Good Moms Have Scary Thoughts

If I didn’t constantly monitor my baby’s breathing while he slept he would stop breathing. And when I did sleep I had recurring dreams of my husband/family taking the baby away (that would never happen). So I decided not to sleep. Looking back, I’m pretty sure that led to my PPA/D.

It all gets too much and I’m tired and my baby won’t sleep … and I have no support to help me get them to sleep, I leave my baby to scream and I just zone out. I worry that I’m not good enough, not attentive enough or that I’m damaging them. But in that moment its just what I’ve got to do for myself to be vaguely ok.

Sometimes, when you realize that 98% of the time you nursering alone the baby, you think: “I don’t want to be a mom anymore.”, but most of the time the right though is: “I don’t want to be my partner’s mother anymore.”. Be a father isn’t a help, is responsibility, specially during postpartum.

My MIL feels she doesn’t have a connection with our baby because she lives a few hours away. She keeps insisting on watching him over night or a little longer every chance she gets. I am not at all ready for that. I want them to be close but it gives me extreme anxiety at the thought of this and any time she has watched him (only for a few hours at most) I’ve broken down into tears. I always feel like something bad will happen. Other people are not as observant as my husband and I are and be it germs, heavy objects, or him falling, I imagine a million and one things happening to him.

My daughter could unlock the 4 locks to get to the pool, fall in and drown alone without anybody knowing.

My daughter constantly cries. No matter what I do for her she never stops. Put her on the floor, crib, hold her. I just want to hit her repeatedly until she stops. How can you love something so much but want it out of your life?

When parenting gets really hard and/or painful (like when my son bites me during breastfeeding to the point where I’m bleeding), I find myself wanting to hurt my son, but only for a second. To be clear, I adore my son and would never actually hurt him, and I find the idea abhorrent! But in that nanosecond, I cant help but imagine fighting back or dropping him on purpose.

I miss my old life, I miss being me? I don’t know who I am anymore. Everyone says it’s amazing what a woman’s body can do…but I feel mine has failed me. I have ptsd from labour…horrible scarring, a prolapse, and I’ve lost my entire identity. I can’t even pick my baby up without being in pain. I miss my sex life, I miss working out, I miss not having panic attacks at 2am worried my baby is dying in her cot. I love her so much but I want my old self back, I want to remember what it’s like to be a human.

I’m sitting in the nursery at 3:30 am. My daughter is 3 weeks old. She has wanted to be held from the moment she was born. I stay up with her throughout the night and hold her because she won’t sleep in her bassinet, won’t take a pacifier, nothing works except feeding her. So I hold and feed and change diapers and repeat. All day. This makes me resent my daughter and deeply miss not having this responsibility. I’m crying because I feel terrible about these thoughts but I’m also crying from exhaustion and frustration. I don’t understand why This is happening and I’m so unhappy. I wish the circumstances were different and I was like other moms that love motherhood and embrace this time but I’m just not :(.

Pregnant at 21. Had my baby at 22. What I failed to realize was that it was more than I wasn’t prepared for the struggles that come with being a mom. It was the struggles of having a sh*tty partner. The father of my child abuses alcohol, has not always been faithful, emotional manipulative, and on some level physical abusive. I’m trying my best to work it out for my child but I’m near my wits end I hate for my baby to have a family like this but I’d also hate for him not to have his father in his life. No book or article could prepare me for this ..

I had my first intrusive thought when my son was 1 week old. On a walk I vividly imagined myself throwing him and his car seat into the river. Now he’s nine months and I have very vivid thoughts of strangling him or snapping his neck when he is breastfeeding. These thoughts scare me and I feel like a terrible person and mother because of them.

I’m so angry and disappointed about my C-section. Everyone keeps telling me how lucky I am I didn’t have to give birth vaginally and all I can do is sit quiet and scream inside. It was not the easy way out. The drugs made me feel disconnected from my baby. When I held her I felt nothing. I was so scared that we would never bond. I thought I was broken and bad because I didn’t feel connected to her immediately, the way everyone said I would.