It’s been almost a year and a half since my last post! I actually forgot about this blog,
A lot has happened since then, I did leave my husband for a few days mostly to clear MY head and figure out what I wanted. During this time, I realised I didn’t want to loose my family and the problem was not just my husband, I had to take some responsibility for the deteroriation of the relationship as well. So, I continued personal counselling for myself without trying to force my husband to attend with me. Once a month we would have a session where we worked on specific goals we wanted to achieve as a family, but we stopped marriage counselling because it wasn’t working for us.
What worked was me realising I wanted to fight for the relationship, realizing also that my depression made me look at things from a very strange perspective. Everything my husband said or I did, I took personally and felt that it was a complaint against me. He would state a fact, “you didn’t do the laundry today” and I would hear it as a complaint and displeasure – I heard the same statement as “why didn’t you do the laundry, what have you been doing all day, you are not a good wife”. Somehow I managed to always blame myself for everything.
With personal counselling, I was able to rebuild my confidence and my self-esteem and that changed my perspective on a lot of things including the state of my relationship.
Now don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t all me and my husband definitely acted like a jerk during the first year of our daughter’s life, but he’s not alone in this. Many first time parents have a difficult transition adjusting to the new dynamics in the relationship, and it’s even worse if one parent is suffering from depression. We also realised that for a few months my husband was also depressed about our situation which made it even worse.
The good news, things have changed! We are a stable couple again! We work together for the good of the family, we treat each other with love and respect and our relationship is healthy once more. It’s really important to try to work out the issues in the relationship and have a good mental health before making big decisions like getting a divorce. I see that now and I’m really glad that I didn’t end my marriage while I was in still suffering from postpartum mood disorders.
