James' World 2

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Through the muffle of both an interior door and an exterior one, I hear a chair scraping against pavers. Instantly, adrenaline courses through my body. I can hear the whoosh of my blood pumping in my ears, can feel a flat and unyielding pressure against my sternum and throat.

My eyes fly open, and I imagine the hairs on my arms and legs similarly standing at attention, but I have trained myself to stay perfectly still when this bodily response occurs, though every instinct I have is calling me to my feet. In slow motion, as if she will hear my eyeballs moving in their sockets, I shift my gaze downward to my baby. Her breath is light and warm against my chest. I have been holding her for over an hour, trying repeatedly to lull her with milk into a deep enough sleep that I can carefully — so, so carefully — rise from the reclining chair and take the six steps across the room to her crib, where I will attempt for the fourth time in an hour to place her like a piece of unexploded ordnance, not daring to breathe during the operation.

From the patio, I hear the noise again, and I recognize it immediately: the legs of our wooden outdoor furniture are dragging as N gets in and out of a chair. From my place in the noise-controlled, blackout-curtained nursery, where I am one sneeze or hiccup away from having to start the entire process over from scratch, the scraping sounds like a muffler dragging on the highway. My skin is hot with rage, which is just a cover for the deep despair that swells my whole body. My baby won’t sleep unless I am holding her. I am many, many months past the breaking point of going without sleep, and without respite, without my body being under my own control. Under these circumstances, anything that threatens to wake the baby up feels like a direct “f*ck you” to me and my labor, and I know he is out there, my boyfriend, love of my life, inadvertently scraping the f*cking chair on the patio while I die of exhaustion and boredom in here.

The anger and powerlessness snake up my throat from my belly. The baby stirs — whether from the sound of the chair or from my sudden energetic shift, I don’t know — and I know this means I will have to reset my inner countdown at least another 30 minutes. Tears spill down my cheeks, hot and fast, splashing down onto the baby’s face, at the same pace that the rage crests inside my body and rises, like vomit, through my gullet. It wants out. It wants to scream. But I am the parent, not the baby, so I clamp my hand over my lips and try to let it noiselessly into the chamber of my mouth.

I was ready for PPD. But it didn’t come — at least not the way I was expecting it.

“Rage is an unmet need,” a friend often reminds me when we talk about our experiences — shared, but different — of postpartum rage. She’s a provider of mental-health services to perinatal people and the operator of the Mom Rage Art Studio, so I take her words seriously. They feel right. This language came up in all my conversations about postpartum anger. I wish I’d had their clarity.

For me, it was the noise. For other new parents, it might be something completely different, like perceived or real incompetence at taking care of the baby. For others, it is beard hairs in the sink or a chronically overfull trash can or the way he pronounces the word corduroy. Sometimes it’s the way she just gets up and leaves the house when she needs something. Or, most damning of all, simply his face, existing. Postpartum rage triggers are as diverse as they are affecting, but remain remarkably consistent in their targets: the near and the dear.

When I had my baby in 2020, I was well armed for the fight against postpartum depression. PPD is a predator you can see coming — it’s even got its own acronym! — so I assembled my defenses accordingly: therapist, postpartum group, partner, family, Expecting Better, some mindfulness sh*t I bookmarked on YouTube. I took a dutiful series of classes and handouts with the precise vibe of a D.A.R.E. class that taught me the things to watch out for. Sleeping too much, crying too much (how much is too much? No one can say), “persistent sadness,” and thoughts of self-harm. In other words, a version of the treatment-resistant major depression I have managed for most of my life, except now there’s a baby. I was on Prozac by the time Prozac Nation came out. I can clock a generic versus name-brand Zoloft, Paxil, and Lexapro on sight. I was ready for PPD. But it didn’t come — at least not the way I was expecting it.

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Mental health

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