A divorce during postnatal depression? Separations don’t come much rougher than this one. Our Capsule reader Lisa came home from her six-week check-up after giving birth to discover that not only did she now have a PND & PNA diagnosis, but she now also had no husband…
In our past instalments over the last year we’ve covered everything from when you’re most likely to divorce to whether they’re contagious to whether being on the contraceptive pill can effect your chances! and have now spoken to dozens of women – including one whose husband announced he was leaving her to have an open relationship with a 19-year-old, another who was quite literally ghosted by her own husband and one who discovered the real reason her husband divorced her was because he had a baby with her SISTER.
If you have a topic you’d like to discuss, share your thoughts, experience or advice about, drop a line to [email protected].
TW: Postnatal anxiety, intrusive thoughts, suicidal thoughts
When Lisa and Shaun signed up for antenatal classes ahead of the birth of their first child, they hoped it might make them feel a bit more prepared.
“Instead,” says Lisa, “I think we giggled through the whole thing. We did it over Zoom because of lockdowns and it felt so comical. We were so naïve back then! We had to keep turning off the camera and saying there were issues with our wi-fi because we got the giggles. Thankfully, another couple were exactly the same and she, Sarah, became one of my best friends. Not just a mum friend, but a best friend.”
Lisa says she wished she paid more attention (“I thought all the ‘make a birth plan stuff was ridiculous, because, really, it’s up to nature and the baby, right?”) but there was one part in particular she wished she’d listened to intently.
“I had never experienced anything on the spectrum of depression or anxiety,” she says. “So, when the midwife covered off Post Natal Depression I think I actually turned to my husband and gave him a little knowing smile and switched off totally. Like, the audacity of it. I thought it was something that really only happened to people who had a history of it, so I went into birth thinking there was a 0% chance I would, or really could, get it.”
But, like most new mums, Lisa got knocked sideways by the baby blues on day four after giving birth (by emergency c-section, after the baby’s heartrate started skyrocketing).
“I felt out of control,” she says. “I cried at everything. Everything. And I couldn’t stop.”
Her midwife reassured her it was normal and would get better – as did as Sarah, who had her baby a week earlier and went through the exact same hormonal rollercoaster. And sure enough, she soon felt less desperate. “But I didn’t feel right,” she says. “I wasn’t crying 24/7 anymore, but I had the baby blues. I just felt this crashing, overwhelming sadness. And this fear that something was going to go wrong.”
Two weeks passed, and Lisa continued to feel deep in the baby blues. “Everyone I spoke to in our antenatal group was going through the same thing, so I figured it was normal, especially during lockdown,” she says. So another two weeks passed, and then another. She continued to go through the motions – often, completely alone because she was scared to death of anyone else holding or caring for the baby. Her family lived out of town, and lockdown meant they couldn’t travel into Auckland, so it was mostly just Lisa and her husband.
She left for her six-week check-up feeling completely numb – both emotionally and physically.
“I remember the midwife asking how I was doing and I burst into tears,” Lisa says. I told her everything: I couldn’t sleep, I was having intrusive thoughts, I was afraid, and I was having suicidal thoughts.”
Her midwife diagnosed her with PND and PNA.
“It came as both a relief, and as absolute terror,” says Lisa. “I was glad there was a name for it, but I was so scared of having it. But weirdly, I felt almost excited to go home and tell my husband. I thought he was going to go, ‘Aha! That makes sense! And now I will fix it for you!’”
Instead, shockingly, she got home to find her husband was leaving her.
“Now, in hindsight, I’d say he also had PPA,” says Lisa. “But what he said was that he just couldn’t do it. He wasn’t cut out to be a dad, that I was doing a good job and the baby and I would be better off without him.”
Lisa says she remembers feeling like she was drowning in quicksand. “It felt so out of body,” she says. “It didn’t feel like real life. I very mechanically told him that I had been diagnosed with PNA and PND and he barely registered it. I didn’t even know where he went that night.”
Thankfully, Lisa’s family rallied. None of them lived in Auckland, but they – with the help of her midwife – made an urgent case to be allowed to cross the lockdown border and pick Lisa and her daughter up, and bring her to the family home outside of Wellington.
“I barely remember those months,” she says. “I’m so grateful to my mum, our family and my friends, including Sarah, who all went above and beyond. They carried me through that time. Sometimes literally.”
Medication helped immensely, says Lisa, which was a godsend, because somehow, things were about to get even worse.
Her family knew after three months of Lisa living with them that her husband had moved in with another woman. They managed to keep it from her for another six weeks, until she was in a better headspace.
“I had a six-month-old baby, had been through the wringer, and my husband had a new partner,” she says. ‘He says he met her after we broke up, but none of it makes sense to me. Auckland was still in a lockdown over that time, so I don’t see how that would have even been possible.”
“For a long time, I blamed myself – that me having PND and PNA meant I wasn’t myself and maybe if I hadn’t had that then we would be fine,” says Lisa. “I’ve had therapy, which has helped hugely. But Sarah probably put it best to me when I told her one day that I blamed myself. Sarah had PND so understood. She said, first of all I didn’t ask for PND & PNA, but most importantly, if my husband couldn’t handle a bit of PND, if it wasn’t that it would have been something else. We’d never had any big tests in our relationship before – the first thing that was hard, he left straight away. She said that says more about him than me, and I’m inclined to agree now.”
It’s now a few years since they separated – they’re divorced and Lisa now has full custody of their daughter.
“Sadly, she’s barely seen her father since those first six weeks,” says Lisa.
“Sometimes I feel really generous with my thoughts, like, okay, maybe I missed little things, like how silly he was on those antenatal groups, and how he didn’t buy a single thing in preparation for the baby. We talked about having a baby for years – and he actively participated in trying to have one – but maybe having one was different to the thought of one? Maybe it was too much for him and this is the best solution. But other days, I want to hire every billboard in the country and make an ad with his face telling people what he did, and to warn other women to avoid him at all costs. I hope one day he really recognizes what he did and wants to make things up to my daughter. I hope that for her sake – it’s too late for us to ever rebuild the hurt he caused me, but I hope he one day tries to make it right for her.”
