Prenatal depression is a serious problem that too few people talk about

As the pregnancy progressed, I found myself staring at babies in cafes or on the sidewalk, wondering why I’d ever wanted such a weird, loud thing. Why had I longed so much to smell a little, fluffy head? A friend asked me to hold her baby so she could eat, and I felt myself flinch. The baby was so heavy. My arms started to hurt. I just wanted to give him back to his mother.

The worse I felt, the more I pretended. To my midwife, to my therapist, to my friends, to my husband. Even to my unborn baby, to whom I spoke in strained voices: “Hi, honey!” I became convinced that if I didn’t say out loud how much I didn’t want this child, the child wouldn’t be able to tell.

I was scared and running out of time, so I did what every crystal-loving, horoscope-loving millennial does in times of trouble: I went to a psychic.

She wasn’t a psychic with a scarf and heavy eyeliner. She was a psychic of vests and shoes. She worked in a boring office with generic art on the walls. I told her why I was there: I had always wanted to be a mother, but now that I was pregnant, I didn’t want that anymore. She said nothing. She looked at me. I started to regret the $160 this was going to cost me.

Then she told me that the first realization I had ever had, as a tiny seed of a fetus, was that I was not welcome in the world.

Later that week I went out to dinner with my mom and we started talking about my pregnancy, and then her pregnancies. “I remember when I was six or seven weeks pregnant with you,” my mother said, “and I wasn’t sure if I wanted another baby. I remember feeling like I didn’t want to be pregnant.”

I finally had my proof. I was the unwanted baby and now I couldn’t welcome my own baby. The power of generational trauma was so strong, I told myself, that I was unable to stop myself from traumatizing my child.

I probably would have continued to believe this – and maybe even still believe it – if I hadn’t done a late night Google search for depression during pregnancy and found a forum where I read posts from hundreds of other women experiencing the same thing. People were depressed about the babies they longed for. Some people weren’t sure if they wanted a second child. Some people had experienced prenatal depression before and assured the rest of us that the depression could quickly disappear after giving birth. One post mentioned that if you have had a bad reaction to progesterone birth control, you are likely to develop depression during pregnancy as your body is flooded with progesterone.