Good Moms Have Scary Thoughts

I have many scary thoughts. My baby is now six months old but I still seem to have these intrusive thoughts and they don’t seem to go away. One scary thought is what if my baby wiggles out of my arms and gets dropped off the balcony ledge of my house? Or — even crazier — what if I one day develop schizophrenia or hallucinate and harm my baby without knowing it?

I love my baby girl so much. But, I wish so much that when I watch her sleep, I could just feel content and happy that she looks so beautiful and angelic. Instead, I have these scary and intrusive thoughts that this is what she would look like if she was dead. She would just be this still, quiet, and still beautiful. I immediately gently poke her to make sure she is still alive and can move. I wish so much that I can just stare at her sleeping and feel at peace, instead of this incessant worrying for her life and safety that I constantly feel.

I feel like I am a waste of space & that my family would flourish without me in their lives. I feel I’ve completely ruined my children & that I will never be good enough for them or my husband. I am so tired. So tired I don’t care about anything.

My two year old told Daddy today he wants a lil sis. My husband who has also been on the fence about a second child came in smiling. My heart constricted. I felt trapped. I don’t know if I want to do this again. What if it’s worse than the first time? Except this time my fear of everything will not just affect me and my husband it will also affect my beautiful son who I am just now bonding with. Will this ever go away?

I used to imagine accidentally dropping my son, and his head would shatter like a glass jar of spaghetti. Then I started having that image every time I would pick him up, and I would hold on to him tighter. I would walk past the stairs 500 times a day and imagine accidentally dropping him and him shattering like the jar. I would have so much anxiety walking past the stairs because I wasn’t sure if I was imagining doing it or I was fantasizing about it. I started not knowing if I was going just snap and drop him, or would it be an accident, but either way, I held on to him tight every time and silently tried not to panic … every day.

Recent mother of 2. While I was pregnant I had scary thoughts of the government coming to the apartment where we lived and would take us all one by one and kill us if we contracted covid, it made me go into a panic attack and cry for 3 days. Now with my one year old and newborn I’ve been really really crying thinking about throwing my son down or squeezing him hard while hes crying and I love him and his sweet little self it tears me up. When both of my babies are crying I vision myself beating the oldest one just because she is big and I feel like the worst mom and bully ever. I constantly vision my husband raping her but that would NEVER happen I’m with her 24/7 and he wouldnt even change her diaper. I feel like the world’s worst mother if I do not give her everything she wants and I feel like she will never love me as much as she loves her dad and the same goes with my son. I think that they deserve much better than me even though I choose to stay at home and spend as much time as possible with them in case I were to die they would have nobody to love them as much as I do. It’s really tough right now. I think I have psychosis instead of depression and if I tell anyone they wont let me around my babies even though I would never ever harm them.

Sometimes I want to walk out into traffic. Not to die, just to be hospitalized where someone will take care of me for a change.

My baby wouldn’t sleep last night. I had been in the internet a few hours before, reading about sids and was terrified. She was up every hour, waking myself an my boyfriend up. This has been the new normal. Last night she was quite for a short period of time and I thought to my self “maybe she died” and I felt relief. I love her more than life itself and would never actually feel relief if something happened. I feel such guilt that I felt happy. I held my breath for about 10 seconds until she made another sound, and of course was happy she was alive.

I have suffered through ppd with both pregnancies. But my second one seemed to be worst. I was already suffering through depression during the pregnancy to the point I was prescribed antidepressants. Afterwards things did not get better with my mental state. My baby is so needy and so loud when she cries. She’s now one and my other daughter is 5 and my anxiety and stress is heightened. What makes things stressful is the fact that we live with a friend of mines and her husband. And trying to ensure my children dont wreck their house stresses me out. Trying to ensure my children are quiet all the time, not whining all the time just for the sake of not disturbing their peace stresses me out. Sometimes I feel like my friends are judging my every move as a parent and feel like I’m so weak and needing help as a single mother that they step in to discipline my children. Sometimes I hate them and my children. I love them all to death but the stress they all cause me makes me want to disappear. My anxiety is getting to where I have used a lot of strong language towards my children as a way to discipline them sometimes. Afterwards I feel horrible. I feel like I’m affecting my daughter’s self esteem cause I’m projecting my deep down anxieties and stress on her. She irritates the crap out of me. I wish I could express to my friend sometimes how I truly feel as a mom but I fear the judgement or ridicule I may receive so I just keep things bottled up. I just want and need time a break away from my children but I fear that because I dont want to be a burden.

I don’t know if I love my baby girl enough. She’s over a year old, and the overwhelming all-consuming love other moms describe has never hit me. I adore her, I cherish her, but sometimes I look at her and feel like I don’t know her. Like I don’t even remember how she got here.

I constantly worry that my baby is going to die. Images play in my head of him being carried away in a body bag. I obsess over the worry that he will choke on something and I won’t be able to save him, so much so I am scared to feed him anything that hasn’t been mashed or cooked to mush. I spend every second of the day worrying about him hurting himself. I wake up constantly thinking he has died in the night while I have been asleep. I worry that one day I will die and he will be left by himself and get hurt as no one is around to protect him. Most days I feel like I’m drowing in all this anxiety and I have no one to turn to.

My baby is crying so much that I yelled at him and it made me feel guilty and it triggers me.. I want to hurt myself, Im not a good mom.