Telling about postpartum depression | The Press

“The photographer had been fine, because he had still managed to put me with Naël. But we can clearly see that in reality, it is Alexis who is wearing it, it is Alexis who is comfortable with it. I don’t even have the strength to carry him in my arms yet. »

Catherine Handfield
The Press

Sitting in her apartment in the La Petite-Patrie district of Montreal, Léa Lefevre-Radelli looks at the photos that The Press had taken from her, in March 2021.

It’s been a year. Her first child, Naël, was not yet 3 weeks old. At the time, she had not yet realized it, but Léa is certain of it today: she was suffering from postpartum depression.

From fall 2020 to spring 2021, The Press had regularly followed Léa and her spouse, Alexis-Michel Schmitt-Cadet, to document the pregnancy in times of a pandemic. The couple, of French origin, had lived this pregnancy far from his family, separated by an ocean, isolated by sanitary measures.

Léa remembers very well how she felt when these photos were taken.

Léa also notices the marks on her arms, a symbol of this difficult childbirth which was induced and which ended in an emergency caesarean section and a muscle tear in one leg. She had just returned from a hospital stay to treat an infection in her scar.

“I stayed for a long time with this feeling that my body no longer belonged to me, this feeling of being completely caught up in the wires, the syringes, the solutions. »

A liberating text

The Press reconnected with Léa after reading one of her texts on social networks. She recounts the first weeks of her life as a mother, which were hard, very hard.

Naël was born in February 2021, in the middle of the second wave of COVID-19, when the curfew in Quebec was at 8 p.m. and gatherings were only possible outside. Léa would have liked so much for her mother to come and help her, but French residents could not leave the territory unless there was a “compelling reason”. And helping her daughter who had just given birth was not one of them.

Because she was isolated, Léa never really had the opportunity to talk about her delivery, to put into words what happened to her. It was painful, too, to talk about it. She was afraid of not being understood.

After writing her text, Léa spoke to a relative, who suffers from depression, and who told her a sentence that resonated with her. In the morning, when I wake up, the nightmare begins again. “That’s exactly what I experienced the first weeks after giving birth,” says Léa. But me, it wasn’t every morning, it was every three hours, when I had to wake up to breastfeed. »

Lack of support

Writing has done him good. She was able to speak to Alexis, her husband. And she thought a lot, too.

The loneliness she suffered goes beyond the pandemic, said Léa Lefevre-Radelli, an employee of a Montreal university. In her eyes, the causes of postpartum depression must be sought “in the way society and the health system treat (or do not treat) women who have given birth”.

Léa points to a myth according to which caring for a newborn is something instinctive and natural for all the women. that women are all carried by an infinite and instantaneous love which compensates for the fatigue and after-effects of childbirth.

“One, it generates guilt and a feeling of not fitter, says Léa. And two, it means that there aren’t the appropriate resources, because we believe that women don’t need them. »

Léa would have liked, at the hospital, for a nurse to take her hand and ask her how she was. She would have liked to be offered psychological support. She would have liked to be offered home care to heal her caesarean section wound, to be warned that her milk supply could take a while to arrive, for the State to cover perineal rehabilitation.

While Alexis was being complimented from all sides, Leah also needed to be told that she was good, too. One day, an osteopath congratulated her for cradling Naël in a sling. She still remembers it so much it made her happy.

It was babywearing, moreover, that helped her develop her sense of competence as a mother. It also did him a lot of good to go to France during the summer to see his family. But what really allowed him to get better was when Naël started daycare, at the age of 7 months. She slept, a lot. She was able to start doing things for herself, to heal herself.

Nael is 14 months old today. He is a sociable boy, smiling, who discovers the world. “I don’t feel it’s a constraint, that he has to be in my arms otherwise he’ll cry. We have fun together. » Léa is happy to find this space of movement which she needs, finally.

We dare to ask her the question: does she want another child?

“We think about it, yes,” she said. And now I know that the baby stage, it passes. »