He traumatized me postpartum instead of supporting me. Then when I developed postpartum depression, I did exactly what women are told to do: I got help. I went to therapy. I took medication. And after I left, the very mental health care I sought to survive what I was going through became something he tried to use to scare me out of fighting for my children. Therapy does not make a mother unfit. Medication does not make a mother unfit. Asking for help does not make a mother unfit. And women should never have to fear that seeking mental health care will someday be weaponized against them in family court. #PostpartumDepression #PostpartumMentalHealth #MaternalMentalHealth #DomesticViolenceAwareness #CoerciveControl

And I was supposed to pardon with my second child. I also had an almost two-year-old at the time. And I was trying to breastfeed my second child exclusively. And I was really focusing on, you know, making sure that her weight went up every week and making sure that I was establishing my milk supply. So I spent a lot of time nursing her. And I would set up different things for my two-year-old, you know, like little activities. I would play with him on the couch next to me while I was nursing her. And I was doing everything to try to make sure I was giving equal parts to both of my children. One thing my axe used to do is he would come over to me while I was breastfeeding my daughter on the couch. And he would say things like is she still eating or like is she still nursing? Or like is she not done eating yet? And it was as if like me sitting down was a trigger for him. Like me relaxing, freshly postpartum from an emergency C-section with our two-year-old right next to me was like a problem for him. And it was a problem for me too because I at the time was like, I need to be establishing my milk supply. I need to be, you know, doing chores at the same time. I need to be, you know, timing how long it takes her to get her belly full from breastmilk. So I started carrying her on a baby carrier that I got at my baby shower. And I was like, oh my God, like I unlocked the key to productivity, you know? Like now I can be doing chores. I can be washing dishes. I can be, you know, doing everything I need to do on my feet while I'm still nursing her at the same time. And like I just thought that I was finding ways to be more useful, to be more productive, to be more worthy of my husband seeing me as enough. You know, so long story short, he became abusive and I did end up leaving him. I took both my kids with me and I ended up getting sole custody of them. That is the thing that pisses me off the most. When I look back on it are like the missing memories I have of my kids when they were super little because he would do things like, oh, like one afternoon we were getting sick, right? All three of us were getting sick. We were coming down with something. And my daughter was just a couple months old and I had, you know, like I said, my two-year-old at the time. And he randomly had to go to his friend's house in a different state, like three hours away, to help him with something and just left us. It was COVID, come to find out. And it was horrible. And like these are just things that I thought I was being selfish for calling him out on. Like he had gaslit me and manipulated me so fucking much that I thought I was asking too much of him as a father. And I wasn't even asking the bare minimum. The help that I got from him should not have come in the form of, I take our son out every Saturday. I take him out to Home Depot with me every Saturday. And that gives you a break and that gives you a time alone with her. He was a self-proclaimed, like best at in the world. And the truth of the matter is, those times that I spent in survival mode as a newly postpartum mother were in direct correlation to the deliberate choices he made to be unsupportive. And throughout all of this, I ended up getting postpartum depression. After all of this when I finally left because he became physically abusive, one of the things he used to say to me to scare the hell out of me since I had filed for custody was I'm gonna tell the judge about your mental health problems. I'm going to tell the judge that you are on an SSRI. Fit parents don't need medication. I was also seeing a therapist because I was trying to understand what the fuck was going on with me and what I could do better to make my marriage better and to pull my weight and to do more to help out and to, you know, prove my worth more. I actually got quite a different opinion from my therapist who seemed to think that I was in an abusive marriage. And he also used to say that fit parents do not require therapy once a week. I wanted to share this because a lot of partners will appear to be supportive on the outside and you might never know what kind of weaponizing of the mother of their child's mental health, they might be doing behind closed doors. Let me know in the comments if you experience anything similar.