Step by Step Parenting

Given that anxiety is something I’ve struggled with throughout my life, and that I was diagnosed with postpartum anxiety following the birth of my oldest daughter, I just assumed that I would have raging postpartum anxiety once the twins arrived.

To my surprise, though, I felt great after the twins were born. I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop, so to speak, but it never did.

Days went by, and then weeks, and before I knew it, I felt mostly recovered from the whole ordeal. At only nine or ten weeks postpartum, I felt like I was back to my old self. There were tough moments, of course, but it was nothing like the first time that I was postpartum. I almost felt guilty admitting to people that I actually felt great.

The early weeks were filled with wonder and snuggles, and I thanked the lucky stars that my mental health remained mostly intact. I had escaped the clutches of postpartum anxiety!

Well… so I thought.

With my first daughter, postpartum anxiety showed up in all of the usual, expected ways. I worried about tripping down the stairs while holding the baby, or getting into a car crash on the way to my mom’s house, or the baby getting COVID (to be fair, this was during 2020). I even had intrusive, anxiety-fueled thoughts that feel too scary to spell out, but if you’re a mom, I am sure you can imagine exactly what I am talking about!

Nearly six years later, though, I wasn’t as anxious about the babies themselves, so I thought that meant I was in the clear. Little did I know that instead of being anxious about the babies, I would just be anxious about everything else.

Around five weeks after the twins were born, I started having dreams that if I didn’t pass the bar exam upon law school graduation, I would be killed. Yes, killed. In my dream, it was some dystopian society where there was a plague, and somehow it was decided that only barred attorneys and their children (but not their spouses?) would be allowed to live. If you didn’t pass the bar, or weren’t an attorney at all, then you were left to die. Ever since law school started, I had been stressed about passing the bar, but not like this.

Then I started having dreams about messing up huge assignments at work.

Every email I got from a supervisor or professor had me on edge.

I suddenly felt like all of my classmates probably hated me, and I began to feel like I didn’t belong at work or school anymore.

As someone who was usually fairly composed in a workplace setting and at least confident enough to get by, these thoughts were very unsettling. I didn’t recognize myself anymore, and no amount of logic or reasoning helped. I knew these fears were unreasonable, but that knowledge didn’t change how I felt.

After a few weeks of this, it hit me: what I was experiencing was simply postpartum anxiety in disguise. The contents of the anxious thoughts were different, but their intrusiveness, their unreasonableness, and the way they felt all-consuming and inescapable were the same.

With my first daughter, my whole existence revolved around my daughter, so my anxiety did, too.

But with the twins, I was also juggling work and school, so my postpartum anxiety made sure to attack those areas of my life, as well. If I didn’t know myself better, I might have missed the signs completely, and then struggled even longer because I didn’t know the ways in which I needed help.

Once I understood the root of the anxiety, the thoughts became easier to ignore. The noise and panic subsided enough that I no longer felt like I was drowning in it. On the days when my anxiousness began to feel like too much to bear, I made sure that I went for a run, or journaled, or called my best friend, or did any of my other coping mechanisms to help.

Nothing has “cured” my postpartum anxiety. It’s still very much there. But learning how to recognize it when it shows up in surprising ways has helped me live with the anxiety without letting it run the show.