Did you know that postnatal depression is considered a mental illness? Post it or psychosis is also up there in the mental illness group, but most mother so focus on this one hour pregnant. When you’re expecting a baby, it’s the most exciting time of your life.
You envision your new child and everything you plan to do with them throughout your life, you picture what they might look like and what their hobbies may be, you have a vision and a dream for this child. You don’t consider that once the baby is born you’re going to get shocked.
There is a huge shock to the system that comes with motherhood, and before you know it you’ll start googling what are the 5 signs of mental illness just to make sure that you’re not going nuts. One thing that all of the lovely baby pink and pastel yellow baby books won’t tell you is that motherhood is hard.
Even when you have a village around you, a child has just irreversibly changed and then exited your body. That’s a lot for one person to handle. You can read every book and every pamphlet that comes by your door, to make sure that you are an informed mother, but no mother is truly as informed as she thinks she is. Once that baby slides into your life and becomes a permanent attachment to you, life will never be the same again. That could be the hardest pill to swallow. Here are some of the reasons that motherhood is so hard – even if it is wonderful.
- It is so sudden. This is going to sound so doom and gloom – and while motherhood is one of the greatest and most precious gifts anybody can have, it’s a shock! It doesn’t matter if you planned and you tried for this baby, it doesn’t matter that you spent almost 10 months of your life pregnant and feeling every kick and every twist, it’s still sudden. The baby is suddenly there in your life and everything is changed. You can’t grab your keys and walk out of the house not without an arsenal of baby gear and a baby in the pushchair. You can’t just go to sleep and enjoy your night sleep because in an hour there will be a baby you need to feed, burp, change – it doesn’t feel as if it will ever end. Because it doesn’t.
- Your life as an individual is on hold. When you become a mother you suddenly put on another coat. There is the person you were before you were pregnant, and the person you are when you become a mother. You will spend a lot of your long nights burping and pasting with a baby remembering the person before you were pregnant. Your life will be positively changed, for the most part, but you will still sometimes wish to be that person again that you once were. The one who was carefree, didn’t have any anxiety or postnatal depression, and didn’t feel like the world suddenly revolved around the baby.
- Sleep deprivation. The last point that we are going to make is that sleep deprivation makes everything worse. No matter how tired you think you were before you had children, you never experienced actual tiredness until you become a parent and your tiredness is because sleep is kept from you.
