I recently read the post of a woman in an online forum admit to nearly 2,000 forum members that she was at her wit’s end; she’d given it her all but having an infant and a toddler was running her to the madhouse. I was surprised, but not surprised, to read the number of responses suggesting she might have “just a little PPD” and that she could benefit from medication. While I give my heart to those women who are on medication for post-partum depression, I’m not so sure what this woman was describing was of the clinical variety, and I wonder, why is it that when a woman experiences something other than a walk in the park, we quickly assume there is something wrong? Is it our collective guilt ganging up on us?

I’ve always found it odd to assume something is out of place, considering what a woman’s body goes through in the first year alone after giving birth, and especially so if she’s nursing. She’s probably already 95% marinated in hormones. The humiliation of rarely going to the bathroom alone, sleep deprivation, exhaustion and cold meals eaten as if out of a trough most days aside … she’s probably not been herself in a while. But the more we decide that women who admit to having a rough time in the first year after birth or even beyond—and especially after the arrival of a second, or third, child—are clinically depressed and in need of medication, the more we promote the idea that something other than a walk in the park is an unusual experience for a new mom.

And what of the women who feel they are not in either boat? (The category, I assume, most women, including myself, fall into)? What if the first year of a child’s life—most often wrapped up in terror, fear, excitement, shock, fun, frustration, heartbreak, and joy—and more talk of bowel movements than one wants to admit—is not at all pathological, but completely normal …

Most of us—children or not—laugh knowingly and sympathetically at stories of harried moms sounding as though they escaped a three-ring circus, desperate for a Calgon-moment, unable to tend to their own hygiene and write them off as suburban types who bit of more than they could chew in the housewife department. But who are the women gliding through this first year of surprises no one’s every told you about: Your doctor says you shouldn’t have sex for six weeks after birth. Little do you know, it might be six months or longer before the thought even crosses your mind again. You’ll have consoled yourself long before the baby is born about how to handle returning to work, until you discover the guilt you have about daycare is enough to give you an ulcer and that working from home two days a week and ending up pulled in five different directions while you do is no real solution. So you wish away your time until your newborn is old enough to attend preschool; then you feel guilty for wishing away your time. You feel guilty for ever having had aspirations beyond motherhood and you feel guilty that your husband has now taken on more of the financial burden, even though you know you’ve taken on more of the household and childcare duties, but yet. You want to feel productive. And you remind yourself that you are doing the most important job on earth. But somehow that doesn’t help you when you watch from a pee-stained comforter cover in your worn-out pajamas as your husband puts on a jacket and heads to the office … a place where he has the ability to reason with people, to hold conversations, to get up and go to the bathroom without negotiating with a pre-verbal infant and to drink coffee without worrying about how much of it will pass through your breastmilk and keep your baby up at night.

Pre-children, we swear off this image of ourselves. Pre-children, we will somehow afford nannies who can spare us our dignity and help us more quickly return to our pre-pregnancy weight. Pre-children, we zealously protect our pre-children illusions and ignore those friends who have gone before us, who are always complaining about milk being expensive (milk?) and buying stain removers, who try to have conversations with us atop the din of their chattering children and think that’s normal, who talk about a single glass of wine as if it were the holy grail of freedom. Good god, what has happened to these people?

And then we, ourselves, have children … children who we imagine will remain stationary long enough so that we can get our acts together and figure out this child-proofing thing, half-halfheartedly spending money on guards and gates and bumpers to turn our formerly chic homes into something resembling a bumper car ring. Children who we think we can take shopping, despite their insistence that it’s a good idea to have a full-blown meltdown right in the middle of the store, with four people on line behind us as we dig through the bottom of the stroller trying to find our wallet and realize we left it in the car, and recall, suddenly, how we swore …. swore, swore, swore …. we’d never be one of those parents. Children who we take on bike rides through the park when it’s pretty outside, when the stars have finally aligned and we get to be one of those parents … finally—the ones you see with babies tucked away in slings, shopping for imported ginger lemon biscuits and tiny bars of organic pomegranate soap at Whole Foods—but then they puke, again, from heat or who knows, but what’s with the puking every time we try to get out to show you off anyway or try to be like those people in Whole Foods? Our relationships are not what you’d call relationships any longer, and our hair has been in a ponytail since sometime before we checked into the hospital to deliver, and there are fifteen orange plastic balls strewn through the living room and dining room and a bag of rotting string beans in the fridge that we keep meaning to throw out and your husband has just narrated his afternoon with the baby while you tried to take a shower and simultaneously clean the bathroom. He took her for a walk, and then they stopped at the post office and then they picked up a leaf off the ground and that is your husband’s version of what it is like spending time with the baby, and somehow it never involves pee on the bed or cooking dinner with a sweaty 22-pound baby in one arm.

People say things to you about how they bet you don’t remember what life was like before the baby came. And you don’t know why but you’d really like to punch them hard along the jawline. And then you wonder if this anger lands you somewhere on the spectrum of post-partum depression and if that fleeting thought you had the other day of wanting to leave the house for a bit while your child played happily on the living room floor alone constitutes …. depression.

So you mention something along these lines to a few of your friends who have btdt, and you know you’ll probably be met with the same comforting validation you’d get from long conversations with friends about dating, and weight, and shopping for clothes, and decorating a room … except. Instead. Instead, your friend—the one whose head you held while she puked into a pot of geraniums back in high school at her own party while her parents were gone for the weekend—says, in a kind of mommy voice she’s adopted with everyone she talks to now, since her kids are older and yours are still young, “Maybe you have a little ppd?”

Air escapes your nose and makes a sound somewhere between a guffaw and a snort, and you bite your bottom lip to ensure against any further involuntary noises while managing to say, “Oh. True. Hmm… Maybe. I hadn’t thought of that,” and then you quickly mourn the death of your friend in your head, wondering what happened to the days of compassionate, validating, sympathetic, confessional girl-talk, and tell her someone’s at the door and don’t speak to her again for months.

But then in the back of your mind, you begin to wonder. Do I? I mean, is this post-partum depression? Should I nip it in the bud before I end up floating my Beannut into a raft down the Hudson? What is it with your friend anyway? Maybe she has some mommy gene that you don’t? Or maybe she is simply okay with never having a goddamned single second to herself not even to change a maxi pad like ever. And then you wonder if that’s just the ppd talking.

So you visit your OB and you do what everyone says you should do when this kind of thing arises after birth. You talk to him—your busy, middle-aged, male OB whose face you barely remember because he’s so busy he actually resembles more of a whirling dervish than an obstetrician—and you tell him. Your feelings. You say something like, “Well I don’t know. I mean, I guess I need medication or something.” And he says, “What? Why?” while jabbing his pointer around on his touchpad. You have some vague sense that you might have screwed up somewhere. That you’re not flowing somehow. Things are just not. Exactly. A walk in the park. “I guess I’m just. Maybe I have depression?” Your nonstop whirling dervish of a doctor who has A-type and overworked written all over his stark-white lab coat actually sits down, looks up from his touchpad, and says to you, squarely, “Life is short. Raising a baby is hard.”

You watch him, wait for the punchline—the script you know he’ll send you out the door with. “How long have you known your husband,” he asks, startling you.

“Um, well, technically, we’re not married. But—”

His expression doesn’t change.

“We, uh, knew each other three months before—”

He cuts you off, sparing you. He’s a kind man. You give yourself a mental pat on the back for having this sweet person deliver your precious offspring.

“Look,” he says. “Sleep deprivation is the pits. Staying home with a kid is rough. It’s rougher than this,” and he pauses to look around, and you note that he means his job—his work as a goddamn OBGYN in an excruciatingly busy practice. Holy crap. Talk about validation.

You sit up straight.

“Do you have a good therapist?”

“I do,” you say.

“Good,” he says, satisfied with his little heart-to-heart. And then he looks at you like you might launch 52 more questions at him, but instead you just stare back.

“That’s it?”

“That’s it!” you say, buoyantly, your newfound sense of normal leaving you a little heady.

You leave his office and register your diagnosis—sleep deprivation. Liver, spared. Mental health, in tact. It is a thing but it’s not that thing. It is something someone else recognizes as tough. Why hadn’t anyone just said that in the first place?

Probably because they were far enough removed from it to be one of those people who thinks babies are all sugar and unicorns and dancing ballerinas.

Or maybe they just forgot.