Tag Archives: Postpartum Voice of the Week

Welcome to #PPDChat Voices!

Hi there!

My hopes for this faded when I hit a tech snafu this past weekend. Granted, I should have recorded earlier than this past weekend but life has been crazy up and down with recovering from a road trip and days full of pain which induce fog-brain so, yeah, I was totally behind. HOWEVER.

I’m having a decent week now, still taking it slowly but I’m thrilled to be introducing this new feature at the blog! We’ll be rolling it out as we get submissions so feel free to send yours in whenever you want. I had grand plans of doing mine first, but recording is just not cooperating over here so I need to get that aspect ironed out.

PPDChatVoices Today’s #PPDChat Voice is Lindsay, or if you know her on Twitter, @lilloveandluck. She is all sorts of awesome. Her piece is too, despite the fact that she keeps apologizing for all the uh’s and um’s. It’s tough to put yourself out there on camera, yo.

Huge thanks to Lindsay for submitting. (Check your email for your badge for your blog!)

Lindsay’s bio: Powered by espresso and cake, Lindsay is a jill of all trades trying to find her niche in the world. She became a serendipitous advocate after being diagnosed with Postpartum Depression and Anxiety in 2011. She lives and breathes New Orleans with her patient husband, sprightly son, and critters. She blogs at www.withalittleloveandluck.com , and you can find her over-sharing on Twitter @lilloveandluck.

Postpartum Voice of the Week: @jamesandjax’s “Ghosts That We Knew (Hope in the Darkness)”

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This past week there were several powerful posts about PPD. The writing these days is not only prolific but profound. It’s encouraging to see so many new voices growing and fearlessly sharing their journeys.

The post which caught my attention this week was over at Jamie & Jax’s place. She wrote a piece in which she used music as the inspiration, “Ghosts That We Knew” by Mumford & Sons to be precise.

I rarely listen to new music as I get stuck in my own rut because of my OCD. But I decided to find the song on Spotify and give it a whirl.

I cried.

The song is so perfectly fitted for #ppdchat, as Jamie points out –something another Warrior mom, Lindsay, mentioned to her. I haven’t listened to the song since the other day because it’s that powerful.

The lyrics that got to me the most?
Slam into you right at the start of the song. I was a blubbering mess for the rest of it.

The first few lyrics are:

“You saw my pain, washed out in the rain
Broken glass, saw the blood run from my veins
But you saw no fault no cracks in my heart
And you knelt beside my hope torn apart”

These lyrics truly embody the spirit of #ppdchat. We see the cracks yet we still love and support one another without judgment, without hesitation, and with compassion.

Thank you Jamie & Lindsay, for bringing this to “light” and for being such amazing members of the community –together, we are a light which will never rest, never fade, and always be brightly shone upon the path of those who follow in our path.

Go check out her post and the video for the song here.

Postpartum Voice of the Week: The Monster Within

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Every so often, I read a blog post which takes me right back into the darkness. Right back into the days spent in the middle of the vortex with the Wicked Witch flying right past my window.

This is one of those posts.

I’m not going to spend a lot of time ruminating or introducing the post.

I will say that if you’re vulnerable, you may want to avoid it. There’s a lot of showing instead of telling, raw honesty, and power in this post.

It’s why this post by Kimberly at Reflections of Now is my pick for Postpartum Voice of the Week.

Go. Read. Love.

Postpartum Voice of the Week: @jenrenpody’s Horror Show in My Mind

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I have a special place in my heart for women who struggle with Intrusive Thoughts. Don’t get me wrong, I have a place in my heart for all women who struggle with Postpartum Mood & Anxiety Disorders, but Intrusive Thoughts plagued me during both of my episodes. They are insidious tenacious monsters hell-bent on tearing your mind and soul apart.

When I come across a post mentioning Intrusive Thoughts, I read it with a heavy heart. I know how she felt when those thoughts attacked her. The burning fear, the anxiety, the repulsion of “Oh my GOD why am I thinking like this?!?!” which catapults itself through her brain as the monster takes hold in her mind.

This particular blogger, Jen, a proud member of #ppdchat, writes a heart-rendering (and potentially triggering) post about her journey with Intrusive Thoughts. She’s revisiting this time in her life as a result of a tragic event in her area this past weekend. It’s difficult, as women who have been through this, not to flash back when something terrible happens in a family near us – or even harder yet, a family we know personally. We internalize our thoughts, our fears, and everything comes flooding back, threatening to pull us under.

My absolute favourite part of this past is this paragraph:

I knew that these intrusive thoughts were not real and that they were not rational. I could not stop them from replaying over and over in my head. It took me months of therapy to realize that I had suffered from these thoughts. In order to protect myself, I stuffed those thoughts way down deep. I could not bear to bring them to the light of the day because they were just too horrible to contemplate.

Jen deals with these emotions in a powerful post which you absolutely should read. As stated earlier, however, it may be possibly triggering if you’re still struggling and on fragile ground. So read her post, “Horror Show in My Mind: Intrusive Thoughts,” with a mindful consciousness and an open heart. Then show her some love, will you? She needs it this week.

My Postpartum Voice goes Zeen

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I joined a new Beta site this past week. Darren Rowse, over at ProBlogger recommended checking it out.

I received my official invite last night and spent the morning playing with it. It’s a neat site, allows you to aggregate content from across the web, social sites, and beyond into a neat “zeen” (that’s hipster for magazine, I think).

I produced a Zeen focused on “Celebrating Postpartum Voices” this morning. The theme is “A Retrospective of Postpartum Voices of the Week.”

You can check it out here.