Nursing Made Me Really Sad

I knew from the beginning of my pregnancy that I really, really wanted to breastfeed.  I knew that there were likely going to be some physical difficulties.  So many people told me about the horrors of a bad latch, the pain of engorgement and awfulness of callused and cracked nipples.  Still, I envisioned myself powering through and doing it for my baby.  Fortunately, I didn’t have that many struggles with the aforementioned breastfeeding obstacles, aside from some minute latch problems, it was a relatively easy thing for us.  Power to you moms who do have to deal with all those things!  What I did struggle with, that no one told me about was the, albeit brief but, immense sadness that came along with my let down. 

I had prepared to nurse my baby while crying, just in my prep I was crying from physical pain.  I was so blindsided by the emotional sadness that came with it.  Now, don’t get me wrong, for me it wasn’t an extended amount of sadness, just a few minutes, but it was a crushing, shocking sadness that for those minutes, ruined me.

Throughout my pregnancy, I was convinced I would have postpartum depression.  Every, single time I nursed I thought to myself, “This is it.  This is the PPD setting in.”  I really wish someone had told me that this was totally normal!  Evidently, there is a condition called Dysphoric Milk Ejection Reflex that does just that.    Just before the milk let-down, moms experiencing this have negative emotions for just a few minutes.  It seems that it has to do with a decrease in dopamine which happens right before the let-down (KellyMom.com, 2012)

So there you go!  What I was dealing with was just a part of the emotional rollercoaster that is motherhood.  For me, it resolved itself to happen very rarely in about 8 weeks.  By that time, I had done some research and figured it out, but it sure would have been nice if someone had just been like, “Yeah having a baby is physically hard.  And nursing is physically hard, too. You know what else, though?  It’s really emotionally hard, too, especially in the beginning.  You are going to be fine.  You’re going to do a great job, but you also might be sad or angry or anxious and that’s ok.” 

Resources:

Depression or other negative emotions upon milk let-down (D-MER) • KellyMom.com. (2012). Retrieved March 28, 2016, from http://kellymom.com/bf/concerns/mother/d-mer/