sure. It’s great.' One day I was coming back from one of my baby’s cardiologist appointments, which was across the river. I was driving across the bridge and I remember thinking, I should just park my car and take Noah and jump off the bridge. That was probably my darkest moment. There were times I would think about drowning him in a bathtub. There were times I thought about turning my car on in the garage and drinking a bottle of wine and going to sleep with him in the backseat. I didn't have an attachment to him, but I didn't want him to be without me. I was like, Well, I can't LEAVE him. He can't grow up and know his mom killed herself. It’s really scary to think about that now. That’s what severe postpartum depression looks like."

7/12 "Our son was born with a sacral dimple, which is a hole in the spine. A month after his birth, we discovered a huge hole in his heart and he eventually needed open-heart surgery. Then he had an intense dairy allergy. I went from eating so much dairy when I was pregnant to suddenly having to completely cut out all dairy from my diet. I was reading every label and asking for the ingredients in the McDonald’s drive-thru. If I had a drop of butter, my baby would be in excruciating pain and cry for hours. And I’d cry with him because I did this to my son. It’s all my fault. There were big plans to breastfeed, but he would never latch – so for every feeding, I had to pump into a bottle and then feed him by bottle. It was double work every time. I was making these diet modifications and then doing all this extra work to feed him. It was super hard. When my maternity leave was up and I went back to work as an ER nurse, it was a lot. It is HARD to get a break at work to pump. I was like, I can’t do this anymore." 7/12

6/12 "The second he was born I knew something was wrong with me. I didn’t even want to hold him. My wife tried to hand me the baby in the operating room and I was like 'No, just go, just go.' She said, 'Don’t you want to see him?' I said, 'No. Just go.' Of course I didn’t tell anybody. I didn’t tell my wife. She had no idea. I had this overwhelming sense of embarrassment. How could I not want to hold my baby? What kind of woman doesn’t want to hold her baby? I knew this was postpartum depression. I was hoping my hormones would balance out and that it would just go away. I would go through the motions and do everything I needed to be doing, but I didn’t have any attachment. It was like my son was a complete stranger to me. Somebody else’s baby. There was this part of me that missed my old life. I couldn’t do anything anymore, and I had to take this baby with me everywhere I went. Plus my body – I was hard on myself when I was pregnant, and I was even harder once the baby came out. I had stretch marks all over my stomach, all over my thighs, all over my breasts. Stretch marks everywhere. And I had the c-section scar. Now every time I got naked and looked in the mirror, I saw this traumatic reminder of that day. I felt like my body is disgusting, my hormones are all messed up, my boobs are huge, I can’t fit into any of my clothes – plus I don't have any attachment to this baby, and now I hate myself and I hate my body. My wife was so good at being a mom. There was this part of me that was secretly jealous that her body was the same. She didn’t have to feel everything that I felt, and she just got this beautiful baby boy to take care of." 6/12

5/12 "I hated being pregnant. I hated every second of it – which was so strange because I wanted to be pregnant so bad. My wife didn’t want to carry, and I was like, 'That’s okay because I’ve wanted to carry my whole life!' Then the second I was pregnant, I was like, I can’t wait to get this baby out of me. I’d heard all these stories from my sister and other women about how pregnancy was the most wonderful thing and the baby’s always with you. I did not feel that way. I was so uncomfortable. I really wanted a natural birth – no epidural. At about 36 weeks, my son flipped, and he was what is called frank breech. His butt was at the opening of my uterus, and then his arms and legs were up in a 'V.' He was sandwiched. Because he flipped so late, he couldn’t get back around. So I had to have a c-section, which was devastating. I’d never had any surgery before. I had a hard time with the concept of being cut open and being awake, and then having complete loss of sensation from my chest down. My epidural wore off in the middle of them suturing my uterus. I was telling them I could feel the stitches. They’re like, 'No, you can’t. No, you can’t. Where am I touching now?' I told them, 'The left side of my stomach.' They were like OH MY GOD." 5/12

4/12 "I probably shouldn't have been so hard on myself. I was pregnant and doing the best I could. But I gained 100 pounds in six months. I'm five foot two. There wasn't a lot of area for the weight to go. I was huge. It was difficult to move. It was difficult to get up and down. It was difficult to shower, to shave my legs. I had to leave my job a month early. I was an ER nurse at the time, and people could hear me coming down the hall – I was so breathy. They weigh you at every one of your doctor visits. One day I weighed in at 185 pounds. I started crying on the scale, and they said, 'It's okay – we won't weigh you anymore – it's okay.' Which probably was the wrong thing to say. They should’ve asked, 'Why is this girl gaining so much weight?' I always thought I would be this beautiful pregnant person. I spent my life admiring pregnant women thinking, You're so beautiful. You look so good. By the time I went into the hospital to have the baby, I could barely see out my eyes – they were almost swollen shut. I had about six double chins. I looked like I was going to pop. It was not the image that I had in mind for myself all those years I wanted to be pregnant." 4/12

3/12 "This wasn't a whoopsie. This was a planned pregnancy. That's the thing about lesbian and gay couples – we're going all in. We WANT a baby. There's no accident. There's no one-night stands. I was a little petrified of losing the baby because getting pregnant cost us $30,000. So I really wanted to try and do everything I could to not have a miscarriage or lose the baby. That aspect was stressful. You’re supposed to do kick counts to make sure the baby’s moving enough. I would be completely paranoid if the baby wasn’t moving enough. I was petrified of a stillbirth. I talked to my wife a lot, and she was super supportive. She would say, "Oh, you look beautiful. You're doing a great job." And all my ultrasounds came back good. But I'd heard a lot of stories of women drinking too much caffeine. Caffeine is a stimulant, and a stimulant can cause a miscarriage. So I cut out soda, which is a big deal for me. I grew up on soda – I didn't even know what water was until I met my wife. I'm also a coffee person. I need coffee to function. And I completely cut out coffee. I’d also heard stories of women not eating enough. I was so petrified of NOT eating enough that I ended up gaining a hundred pounds while I was pregnant." 3/12

2/12 "We got married when I was 26 and immediately began the decision process for picking a sperm donor and finding a fertility clinic. There’s a lot of successes with IUI and it was cheaper than IVF. We did six rounds of IUI, and it just wasn't working. We found out I had a blockage in one of my fallopian tubes, so we got that flushed out, and then did another IUI, and that still didn't work. So we did IVF, and the process took a little over a year. We were finally pregnant. It was wonderful – we were overjoyed. So happy. When you’re doing IVF, you're just going through the motions every month. When we got our due date of December 27th, we were like, Oh God, that's Christmas! What did we do? Why didn't we wait a month?! What is wrong with us?!" 2/12