Good Moms Have Scary Thoughts

When my daughter was two months old, she rarely ever slept. It didn’t really bother me (or her doctor) until she had kept me up for more than 30 hours. When she wouldn’t sleep, my mind would scream at me that I didn’t actually love her and I would leave her if it was possible. If she cried, I had visions of throwing her against the wall. It scared the hell out of me. I still haven’t told anyone.

I had constant, intrusive thoughts of other people hurting my daughter. Like of someone ripping her from my arms and throwing her as high up into the air as they could while I helplessly watched her hit the pavement. When I was with her I would be on high alert so sure that someone was going to try to hurt her, and when I was away from her I was certain that something was going to happen to her.I know now that in that state of panic I was at the biggest risk to myself. When I was away from her I would become so convinced someone would have hurt her and she was gone and that I wasn’t going to live in this world without her that I would feel like I had no other choice but to kill myself. I’d look for a place to jump or I’d take off my seatbelt and plan to crash the car I was in. I viewed the new curtain rod my husband installed in our bedroom as something very sturdy to hang from. The intrusive thoughts were endless and everywhere.I was constantly seeing ways my daughter could die and, not wanting to live without her, would search for ways to end my life. I was terrified that something horrible was going to happen to my daughter and that I would kill myself. Some mothers I know intervened when I told them about the intrusive thoughts I was having. I sought treatment. They followed up to make sure I did. They made me accountable to my health. They supported me. They saved me. I saved me too.

My child is almost 2, and those intrusive thoughts from the earlier days were mostly gone. Now, someone I know from facebook is having an extreme medical situation with her baby. It seems those intrusive thoughts are resurfacing a bit after I read the posts about her baby’s situation. Early on, my mother mentioned a technique where you say “Cancel” out loud and imagine stamping out those thoughts with a big red X in order to stop yourself from going down that thought path. It works well, and I am using it again. Of interest to me is that seeing another mother’s beyond difficult situation is causing my brain to go into that mode. The thoughts are not even specifically about what her baby is going through. It can be more random like a baby left in a hot car or a child hit by a car. I am sure turning on the news doesn’t help. I assumed a big cause was hormones, and I am still breast feeding so my hormones are certainly still in baby mode. But I am a bit surprised to see the thoughts return even if in a lesser form.

Being the survivor of childhood sexual abuse, I knew that a lot of the time victims become abusers themselves. Though I knew I would never do what was done to me, this statistic haunted me after my daughter was born. I would cry alone, painful cries, both for my abuse I hadn’t dealt with and for fear for my daughter being in my care. I spoke to NO ONE for fear of them thinking I was a predator in any degree. I would change my daughter’s diapers quickly and after I would hold her close and vow to destroy anyone who ever hurt her. Eventually the fear went away and I felt strong, and so sad for the pain I endured alone. This is my first time really sharing. Thank you for this space.

I thought becoming a mom was the worst mistake I had ever done. I had two sweet babies and I was terrified of screwing them up. I felt like a complete failure and thought about running away. They deserved so much better than me. My love for them was the only thing that made me stay. Therapy and time helped lift the dark clouds but I still occasionally have those thoughts pop up in my mind and every day is a battle against the anxiety that threatens to crush me.

It was a chilly, sleepy afternoon, so my husband lit a fire in our fireplace. The living room was cozy, candles were burning, the dog was snoring, and I all I could picture was throwing my newborn into the fire. I couldn’t hold her while walking by the fireplace for months. I wish I could say this was the only place I couldn’t walk by without being plagued by horrible thoughts. Every room in the house contained potential tragedy. The mental pictures repeated themselves as I returned to familiar spots in my house: the bathtub prompted a vision of me drowning her, the bedroom caused me to picture smashing her head against the corner of my nightstand, the elevated back deck made me see an image of throwing her onto the patio below. I was ashamed. I was afraid of being alone with my daughter. Ironically, all I ever wanted was to be a stay at home mom, and now that I finally was one, I was terrified to be home alone with her. I questioned my sanity; I wondered if I was oppressed by a demon; I worried that my thoughts were suppressed, evil desires. Now, after months of therapy (thank you Postpartum Stress Center), medication, and much personal reading on the topic, I wonder why I NEVER heard about intrusive thoughts despite the countless books I’ve read on parenting and moms I have talked to. Intrusive thoughts must be made known.

I had such manic post partum anxiety immediately after my daughter’s birth, I didn’t sleep at all. I just watched her breathe and ruminated over all the terrible things that could happen to her if I looked away. She’s 2 now, and I’m in a much better space mentally, but I still sleep better with her than without her. I have a constant fear that she will need me and I won’t be there for her.

My baby is 16 months old and I still have PPD. It was treated with meds for the first 12 months but I felt better so I stopped the meds. Now I don’t know if I’m still better or getting worse again. I still have so much rage and I don’t know why. My husband does one thing different or “wrong” and I can’t keep myself from wanting to tell him what an idiot he is or even slap him across the face. I love my husband so much and he really is an amazing father but I put all of my anger on him because I know he won’t leave me. I can keep myself in check but I know that these feelings aren’t healthy, I don’t really know how to fix it or even if it’s actually an issue. There are days where I just want to run away and only worry about myself for a while. I think about how much my son and my husband rely on me and it fills me with dread. I’m a SAHM and I have this continuous thought of “if I die, who will keep up my son’s routine? Who will cut his nails? I’m the only one that does laundry so if I’m not here it’ll just pile up and nothing will be clean.” I double check everything in regards to my son’s care because no one else does it the way I do it.

I’m 10 months pp. A month go my hubby revealed to me, that be comming a father has lowered his Self esteem a lot. Ever since I’ve been so worried about his well being that every morning when I open the garage door to take out the pram, I get this image of him, hanging in a noose in the garage.

I always close my eyes when I open now..

Every time I drop my daughter off at daycare and am sitting at a meeting at work I am unable to leave from, I panic imagining that I actually left her in my car and go through a very vivid scenario where I find her dead in the hot car, flash to paramedics taking her body, DCFS getting called on me for being such a bad mother, and then attending my daughters funeral. I only get relief when I get a daycare update of something like a diaper change, and even then I question whether I dropped her off or forgot her.

1. Knives terrified me, I kept thinking what If I kill my baby with that knife. I used to breathe very deeply & focus all my attention to put them into the dishwasher slowly, somehow they felt safer in there. When in the house on my own I would prepare a meal that didn’t involve knives or wait until my partner came home to prepare it so I knew my baby was safe.
2. If I was outside anywhere whatsoever I would be frightened that a dog would come out from nowhere and savage my son. I was terrified just walking down the street & was constantly watching out for dogs or planning what I would do when it came for us.
3. I was terrified of paedophiles snatching my son, if I was in a shop I would obsessively keep my son always in my line of vision so no one could snatch him while I turned away even for a moment. I had played this out so many times & planned how and where I would physically attack them to give us the best chance while I screamed out for help etc.
4. Sleep – everything about sleep scared me to death, I barely slept for a number of reasons after I had him but became so delirious that I would wake my partner repeatedly asking him ‘where’s the baby’ hysterically when I was either holding him or he was in his cot. I was terrified I would lose him in his sleep – either he would stop breathing or he would be stolen or I would forget where I’d put him.
5. The strangest one was an issue I had with chicken. I couldn’t eat chicken for a long time because every time I ate it I thought it was my son. He would always be in the room with us so I would try and get some logic into the situation and stop, look at him and tell myself in my head – this is not your son, you can see him and he’s fine. But I couldn’t eat the chicken. It made my stomach turn.
The above is a taste of my scary thoughts – there were so many I could write a book. I feel that for my first year particularly the first six months I was literally living in fear of me or someone else hurting him. It’s a lot better now he is two years old but the reality is I still have these thoughts from time to time which upsets me and I don’t know what to do about it.
The thoughts did not feel like thoughts – they were played visually in my head – I could see a scene occurring which was vivid in detail, terrible to watch and graphic. It was as if I was suffering from post traumatic stress disorder about something that hadn’t actually happened. I felt that I was losing my mind & every single day was very hard. I did seek mental health assistance from a perinatal mental health service we have locally. Although they were good I’m not sure they fully understood how bad I felt – it seemed that they thought I had post natal anxiety & it wasn’t perceived to be that serious. It felt very serious, I contemplated suicide because I felt that I was losing my mind and that my family would be better off without me. The only thing that really stopped me from going further with those thoughts was the risks to my son if I wasn’t there because I knew that only I knew the terrible risks and I had to be there to stop the bad things from happened. It was like a sick twisted vicious circle.