A couple hours after my delivery out of nowhere I just felt sick and nauseated, and I felt itchy all over. When they brought my son into the room I asked the nurse to take him back, luckily; dad, my mother and sister were in the room so they tended to my son. At first my family thought I just didn’t want to be bothered because I felt sick but as the day went on they noticed that I was very withdrawn from my son. The time came for me to leave the hospital with this baby and I didn’t care if he came or not, I had developed postpartum depression.
My sister couldn’t understand why I was acting the way I was, he looked just like my daughter and I loved my daughter with all my heart. I can’t really explain where it came from or why, I had a good pregnancy and I was happy and excited about the birth of my baby. During this period I didn’t want anything to do with him and everyone around me knew it. I ignored him, I wouldn’t feed him, I would take my daughter and leave him behind, and when I found him staring at me I would yell at him to stop looking at me. My sister and my mother wanted to take him home because they feared I would neglect him, but dad wouldn’t allow that.
Three months went by and it was time to go back to work, I was excited because I knew I would see less of him. One day on the way home from work his dad called and asked me to pick him up from the day care center; I was not very happy about that. On the way home, after I picked him up, something told me to look in the rear view mirror and when I did I noticed my son staring at me and his face turning blue. That was the day I snapped out of my depression, and one of the best days of my life.
According to Midwifery Today; in rural Mexico, midwives still attend almost 50% of the births and are preferred over the doctors because they themselves are women; because they charge less; because they go to the woman’s home, are available, speak the same language and share the same culture; and because they treat women with warmth and emotion. The clinic where I went to for prenatal care had midwives, and they were great, very supportive, but most of them didn’t have children. I always wondered if they really could understand what we were going through. Personally, I think men are more sensitive to woman because they really do not know what a woman endures; maybe this is why the midwives were great.
Midwifery Today. (2015). Birth & Midwifery in Mexico. Midwives in Oaxaca.
Retrieved from: http://www.midwiferytoday.com/international/mexico.asp
