When Your Cheese Slides Off Your Cracker

On postpartum depression, the Lindsay Clancy case, and the frightening realization that sometimes your brain stops being your own.

The Lindsay Clancy case has, and continues to, trigger anyone with a pulse. It’s hard to fathom, hard to process, and even harder to listen to the court testimony. And everyone has strong, strong opinions about it.

The comment sections of anything related to this case?

Dumpster fires.

Annnnndddd I may have called a TikTok creator an ass when she mocked Lindsay Clancy for taking detailed notes each day about her moods and the effects of the medications… because I remember doing that myself.

There are a lot of women, like myself, who are viewing this case through a very personal lens. Those of us who know what it’s like to make a baby, grow it, love it, bring it into this world, and then watch the cheese slide off your cracker.

If you’re easily triggered by this kind of topic (depression or suicidal thoughts), I’d encourage you to stop reading now.

I had severe postpartum depression after I had my daughter. It has been fourteen years, and I still get triggered. Like when I read a social media comment that said, “There must have always been something wrong with her, you don’t do something like this if you’re not already crazy.”

I refrained from calling her an ass, too. But I wanted to.

I'll say this before anyone gets ahead of themselves: I'm not claiming there was never anything "wrong" with me before I had severe PPD. In the pre-mom days I had plenty of things wrong with me.

Like getting testy during my luteal phase.

Like laughing that one time my ex-husband fell down.

Like being told “you can’t do that” or just “no” and thinking “this is a hill with a good view, I think I’ll camp out on it for a while, and if needs be, die on it.”

Like saying "okay it's fine," when something is decidedly not fine, repeating it a few more times for good measure, and then erupting into a female Mount Vesuvius. (Although now that I'm estrogen-light, those eruptions are delightfully rare because I am awesome at saying “okay that was nawt fine.”)

But before I had children I did not have struggles with mental illness.

I was never mentally ill.

Not for a single day.

And after I had Jane I began to experience a feeling of dread that I still can’t fully explain. It started out tiny, like a baby-nugget of dread deep inside the back of my brain.

Not the regular “crap, it’s Sunday night and I really don’t want to work tomorrow” dread (which is bad, I know). But a different dread.

A dread that I might trip and fall on Jane and her brains would squish out underneath me. A dread that I might forget to feed her and she would die. A dread that made me imagine getting into a car accident and Jane flying out onto the road because her carseat malfunctioned.

I stopped being excited about anything. I stopped looking foward to things. I had no interest in things I’d cared about before. I felt like a flat cardboard cutout human. And I felt dread every day, all day long.

And then the vertigo-migraines started happening.

I don’t mean I felt a little dizzy. I’m talking room-spinning-circus-ride-from-hell that never stopped for hours, sometimes days. And I was alone with Jane, and the vertigo would hit, and I would go down to the floor, vomiting, trying to keep her neck cradled while I lay there.

My ex worked constantly, and socialized a considerable amount, and my grand-sum-total of alone time with Jane was fairly constant. When she was six weeks I went back to work full time, driving slowly on my way to take her to daycare, praying the vertigo wouldn’t hit. I should never have been behind the wheel. But I knew if I didn’t go back to work we might lose our house.

(Whether the vertigo and the PPD were connected, I’ll never know.)

Then came the lack of sleep. Vertigo would wake me up nightly, complete with vomit and lying on the floor while the room swam, praying it would end before Jane cried, or the alarm went off and it was time to get ready for work. Between Jane’s nightly feeds and the vertigo, I never slept.

I wound up in the ER which resulted in zero help. Then migraine doctors prescribed medications that had drowsy-warning labels, and were impossible to take and function at any level, let alone while working with a newborn baby. They switched them and changed them, and it only made things worse. I started keeping a little diary of days, symptoms, medications. I remember asking a doctor, “I have to get up with my baby at least three times a night, I can’t afford to be knocked out” and he said “well, let someone else do it.”

But there was no one else.

There was just me.

I couldn’t stop crying.

I would sit awake all night long with Jane, throwing up, spinning, feeding her, and watching I Love Lucy marathons.

Then I would get ready for work when the sun came up.

Rinse, repeat.

My dread-level became Mount Everest level high, and it hit critical mass when Jane was three months old.

One night Jane was wailing and I was laying on the floor next to her, vertigo spinning me in malevolent circles. I remember trying to comfort her and not get vomit on her. My ex had gone out to dinner with coworkers, and I called my parents. They were two hours away, and it was already dark outside, but they immediately got in the car. They loaded Jane and me up and had us settled back at their house by midnight.

For the next two months I laid in bed in the house I grew up in. I literally took to the bed like some old Victorian lady. I withdrew from everyone. I stopped talking. I’ll never forget my mom (who had to become a full time grandmother/mom while carrying trays of food up the stairs to me) looking at me hopefully when I would say more than one sentence.

I stopped holding Jane, and then I stopped taking care of her altogether. Being around her filled me with even more dread. I believed in my heart of hearts that she would be better off without me.

And then one day I thought (and I remember this moment very clearly), “I’m not me anymore.”

And it was true. I couldn’t remember what it was like to be myself. I had become someone else, something else. And I felt I would never be me again.

And that’s when I started wishing I would die.

I didn’t actively plan a suicide. But I did think about earthquakes rattling the house and cracking open my bedroom wall so I could fall down the mountain. I thought about cars swerving unexpectedly and hitting me. I thought about taking a bath and something electrical accidentally falling in the water. And ironically, when I thought about these things, the dread went away. I felt less guilty about not taking care of my baby. The thought of being dead felt more comforting than being alive.

The cheese was fully off the cracker.

What ensued was a spinal tap, a hospital stay, and my ex-mother-in-law sweetly but insistently dragging me into my primary doctor and while I cried uncontrollably, she said, “Just a teensy bit of medication might help.”

I remember feeling outrage. I didn’t need medication. I was no longer Elizabeth, she was gone. So what was the point of medication? I just needed someone to raise Jane and love her, because I was a dread-filled-cardboard-cutout-failure that just needed one runaway SUV to put me out of my misery.

But I encamped on my couch and took the pills. I would lie there with Jane, because I was too scared to walk around with her, and hold her, and she would play with my hair.

I remember my parents brought me some sunflowers, really beautiful reddish-purple ones, and I kept them by my bed.

A couple of weeks after I started my SSRI, I noticed the sunlight coming through the sheer curtains in my bedroom and thought, “That’s pretty.”

Then a week later I wondered, “When did it become fall? This weather is nice”

And then a few weeks after that I laid on the floor and played with Jane, and Mabel lay next to me, and I thought, “I might get to be me again, eventually.”

Once the PPD was under control, the migraines went away. I was wobbly for a while, but eventually that went away too. They said it was hormones. But no one knows for sure.

But what I do know is that I would not have survived without my family’s serious support. I do know that without an SSRI I would have forgotten who I was for a long, long time. I do know that if I had continued down the path I was on, my thoughts might have gone farther than wishing for a lightning strike or a car accident.

And I know without question, I was not myself when I had PPD. I became someone else altogether. Someone sad, and dark, and so full of dread there was no room for anything else.

And so I cannot imagine Postpartum Psychosis. I cannot fathom how terrifying it would be to lose yourself AND hear voices. AND think about harming others.

What happened to Lindsay Clancy is for a jury to sort through.

What happened to me isn’t.

I know exactly what happened to me.

My healthy brain became an unhealthy one.

Hormones, sleep deprivation, chemistry, genetics… pick your combo. Somewhere in those first months after Jane was born, my brain stopped behaving like my brain. And then, with treatment and time and support from my family, it slowly became mine again.

We don’t tell someone who develops gestational diabetes that they were secretly diabetic all along. We don’t tell someone who hemorrhages during childbirth that they were always a little bit hemorrhage-y. But the minute things start going awry inside the brain, people suddenly become amateur philosophers. They start talking about sick people’s character instead of chemistry.

I don’t know whether Lindsay Clancy is criminally responsible for what happened in her home. That question belongs in a courtroom, not a Substack essay.

But I do know this: there are women reading these words who have stared at their newborns through a fog of terror and confusion. There are women who have convinced themselves their babies would be safer without them. There are women who are keeping spreadsheets of symptoms, changing medications, and wondering if they’ll ever feel like themselves again.

If that’s you, I hope someone tells you what I wish I’d believed fourteen years ago.

You are not your worst thought.

You are not your sickest day.

It won’t last forever.

And the woman you were before the cheese slid off the cracker will still be waiting for you on the other side of treatment and support.

Mine was.