I got pregnant in January. It was a wanted pregnancy, I have a lovely partner and I was so happy. It was my lifelong dream to be a mum.
January through to April I had a horrendous first trimester with morning sickness but was otherwise happy and excited as was my partner.
I remember the exact day the "switch flipped", so to speak. I was relaxing at home and scrolling through the news as I often do. An article came up about quite a well known child abuse/murder case that has been in court this year and I read through it. I've always kept up to date with the news and with high profile cases as many people do these days and I had become relatively desensitized but something about this case got into my head. I presume it's because it relates to a baby and I am pregnant. One particular sentence in the article mentioning what happened to the baby triggered me to have a huge panic attack and I haven't really been the same since. It was literally like a switch flipping. My life has a "Before" (before I saw the article) and an "After".
I was so horrified and upset by what I had read that I sought support online. I found a feminist page on Reddit in which women supported each other about past traumas from men and also discussed news stories about men who have harmed women and children and advocated for better protection for women and children. It was similar to the feminism page on Mumsnet. I'm not sure why I thought engaging in this forum was a good idea given that I was clearly very emotionally vulnerable. Some women on the forum advocated to get certain pornographic websites taken down from the web to protect women and children.
Despite wanting to just forget it all and move on with my life and enjoy pregnancy, my mental health continued to deteriorate. In my mind I would constantly be replaying scenarios in my head about how children can be hurt by men and how awful it is and how I need to help. So I would go back to the forum and read through it. It's like a compulsion which I can't control. I would try to go "cold turkey" and bury it all and stop reading about stuff but then it will randomly all come to the surface again and I will find myself in my room, isolating myself from my partner and having panic attacks and reading the forum and checking news articles. I've been able to mask it relatively well from my partner and family. I am able to act like a normal excited pregnant woman around them but it is becoming exhausting.
Recently I was on the forum and someone said they wanted help in starting a petition to have a pornography site taken down due to content on there. Unfortunately they posted a screenshot which showed that men were sharing inappropriate cartoon images on a different website. She had made the post in good faith - she wanted people to band together to get the website reported to the authorities and get taken down. I made reports to various online authorities. I was horrified and vomited several times. It was cartoons but it has still traumatised me.
This was a couple of weeks ago and now I am in darker mental place than ever. I feel sick 24/7 and I can't get all of the stuff that has built up over the last few months out of my mind. I feel very mentally unwell. I have convinced myself that police will now be coming for me and will knock on my door any second. I am convinced my baby is going to get taken off me and I'm terrified. I keep going to an AI chatbot for reassurance where I ask if whether the police will visit me because of the report I made and the chatbot gives different answers each time, sometimes saying yes, other times saying no. I will spend hours asking the chatbot the same question desperately trying to get it to reassure me but it's no use. When it tells me that I won't be in trouble for reporting something in good faith, I will attempt to "argue" with the AI and accuse it of just telling me what I want to hear. I feel as though I have to be prepared for the "reality" so I will tell the AI to "give me a worst case scenario" which is then does and I'll then have a panic attack.
Even now I still get compulsions to go and read articles in the feminism forum to "prepare" myself for the reality of how fucking awful this planet is
I can't bear any of it anymore. I feel so guilty. All I want is for all of this to be gone from my mind and to enjoy my pregnancy and bond with my baby. I was sat in an antenatal class the other day and zoned out the whole time thinking about all of this. It was the same the other week when I went for a growth scan. I was just thinking about all of this.
I've built up a whole scenario in my head where the police will knock on my door and arrest me and ban me from seeing my baby and my partner will hate me and I'll have to go and live with my parents. I've even started provisionally planning for it all. The other day I nearly booked a taxi to a police station because I wanted to "tell them everything" so that I could take away the uncertainty about them visiting me. What doesn't help me is that a week ago go my brother who has autism and lives with my parents DID get a police visit and they checked his computer because of online activity. It was related some political forum where he'd made comments that had gone too far and police wanted to check the person behind the IP address but they determined that he was vulnerable and didn't realise what he was doing and the case got closed immediately. But I feel as though I have "manifested" the situation by obsessing over the thought of me getting a police visit.
I'm due in 3 weeks and I feel as though I am losing control of my own mind. I so badly want to confide in my partner but due to the subject matters I just don't know how to bring it up. He's so excited to be a dad and have our little family. When he talks about wanting to set up the nursery etc I feel sick.
I did try to say something at one of my midwife appointments but I didn't feel able to go into the full details. I just disclosed feeling "a sense of dread that something bad is going to happen" and she assumed I meant I was worried about pregnancy complications and she assured me that this was common. She referred me to a talking therapy service but when I got the call from the talking therapy people a few weeks later I was having an okay day so I asked to withdraw my referral. At my midwife appointments since I have pretended that everything is fine.
I honestly cannot bear it anymore. I keep wanting to just go to hospital or call 111 but I feel like before I can do that I need to be honest with my partner but I just can't because of the subject matters. I don't know how to bring it all up. I'm due in 3 weeks and I don't know how I'm going to get through the birth and postpartum. I think if I do get help it needs to be from an acute emergency service. Making a referral and then weeks waiting to be contacted isn't going to work as I have "okay days" where I bury it all and try to forget about it and if they contact me on one of those days then I will decline the help.
I love my baby boy so much and I just want to be his mum. I don't know why I have gone down this route, I fucking hate myself. All I ever wanted was to be a mum, this should be the happiest time of my life.