Don’t want to take anything away from the seriousness of what happened with Nima, but it has been weighing heavily on me. Writing this post has been very very difficult for me and I am not sure if i should ever share this but I’m trying to #breakthestigma4nima so please hear me out.
This is a photo of me on 06/06/2020 seconds after Veer made his grand entry. I felt every emotion that I could possibly imagine, I felt happiness, relief, joy, anxiety, fear, excitement and so much more.
I was happy because he was finally here and scared because he was finally here, in the middle of a global pandemic. I remember with Laksh, things we so different because he spent the first two months of his life in the NICU. Tomorrow Veer will be two months old so I felt I needed to share this.
I am not sure what I feel Is #postpartumdepression or anxiety because of the current state of the world. I felt something similar when Laksh was born as well and there was no pandemic then. I felt guilt, I felt anxiety, I felt sad, I felt inadequate, I felt disgust, I felt ugly, I felt like I had failed my son. And I thought I felt all that because he was in the NICU for little over 2 months and somehow that happened because of me.
But by the grace of God, Veer has been here with us every single day of the two months that Laksh had spent in the NiCU and our boys with be with us forever more, but I still feel these feelings. I still feel like I am not enough.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t feel this all the time but I do feel these feelings of inadequacy. I feel anger and frustration and irritability for small little things. I felt shame when answering the questionnaire my OB made me fill regarding #ppd becasue I didn’t want to acknowledge I felt those feelings. That me, an educated person who has her sh*t together is feeling like she is lost.
But my question is why? Why do we feel the need to hide our mental well being from the world? Why do we feel that we would be labeled as ‘not fit mothers’ if we say we are struggling? Why do we feel shame in asking for help?
As south Asians specially, mental health is such a stigma and never discussed openly. People throw around the word ‘ I am depressed’ without truly understanding what it means or how debilitating it truly can be.
Today sharing about these feelings has felt like a difficult but much needed step for me but I’m doing this because I hope it helps someone feeling the same way reach out and ask for help.
