Why I Hated All Nine Months of Pregnancy

A mom’s experience with antepartum depression during pregnancy.

I am obsessed with all things related to pregnancy. I always have been. I read trashy-but-fun celebrity baby bump gossip. I quiz my friends about their impending childbirth. I get misty-eyed when I hear about a new baby or a new pregnancy. So you’d think, because I have babies on the brain, that I loved it when I was actually pregnant myself. You’d be wrong. I hated every one of those 40 weeks. With all my being.

From the moment I found out until the moment I delivered, I obsessed about not being pregnant. I was angry. I was depressed. Actually, I was more than depressed. When I found out I was carrying Big Girl, who was a planned pregnancy, I literally went off the deep end. My life was over. I would be huge. I would lose my career. I would lose myself. I was so anxious, sad, and ambivalent about being pregnant that I ended up on a therapist’s couch for the final six months of my pregnancy.

Of course, I felt guilty for having these terrible feelings, so that only made me feel worse. And as soon as my baby was delivered? I fell in love with her, and with being a mom. 

My midwife and my therapist were in agreement with their diagnosis. It—antepartum depression—is hormonal, and my experience was not that uncommon. Between 10 and 20 percent of women experience antepartum depression, but few talk about it. It’s often a precursor to postpartum depression, too.

I was lucky. I was pretty much cured once that little redhead came out of me. But I was thrown back into the chasm when I got pregnant again. At the time, Big Girl was only 18 months old. I went home numb from the sonogram holding a grainy picture of the baby. Again, the symptoms set in. I found myself stomping and crying around the house, saying I was ruining Big Girl’s life by bringing another baby into the picture so soon. Then, at 13 weeks, I miscarried. The guilt was overwhelming then. I felt like I wished that baby away.

We tried for several years to get pregnant again, even though I knew I was almost guaranteed to suffer the same symptoms. And we were blessed with my miracle baby—Little Girl—after we gave up trying. Yes, I went through the same horrific nightmare. This time it was even worse because I was told that I could literally die from carrying her. So I felt all the same emotional symptoms, but I also had another feeling: Intense guilt about putting myself at risk. I didn’t want to leave Big Girl without a mother. And then the moment I went into labor I could hardly wait to meet my new baby. I look back at the delivery photos and can’t help but smile. I have never seen such pure love, exhilaration, and emotion on anyone’s face. It’s completely obvious how in love and excited I was to become a mom.