Jessica Mannen Kimmet reflects on her battle with postpartum depression, how it impacted her family and her choices, and how she got to a healthier place. She recently published the book, Groaning in Labor, Growing in Hope: Scripture Reflections for the Hard Days of Early Motherhood, in which she draws from her own experience of postpartum depression to help women find spiritual resources to accompany them through similar experiences.
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Jessica Mannen Kimmet reflects on her battle with postpartum depression, how it impacted her family and her choices, and how she got to a healthier place. She recently published the book, Groaning in Labor, Growing in Hope: Scripture Reflections for the Hard Days of Early Motherhood, in which she draws from her own experience of postpartum depression to help women find spiritual resources to accompany them through similar experiences.
Contact Femammal:
If you have feedback or want to be a future guest, please get in touch!
Logo design: copyright Darragh Hannan
[00:18] Greer:
Hi, this is Greer, your host for Femammal, the podcast that holds space for women to explore what it means to live well in our bodies and celebrates moving through this world as female mammals. This season, we are listening to women share their stories of how they formed their families, especially when health factors or medical issues impacted their decisions. Women's health matters for its own sake. At the same time, for many women, health issues not only impact their own quality of life, but also their paths to forming families. And many women have wanted to share those stories here, too. For our purposes, forming families means the creation of any home life that generates safety, belonging, connection, and joy. And it doesn't exclusively mean becoming a parent and raising children. I hope you will listen to each story this season with a sense of curiosity and compassion. And if you're going through something in your life right now where you're not in a place to listen to stories like these, I hope that you find compassion and support for what you're going through, and you can return to this podcast when you're ready. Today's guest is Jessica Mannen Kimmet, who is a former classmate of mine from the Master of Divinity program at the University of Notre Dame. After a decade of work in liturgy and college campus ministry, she left full time work to be at home with her three young sons, but she continues to work as a freelance writer and liturgical musician. She recently published the book Groaning in Labor, Growing in Hope: Scripture Reflections for the Hard Days of Early Motherhood, in which she draws from her own experience of postpartum depression to help women find spiritual resources to accompany them through similar experiences. In this episode, she reflects on her battle with postpartum depression, how it impacted her family and her choices, and how she got to a healthier place. You may also recognize Jessica's voice from the first season of Femammal, when she reflected on Living in Harmony with the Seasons. If you missed that episode, be sure to check that out. Well, welcome, Jessica. I'm so excited that you are coming back on Femammal for another interview, and congratulations on your beautiful book, Groaning in Labor, Growing in Hope. I've read it now. It's so insightful, so wise, and I really appreciate you sharing from your own difficult experiences to help other women this way.
[03:27] Jessica:
Well, thank you so much and thank you for having me. I'm so grateful to be here and I'm so glad that the book is out there in the world and hopefully making its way to people who it might help. So, yeah, it's great to be here.
[03:37] Greer:
Definitely. So I have the benefit of many years of friendship with you. So I'm personally aware of how keenly you felt your vocation to motherhood and how there was a lot of uncertainty around whether that was going to be a biological possibility for you, as you mentioned in the book. So I was actually wondering if you could start there with your trepidation about whether pregnancy would be possible and then how you felt when you did conceive.
[04:09] Jessica:
Sure. So, yeah, I had a long history of sort of irregularity and just weirdness with my cycles actually going all the way back to the time my period started. It was irregular, which is really common when it first starts, but it never got regular, and no one ever told me at what point I needed to be concerned about that. So I just kind of went with it for a long time. And then in my early 20s, so the year after I graduated college, it got even weirder and more irregular. I started having these long cycles of bleeding. It was always very light bleeding, but many, many days that you would chart as a bleeding day, and I would have these long periods, or what I thought of as periods at the time, every couple of weeks, even. So, I'd bleed for several weeks and then not bleed for a week, and then bleed, bleed. Whatever. I now know that not all of that bleeding was true periods. There was something else going on. I saw a couple of gynecologists when it first started, both of whom just kind of shrugged and said, well, sometimes you have an anovulatory cycle, and your body gets stuck in, like, a bleeding phase instead of a not bleeding phase. And that's just something that happens sometimes. And I would ask very anxiously, well, will this affect my fertility eventually? I wasn't married. I wasn't dating anyone seriously. So this was all very hypothetical. And when it's hypothetical, doctors aren't always super willing to dive deep into the causes of what's going on. So that was my experience, was they said, well, you can go on birth control to just regulate these symptoms, if you would like, but we won't really know anything about it affecting fertility until you are actually trying to get pregnant, which I was not. So that was kind of what I was left with for a number of years. Then when I got engaged and was going through catholic marriage prep, which included kind of training in Natural Family Planning, that got me connected to a doctor who was more willing to look at root causes and kind of try to dig into things that could be causing these issues. When I went to him, the symptoms had actually worsened kind of suddenly. So it was nice timing that I happened to be charting so diligently and had found this connection to this doctor. I had been bleeding for seven weeks straight when I first went to see him, so because it was really hard to tell where I even was in a cycle, so it was hard to kind of time some of the labs that he would have liked to do. But he put me on progesterone supplementation right away, which proved to be really helpful in clearing up some of that bleeding. So low progesterone was definitely something that was going on. And then there's some other piece that's a little bit more murky, even now, nine years later. And with a good doctor like that, it's still a little bit murky, but there are some hormone imbalances that seem to be related to possibly polycystic ovarian syndrome. I don't have enough of the actual diagnostic markers to get that diagnosis officially, but there's something kind of going on, some things that would be consistent with that. So we kind of treat it like I have it. And I did eventually get pregnant, and that was the very long version of the story. I hope you were ready for that. But then I did get pregnant, and because of all I had been through and because of how anxiously I had been awaiting motherhood and how dearly I longed for it, I was expecting to feel nothing but gratitude and joy and excitement. But I didn't actually feel those things. I felt just sort of bewildered and confused. I don't know if it was because I wasn't really expecting to get pregnant after all of that. I had been married and trying to get pregnant for eleven months, so we kind of slid in just under the twelve months that make an infertility diagnosis. I had just a week or two before I got that positive pregnancy test. I had met with my doctor and we'd kind of been talking about next steps for when I would get that official infertility diagnosis. We've been talking about things like Clomid. We'd been talking about a surgery sometime in the next year, kind of a diagnostic surgery to see what else might be going on structurally that could be preventing pregnancy. So I think I had kind of shifted my mind to face a more substantial infertility journey. And then all of a sudden, here I was pregnant and I just was a little bit confused and bewildered and a little bit numb. There was some happiness mixed in there, but it was not the just like, overwhelming joy that I expected. So that was kind of my path to pregnancy. And, yeah, how I felt at conception was nothing like what I expected or what I thought I was supposed to feel, which kind of became a theme of my motherhood for the first few years, too.
[09:06] Greer:
I appreciate everything that you went into so much. I think that kind of detail about the physical side of your experience and then how that fed into the emotional side of your experience is so helpful and concrete. You share in your book about your own struggle with postpartum depression, and you describe having a lot of symptoms of that condition with your first born and then finally getting a formal diagnosis of postpartum depression after the birth of your second child. What were some of those initial symptoms in the fog of early motherhood? And what finally drove you to get an official diagnosis and then seek therapy?
[09:49] Jessica:
Yeah, that's a great question. The symptoms for me of postpartum depression were not what I expected. Again, not what I expected. That's a big theme here. I was expecting kind of a more overt sadness, right. When you hear the word depression, I'm thinking, like, can't get out of bed crying all the time and feeling kind of hopeless and lost. Right. For me, the biggest symptom of postpartum depression was irritability. I was uncharacteristically cranky and short with my toddler, probably with my husband. Just did not have the patience I needed to get through the day. I also didn't have any resilience. So when challenges came up, I just kind of crumpled and would let a bad moment ruin my whole day, and then a bad day would ruin my whole week. And all the sort of negative or not so great feelings that I was having became cyclical and I was incapable of breaking that cycle on my own. All mental illness is like this to an extent, because most symptoms of mental illness are things that all humans experience at some points, right? Feeling sad is a normal human experience. Feeling sad to the point that you can't function in daily life is depression. Feeling anxious is a normal human experience. But then there's anxiety disorders where that anxiety is really getting in the way of your functioning in new motherhood. I think that becomes especially tricky, because what's normal has been completely blown up, and you're sort of starting from scratch at rebuilding your life with this new person in it. You have to make room for an entire new person, first in your body and then in your life and in your day, and how you just go about everything. So that kind of line where these normal human experiences cross into mental health disorders or issues is often stated as when it's interfering with your normal daily life, that's when you need to seek help. In new motherhood, I didn't know what normal looked like anymore, so it took me a really long time to kind of figure out that I did need help and that this wasn't just kind of the normal adjustment to motherhood. When my second child was born, it became clearer to me that I needed to seek help because I was home with my children for the first time. When my second was born, I had gone back to work after my first, which I've talked to different women. Some women find that going back to work exacerbates the challenges that they have with their mental health when a child is born. Other women, and I was one of these, find that it helps. It helps to go back to work, to kind of have that sense of continuity with who you were before a baby, to kind of feel a little bit more control. For me, I was a competent professional, so going back to work gave me a realm in which I felt like I was still in control and could still accomplish the things that made me me and all that sort of thing. With my second, I lost that touchstone because I stayed home with my children and because I was with my first born, who was then a toddler, full time, I could start to see how my mental state and my mental health struggles were affecting him. I could sort of start to see our relationship being effected. I could tell that I was not meeting his needs in the way that I needed to. And for me, that made it clear and obvious and non negotiable that I needed to address this. I needed to seek help. Part of taking care of him was going to be taking care of myself. Like I said, those symptoms weren't what I expected. It was irritability was kind of the first thing, and that kind of led to some guilt and some sadness and some crying. And so there was some of the classic depression stuff, too. But it was irritability. It was really severe fatigue and brain fog sorts of things. Those were the symptoms I experienced. But the thing that really drove me to seeking out that diagnosis and the help that I needed was seeing how it was affecting that relationship with my oldest.
[14:07] Greer:
Well, I'm so glad that you did and that you got the help you needed for yourself, even if it took seeing that interruption in the relationship with your oldest to get there.
[14:18] Jessica:
Yes. And I try to tell new moms that, don't be me. Don't wait until that. You are worth it. And I was worth it. I just was kind of too overwhelmed to see it. It doesn't have to be affecting any relationships. It's not only for the sake of the other people in your lives that you should seek out help. That is sometimes the thing that we need to motivate us and get us over the hump, I think, but to get through that initial barrier. But yes, I deserved it just to feel better for myself, and so does everyone else. And anyone who maybe is listening to this and not sure, please know that I'm not a good example in the timeliness of seeking out assistance with this sort of thing.
[14:58] Greer:
Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for that perspective. And I love that reflection on when you have an infant, the infant herself or himself is a barrier to your normal, effective functioning of daily life. So it's hard to figure out what mental health element might be there. Your GP, your obstetrician, your gynecologist, they are going to have an index for you where they look at your symptoms and say, actually, these are symptoms.
[15:30] Jessica:
Yes. I will say, though, that the postpartum depression screening pretty famously misses a lot of postpartum depression. You get that screening at your six week follow up after a baby's born, and some pediatricians will also give it at the baby's checkups. But I never got it again. And for me, when I had the postpartum depression after my second, it really didn't emerge until I was about four months postpartum. Postpartum depression can emerge anytime in that first year after a baby's born, which is another thing that is sort of unexpected for a lot of people. We sort of envision it as happening immediately after a baby. But for me, I was actually doing pretty good the first couple of months after my second, and things kind of started crumbling sometime in that, like, three and four month range. So, yes, go back, take that quiz again, even if you passed it with flying colors, as I did, at your six week checkup, because it doesn't always catch everything, and the timing of it just isn't always the most comprehensive for checking for what it needs to.
[16:38] Greer:
I had no idea. That's really good to know. Thanks for sharing that.
[16:41] Jessica:
Yeah.
[16:42] Greer:
So you do a great job of highlighting the full person experience that motherhood is. The struggle for physical recovery for your body, the mental health experience, the spiritual and vocational struggle. When we're struggling in one of those dimensions, it can have a cascading effect on those other aspects. And it sounded like you were dealing with stuff on every front. What were some of the interventions or techniques you used to address those different challenging aspects of living into motherhood and getting to a healthier place and the way that those dynamics interplay?
[17:20] Jessica:
Yeah, that's a great question. And still feel like kind of pursuing health and wholeness after children is sort of this chicken and the egg thing. Like you say, there's this cascading effect, but it's like, where do you start? Where is the source of all of these struggles coming from? And I still don't know. So sometimes it's kind of like playing whack a mole. You're like, well, this is the thing that's most pressing right now. So I'm going to address this physical need, and then this mental health need needs a little bit of help, and this spiritually, as a mom, you can't always address all of your needs all at once. I'm getting better at kind of holding all of these things together, but it's hard to know where to start sometimes. But I think the important thing is just to start somewhere and it sort of doesn't matter. I think that in the same way that a struggle in one of these areas can cascade into all of them, improving any of these areas will likely cascade into all of them and kind of help, maybe help make next steps clear as well. For me, the very first step was to get on some hormone supplementation. So this was progesterone again, I had a history of low progesterone already when I went to my doctor with postpartum depression, I don't think we even did labs necessarily to check that. I just had such a strong history of it. He was like, progesterone can't hurt and will likely help. And it did. And progesterone works really fast if it's something that you are lacking in for mental health reasons. So I started taking a daily dose of progesterone. This was before my cycle had even returned, which is why I just took it daily. Usually with progesterone supplementation, it's ideal to take it in the latter part of your cycle when it would naturally be dominant. But for postpartum depression, I just took it daily for several months until we sort of started to suspect that my cycle might be thinking about returning. And then we stopped the daily regimen and sort of saw how things were doing. So that was a really good first step. And I will also say that I didn't go on any sort of SSRI or kind of more typical mental health medication at that point. But when I had stopped breastfeeding, my second, this was like, in the depths of COVID I had been in a car accident. I was in some chronic pain because of a car accident, et cetera. I was diagnosed with kind of more regular depression as well, about a year after the postpartum depression had officially cleared up. And I did go on an SSRI for about five months until I got pregnant again. And that was miraculous for me. I like to point out that some people really have this sort of stigma around mental health medications, and they want to save it to be a last resort. But I actually think that using a medication, whether it's an SSRI or just a hormone supplement or I have another supplement I'll talk about in a second, too. I think that can actually be a really good first resort in kind of lifting us out of those cycles, of thinking that we can get stuck in helping us strategize. There are all sorts of lifestyle changes that help our mental health, right, with diet and exercise and getting sunlight and making time for hobbies and being outside and all those sorts of things. But it can be really hard to take all of those steps when we're in the depths of a mental health crisis or challenge. Sometimes medication, even temporarily, can help lift us up out of those cycles and help us establish maybe better patterns. And then if we are interested in getting off the medication, I think that can always come later, too. So for me, that progesterone was the first step after, I guess the next step for me was I restarted pelvic floor physical therapy. I was having a lot of pain. I have had tearing with all three of my deliveries. That kind of leads to some pain, and that's a whole cascading effect, too, where the tear in the pelvic floor can kind of lead to muscle weakness elsewhere, which leads to tension elsewhere. So it's this whole cycle of things. The low back pain can be really connected to all these things, and just the whole core area needed and still needs kind of some strengthening. But going to physical therapy to help with that pelvic floor pain was really important for me. This was kind of a hard hurdle for me to get over. We had to hire a babysitter for me to go to those physical therapy appointments because I was newly a stay at home mom. We didn't have childcare. We don't have family in town. So paying someone was the kind of appropriate way, the best way to kind of get that care. And that's a thing that made me want to not do it. But my husband kind of insisted. He was like, we need to think of this as part of our medical budget. Like, you are going in for medical treatment and you need to do it, and we need to hire a babysitter for it. He also was insistent that we hire an additional babysitter or get additional babysitter time for me to just take a break, that was a really important step. We found someone who would come one afternoon a week to just give me a break. And my husband was like, you're allowed to do whatever you want with that time. I felt a little guilty about it. So that's kind of when I started doing freelance writing more in earnest so that I could at least pay for the babysitter with the time I was getting from the babysitter. I do find that kind of a good break using my brain in a way that I don't always get to around small children. I also just find that for me, the important thing about that break was just having uninterrupted thoughts. One of the hardest parts of being a parent to small children for me is how relentlessly interruptible your time is. My toddler stopped napping right around the time the baby was born, so there were no built in breaks. And it was so hard on me to not be able to finish tasks and not even be able to finish thoughts. So being able to just step away, do something a little bit different for a couple of hours every week was a really big step for my healing as well. I was about five months postpartum when I started the progesterone supplementation. I started the pelvic floor physical therapy soon after. A couple of months later, when I'd wrapped up the physical therapy, I decided that even though I was doing a little bit better, I also would benefit from talk therapy. So I reached out to some friends and found a therapist who I knew had worked with some postpartum moms. And I saw her for several months, and that was also immensely helpful just for reframing some of my thinking, letting go of some guilt, and some of the expectations I had around motherhood was all really well addressed by that therapist. She also recommended, this is just an over the counter supplement, but there's an omega three supplement that is specifically formulated for mood. And I started taking that, and it really helped. I felt the difference. I started taking that one kind of right around the time daylight savings time ended and maybe some seasonal affective disorder was starting to set in. But that supplement really helped lift my mood back up and helped kind of carry me through that winter, I think so, yeah. Like you said very well in your question, there's a combination of kind of these physical aspects of wellness and the mental health issues and all these things kind of work together. So those were kind of some of the initial steps I took as I've moved forward. I've had a third baby. In the meantime, I've learned so much about what my body needs to recover from a pregnancy and childbirth. So this third postpartum experience has been just night and day from the second one, because I dove right into a very gentle, specifically postpartum exercise program, rebuilt some of that core strength that I was missing, avoided the back pain and the pelvic floor pain that I'd had after the first two babies. In this second postpartum year, did another, specifically postpartum, really gentle running program. Kind of got back into a condition where I can exercise a little bit more fully and have made a point of carving out that time, which is another great kind of mental break as well, when I can make time to run or to exercise. So just all these different aspects kind of working together. And like I said, I don't know where the right place to start is, and I don't know, maybe there would have been a more effective or more direct route if I had addressed some sort of the source of all the other problems. But I don't know which one that was. I don't know what was the chicken and what was the egg. So it's just kind of a matter of choosing something and starting something and just choosing the next step, whatever it is.
[26:51] Greer:
Yeah, absolutely. I love hearing how supportive your husband was in all this. It sounds like you had a hard time giving yourself permission to take care of yourself. And so he was your biggest cheerleader there.
[27:05] Jessica:
Yes. I think that's a really common new mom thing. You kind of have this expectation of yourself to be all things all the time. I think our culture kind of builds up moms as somehow both more than and less than human all at once. And just reminding myself that I am no more and no less than a human person with needs has been a helpful thing to remind myself of. And, yes, he's been really great at reminding me of that. And seeing my. He's very generous in seeing my cranky moments as kind of. He recognizes those before I do as an unmet need. And he's like, what can we do? And he is willing to find abundance where I tend to see scarcity, both in terms of time and our budget money. And whatever it is, he's there to help take care of me, which is. I'm so grateful for.
[28:04] Greer:
That's so lovely. So one theme that runs through your book is that gap between how you had been told you were supposed to feel and how you actually felt at key moments of motherhood, like your positive pregnancy test you were talking about. That gap can be a lot of things. It can be symptomatic of a mood disorder, like postpartum depression. It can be a symptom of how dishonest our culture is about early motherhood. It can induce guilt, like you were describing. How did you move from a sense of guilt about the gap to a greater sense of freedom and affirm the validity of your own experience?
[28:46] Jessica:
This is such a great question, Greer, and I think you've worded it, I was trying to get at this in the book, and you've worded it better than I did anywhere in the book, where it can be all of these things at once. It can be a mood disorder. It can be sort of these societal expectations that are built up in an unhealthy way. It can be both of those at the same time. And then it gets kind of hard to sift out what's what. I think there were some mindset shifts that really helped me to kind of come to this place of a greater place of freedom. A big one was acknowledging my feelings, including negative ones, as not really morally charged. But just as data like this is something to be tended to, this is something to note. I actually started thinking about this. Well, the first thing I sort of thought this about was actually with exercise. One thing I've learned about myself over the last few years is that I cannot stick with any sort of exercise or workout regimen for more than, like, eight weeks, which I used to see it as a huge failing, the fact that I would get bored and get disinterested. Now I just see it as data. I'm like, that's a really good thing to know about myself, and I can kind of make a plan around that. I've found it really fruitful to find eight week training plans and schedule a race to run at the end of eight weeks and have kind of a goal to look forward to. And that's been a really fruitful way to approach exercise. And I started doing that because I had noticed this thing about myself. A lot of my other emotions, it's similarly fruitful to just see them as data and kind of note, here's what's going on. I mentioned my husband seeing my moments of crankiness as an unmet need, and I'm trying to do that, too. So when I have a negative emotion, just kind of like, noticing it. And instead of getting upset that I'm upset, just saying, oh, I'm upset, something's going on. Some need is unmet. Something needs to be tended to here. I don't always, in the midst of running around with three kids, I don't always have time to tend to it immediately. And that's kind of a skill I've had to develop too, is sort of like setting these things aside to be tended to later. I am a big list maker, and I'll even put things like that, like think about this feeling that you had, or figure out what's going on with such and such thought that you were having, and I'll put those things on my list so that I'll actually see them again and tend to them again. And it just helps me. And I am a big planner, so making a plan to meet those needs that are unmet helps me a lot. And even just giving the mental space to making the plan often helps, even if the need itself has not yet been met. The fact that I've given over some time and some mental space to thinking about it helps me feel a little bit more cared for and ready for the next step.
[31:52] Greer:
I love all this practical advice. I'm using this practical advice in my own life going forward as a non mother. Thanks. That's really helpful. Yeah. You had this line in the book that I thought was very apt. You said, "like most women's experiences, the Bible doesn't talk about this season [of early motherhood] specifically, but its stories of hurt and hope and healing have something to say to us." So you're offering us this book of reflections primarily on Scripture. I'm wondering, how did you navigate the reality that the Church and Scripture are supposed to be a fountain of spiritual support for all people, but at the same time, they have so few resources to specifically address your experience directly. And how do you wrestle with that patriarchal reality as you practice your faith as a mom and raise your children in the Church?
[32:52] Jessica:
This is a great question, and it's so important. I was really lucky that my senior year of undergrad as a theology major, I took a class on feminist and multicultural theologies with a wonderful professor who became kind of a role model for me of looking squarely into this reality that the church is patriarchal in many ways. It's a church that has primarily been led by men for men. So where does that leave us as women? And I was really grateful to have her guidance and mentorship and modeling of both seeing that reality clearly and staying committed and faithful to the church. I know a lot of women, when they realize that reality, kind of come to the conclusion that the church isn't really a place for them. And I respect that decision because I think it is a very hard thing to kind of live with. But I'm also very grateful for models like this professor who sort of showed me that it is possible to be intelligent and loving and courageous and also faithful to the church. Those things are not necessarily incompatible. In that class, one of the things we learned about feminist theology, one of the sort of main stays of it, is this idea of retrieval, this idea that women have always been present in history. Women have always been walking with God. God has been present to women. And the fact that their stories aren't told, that's not of God. That's sort of this byproduct of patriarchy and kind of a male dominated culture and many male dominated cultures kind of overlapping with each other throughout history. So what feminist theologians will do is, or one of the kind of main works of feminist theology is to do this work of retrieval. So going back into either church history or Scripture and finding the stories of women and bringing them forward into the light a little bit more, many stories of women are there. We have little fragments of them throughout history, throughout Scripture. Feminist theologians see it as their work to amplify those stories and to tell them more fully and to maybe even imagine creatively what the rest of the story looks like. So for me, I was very kind of joyful in joining that tradition in this book. Some of the chapters in the book do bring forward the stories of women, which are sort of brief stories, but I think have something to say to my own experience as a mother, and hopefully kind of a broader experience of womanhood as well. So kind of seeing myself as part of this tradition of feminist theology and retrieving those stories of women. I also have this underlying belief that God is powerfully present, even where the church fails to communicate, like with us in our motherhood and in postpartum depression, and sort of these isolating moments and things that the hierarchical or institutional church doesn't necessarily speak into very well in terms of my ongoing wrestling with that reality, like I said, I'm privileged to have encountered a number of role models over the years and have a lot of friends who are also really smart women and loving women, and courageous women who also make the choice, with a clear eyed choice, to kind of remain faithful to the church. That's really what convinces me it's possible, is all these other women that I know and have known over the years, so I'm very grateful for that and for their example. And I think it's imperfect. And I think being willing to have doubts and wrestle with those doubts has been really important. And to just trust that God is bigger than the limits that we humans, even within the church, place on that. Humans inside the church are not exempt from our very human tendency to make God smaller than God really is. And just being willing to let my image and ideas about God be blown up again and again and again and make room for them to get bigger has been a really important thing. And it takes work. It takes work to stay willing to do that, but it continues to be fruitful. I think.
[37:29] Greer:
You're an amazing witness, and I really love that you've carried that tradition forward in this work. It's just beautiful.
[37:37] Jessica:
Thank you.
[37:38] Greer:
Yeah, thank you. I really appreciated how honest you were in the book about admitting that in a lot of your darkest moments, you wondered whether you had any business being a mom. Did your experience of postpartum depression impact your discernment about continuing to expand your family in any ways?
[37:59] Jessica:
Yes and no. I guess I kind of always wanted a big family. But the kind of fertility issues that I've faced, although I've proven not to be infertile, for which I'm very grateful, I do consider myself sort of subfertile. My fertility doesn't return quickly after children, so there's been kind of this natural spacing because of well, maybe because of those issues. Maybe I've ended up being someone who breastfeeds for a long time, too. So that might be impacting it. It's hard to sort out all these different threads, but in any event, it's not really been an option for us to have a whole lot of kids really quickly. Just the biological reality of my body hasn't allowed that. So in some ways, my discernment has been not really discernment, just kind of the body that has been given to me and working within its confines. I will say that I think it was kind of an act of courage to have a third child after the second and after the postpartum depression had been bad after the second child. I was kind of nervous about that third postpartum experience while I was pregnant with my third, but I also had come through it, and I knew I could. So I was encouraged by that reality. And having already done it, I was also very encouraged by the support I'd gotten from my doctor, from my husband, from a lot of friends. I'd been pretty open about my struggles with postpartum depression. So I had a number of people who kind of checked in on me during that third postpartum period, and I was really grateful for that. And it really helped, too, helped me not feel alone in a time that can tend to be isolating. And so I would add that word of hope to anyone who has struggled with postpartum depression or is nervous about it. Having it once doesn't guarantee you'll always have it. And you also just get better at being a mom as you go. A lot of what was better was just that I kind of had a handle on things. I think my mind and heart had made the transition more fully into motherhood, and I also had more of a community surrounding me. I think when you have your first child, you don't really have your mom friends yet. When I had my third child, I had mom friends from my older children's playgroups in preschool and all that sort of thing. So we were really blessed with a really robust schedule of meals being delivered and people willing to take the other kids for a little bit so I could rest with the baby and all that sort of thing just really kind of builds up over time. So it just gets better and it keeps getting better. So at this point, I don't think the experience with postpartum depression is really impacting any future family discernment. There are many, many layers of things that we are considering as we consider the potential future of our family. But, yeah, going from that second to the third was the big one, but that one went so well that I think, I feel like we've sort of healed from that experience and are ready to just kind of go forward with whatever comes next.
[41:11] Greer:
It's really good to hear that you've got that hope born of healing, because I know for some women, they have such a grueling experience that they just say, okay, never again. I can't do that again.
[41:22] Jessica:
And that's a respectable choice, too. Some people do only have one child or two children, and that's what they're called to have, and that is okay. It's okay to make that decision as well. I will say that for myself, I have zero regrets about making that sort of harder decision to have the third after the second. It just was a really wonderful and healing experience for all of us.
[41:47] Greer:
I'm so glad you got to have that.
[41:49] Jessica:
Thank you.
[41:50] Greer:
So, last question. I'm wondering, do you have an insight you could share with us into how we as women can listen well to our bodies and our hearts as we move through making these family formation choices in our lives.
[42:04] Jessica:
Yeah, that's such a great question. And I think my biggest insight is that you have to carve out silence, which is hard to come by when there are small children in your lives. For me, I had to pay for silence. I had to pay a babysitter to get that time and space which allowed me to listen to my body, listen to my heart, pay attention to those emotions that I was talking about, tend to the data I was collecting about what I was experiencing. And that's my biggest thing, is you just have to make the time somehow. It might not be today, and it's okay if you're in a season where it just can't happen right now, but it's something that needs to be kept in mind and kept on your list of things to tend to when a little more space does open up is getting that silence, because how are we supposed to listen to anything if we don't have any quiet to do it in? Right? And then my other sort of piece is just to remember that all of us are people in progress, right? We're works in progress. None of us is like this finished person. And I think that was another mental barrier for me, entering into motherhood is that there's so much in our culture that presents moms as this perfect, sort of selfless and self giving, sort of more, like I said, both more than and less than human all at once. And just knowing that you're not finished when you first become a mom, you have so much to learn, and you will learn so much, and you will grow into it, and it comes with time. And it's okay that you're not getting everything right on any given day. None of us do. But you'll get better, and it will get better. And you get to be human. You get to have needs, you get to make mistakes. You get to ask forgiveness for those mistakes, and you get to keep going the next day and trying to do better. And that's all any of us can do. And we can hopefully try to get better at listening to our bodies and our hearts as we go through this sort of journey of motherhood and of life.
[44:19] Greer:
Thank you for this conversation. Just as in the book, you have this beautiful way of being vulnerable in a way that really encourages others. So I highly recommend Groaning in Labor, Growing in Hope. And I'll link to that in the show notes if it would benefit any of our listeners or friends that may need to read this book. And thank you so much for your time and your reflection.
[44:46] Jessica:
Well, thank you so much, Greer. I'm really grateful to be here and grateful for all the great work you're doing with Femammal.
[44:52] Greer:
Oh, you're welcome. If today's episode resonated with you, I'd love to hear from you. You can email me at femammalpodcast@gmail.com. That's femammalpodcast@gmail.com. You can also follow this podcast on Facebook. Just search for Femammal podcast and you will find a community of people who are interested in living well in our bodies. And of course, I'd love for you to rate this podcast and leave a review wherever you download your podcasts. Until next time, be well.