Dear Adele,
Without sounding like a stalker fan, you've always been my queen of queens. I didn't think you could get any higher up my hierarchy of queenliness, but that was until yesterday when you opened up to the world about your fight with PND.
I see everyone is giving you advice on how you can overcome PND to have another baby. And while that's really helpful I'm not going to add to that chorus. 1. Because I really couldn't add anything more helpful, but 2. Because I'd be a hypocrite as I feel the exact same bloody way!
After my first baby PND hit me right in the gut. When I left the hospital I didn't just leave with my baby, I left with a bucket load of anxiety whilst being weighed down with a backpack of fear over the responsibility.
Our first night at home I cried for 7 hours straight, I even cried to my husband 'we've made a mistake in doing this!' and then I didn't stop crying for about 4 weeks. As the weeks went on, fear turned to frustration, then frustration turned to anger, and I continued to live in my angry, anxious ridden torture chamber that was my mind for another 4 years. I felt like you did now, never again did I want another baby. I absolutely hated it most of the time. I loved my baby so much, she brought me a happiness that I had never felt before, but PND made my life miserable. She duped me into believing I was shit at being a parent simply because I didn't seem to enjoy it like other mums did. Why would I have another kid to torture it and myself with the dull and miserable life I could offer?
So when I accidentally got pregnant being joyful at this new life was far from what I was thinking. I cried a lot, I wouldn't speak about it, I even considered abortion. But one night when I thought I had made the decision, I lay awake crying with more thoughts in my head, 'you're proving how shit a mum you really are', 'you're selfish', 'what if you regret this?'. The thoughts won and I didn't go through with it. I decided to go ahead. It wasn't a happy pregnancy and unfortunately it wasn't a fairytale ending. When I had my beautiful boy I fell straight into the hands of PND again. This time she suffocated me. But one thing I did this time, is something you just did to the world. I talked.
You see by talking you're already beating PND. You've looked it right in the face and called it out! That takes a great deal of its power away. Because it no longer becomes a dirty secret, it no longer becomes a negative belief. It calls it out for the fraud it is and highlights what it actually is... a life sucking illness.
No one can promise you that you won't feel what you did with your first child, and that fear alone is enough for anyone to stitch up their vagina. Overpopulation could probably be eradicated if PND could be bottled and injected into all of the human race. Nothing is a greater contraceptive.
But the only thing I really want to tell you is don't let PND make your mind up for you.
I didn't choose to have my second, and like hell would I choose to ever have a third. But even after the shit I went through, now we are back in the light, I now would never choose to be without him or his sister.
PND nearly took that away from me.
