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‘Becoming a mother broke me’: For a woman collecting pandemic postpartum stories, the work is personal (Washington Post)

 

By  Theresa Vargas, March 25, 2020, Washington Post

Ariane Audet grows quiet on the phone.

She is usually the one posing questions about motherhood, and now, she’s not sure how to answer one I’ve asked her.

What do you think would have happened if you had to give birth now?

She stays silent for so long that I glance at my phone’s screen to make sure we didn’t get disconnected.

“I’m afraid to say it,” she finally says. “But I don’t know if I would still be alive.”

Three years ago, Audet gave birth to her first child, and five months later, she ended up in a psychiatric unit of a hospital.

“Becoming a mother broke me in a way I didn’t know was possible,” she explains. “But by breaking me, it finally let me rebuild myself in the way that I wanted to, which is probably someone who needed meds her whole life.”

While being treated in that hospital for severe postpartum depression and anxiety, Audet came up with an idea for putting her photography skills and PhD in literature to use. She decided that once she returned home, she would start a storytelling project called “Faces of Postpartum.”



[Please click here to read the full story.]

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