Essay and postpartum poems at Postpartum Progress
August 20, 2013
When I look back now, I can’t believe it took me so long to recognize the postpartum depression for what it was. Sure, I felt hopeless and overwhelmed and I cried a lot, but I was a new mother, sleeping in 45-minute increments; surely that was how every mother of a newborn felt? My old life was over and would never come back; I just needed to accept that, or possibly to grieve it for a while. But the grieving didn’t end, and the acceptance didn’t come.Before our son was born, I had been a poet and rabbinic student. I struggled, once he was born, to figure out how to hold on to those identities. When he was two months old I would enroll in one single rabbinic school class. But before that, I wrote poems. Not very many of them, but I wrote them. This sounds melodramatic now, but when I was writing them I felt as though I was saving my own life....
My thanks are due to Katherine Stone at Postpartum Progress not only for her amazing blog and resource site, but also for publishing my guest post Unfold: Poems of Postpartum Depression, excerpted above.
My guest post at Postpartum Progress includes short excerpts from some of the poems in Waiting to Unfold, my second book-length collection of poems, published this year by Phoenicia Publishing and available both from Phoenicia and from Amazon.
If you don't already have a copy, I hope you'll consider buying one -- for yourself, for a new mother in your life, or for anyone you know who has struggled with depression and might find hope in this chronicle of motherhood and charting a new path through.