Dealing with my wife’s postnatal depression:
After our first baby was born, we were both so happy and everything seemed so great, life was just perfect! A short time after (several weeks) my wife’s mood started to change and she would often be very snappy and short tempered with me, even for the smallest of things, such as letting the scoop fall into the tub of powdered milk or even just asking a question.
As time has gone on things have gone from bad to worse. She’s gone from snapping at me and being irritable to shouting and screaming at me and calling me names. The day after she will often text me and apologise or apologise to me in person when I get home from work. She’ll say she didn’t mean it and that she just needs more sleep and feels angry and resentful all the time and that she can’t explain why. I always try to understand how she’s feeling and help out as best I can with the house cleaning, baby feeds, nappy changes as well as getting up in the middle of the night so that she can catch up on her sleep.
From the first couple of weeks when this started to now, 3 and a half months later, things just keep getting worse. At first she would just explode at me and shout and scream maybe once a week, and then it was maybe twice a week, and eventually every other day. And now its at a point where every day I go to work tired, stressed and upset and at the end of my shift I don’t know if I’m going home to a happy wife or an angry wife. And before the birth of our baby girl she was always a happy and chilled out relaxed person. And she really is an amazing person with a big heart, we’ve only been married 1 year in July and the whole time we’ve been together has been the happiest time of my life.
Sometimes I have come home from work and I’ve heard her crying or shouting or both in the living room by herself. I try to calm her down and tell her she’s my beautiful wife, and then I love her more than anything in the whole world, and that she’s an amazing mother and doing a fantastic job at bringing up our beautiful baby girl! I tell her I’ll do anything to make her happy and she just needs to tell me what she wants and I’ll make it happen. At weekends she’ll want to go out for rides and walks, and I’ll buy her chocolate and take her for meals and anything else I can think of. We have two holidays planned in July to Dublin and Italy as she wants to go away and she’s an outdoors kind of person.
I feel like I’m trying so hard to help her get through this but it’s so hard sometimes and sometimes I feel so alone. It’s almost like my actual wife has gone and been replaced by a very unhappy person. She will say things like “I’ve lost my life”, “I feel trapped”, “I feel like I’ve lost my identity”, “my life is over!”, “I wasn’t ready for a baby, what have I done”, “I’m never going to be able to do all the things that I wanted to do, like travel and go hikings/camping”, “I feel like I’m a bad mother”. And I think there’s a lot of other things she says but that’s just some of the things I can remember. Whenever she says these things I try to comfort her and give her big cuddles and tell her I love her and that we have a good life. I really try to make her smile and make her feel happy again, each and every time this happens. I know this must be a big life change for her with being on maternity leave and she’s only 24 so I really try to be understanding and to help her in every way I can.
Often it will feel no matter how much I do, no matter how hard I try, or how nice I am, that it doesn’t make a difference, like nothing I do is appreciated and it really gets me down sometimes. Especially since I am so tired all the time myself and I hardly ever get a good sleep. Even when it’s her turn to get up in the middle of the night, I’ll be fast asleep at 4am and all of sudden I’ll be woken up with my wife shouting and crying and saying “I can’t cope!”, “I can’t do this anymore!”, “my life is over”. And it really makes me jump as one second I’m fast asleep and the next I’m woken up with so much loud noise, banging, shouting and crying. I often feel like I can handle the baby just fine, and the baby doesn’t bother me one bit. It’s actually harder to deal with my wife with PND then it is to deal with a three and half month old baby.
Babies are easier compared to a wife with PND. Nobody ever warned me of this, and I never thought or imagined this would happen to us.
When it’s my turn to get up with the baby, I just pick the baby up, take her to the living room so not to disturb my wife, I don’t make any noise at all and I change her nappy and feed her and get her back to sleep and then I go back to bed myself. I never have any trouble with doing this. It is hard sometimes when I’m tired but I just accept that it has to be done and I just get on with it. I don’t get upset about it because I understand my baby just wants feeding and nappy change, which is normal and to be expected. And at first my wife was also very good at getting up in the middle of the night to feed the baby, but now it’s got to a point where every time it’s her turn she starts crying and shouting. So in the end it leaves everyone sleep deprived. And we actually have a very easy baby that just eats and sleeps very easily.
It took me a long time to convince my wife that she had PND, and I finally got her to accept this and to go to the doctors about four weeks ago. She told the doctor everything and the doctor referred her to a councillor. But since then it has been weeks and she’s still not called the councillor because she often feels like she doesn’t need to or feels embarrassed and doesn’t want to discuss with someone else what’s she’s going through. And every day I ask her to call the number or to let me call the number and she keeps putting it off. Now she says she’s called it but can’t get an appointment for weeks but it just feels like it’s never going to happen. And even if we do eventually end up going it feels like we should have had help months ago and that it’s all just taking too long.
We’ve now also had discussions about her maybe getting some pills, like anti-depressants from the doctors because her hormones seem all over the place and she’s never feeling herself. Every day she feels sad, angry, sad, angry, at different points in the day. And about a week ago she admitted to me that she’s angry towards me because she feels resentment towards me, and that having a baby is my fault that she’s lost her life and her freedom. But we discussed having a baby for a long time before we got pregnant and she came off contraception so that we could try for a baby, it was a joint decision. But yet she still feels angry towards me.
I often feel hurt and upset by some of the things she says, I feel upset when she’s upset because all I want is for her to be happy. I’m really trying my best to be a good husband and a good dad but I just feel like we need some help. I don’t feel like there’s anything more I can do to try and help her or fix the problem on my own. Sometimes I feel like I’m going to have a nervous breakdown myself because it’s so hard living with a wife that has PND and I’m worried how much longer this will go on for? 3 months, six months, a year? When will it end? When will I have my wife back?
Can anyone offer advice or share similar experiences?
Scott.