Once the baby arrived, Karmin felt guilty about not meeting her own expectations; finding online posts that were more realistic was comforting.

Transcript

Yeah, like I kind of felt like my depression and anxiety would get better once I had my baby because I figured that when they – when I had her, like, she would be, like, safe in my arms. But she – it just kind of – I – my mood disorder didn’t go away when she came, like, it almost – it got worse pretty well. But I felt like I had the expectations of, you know, I have to have a clean house, I have to have a spotless house. Like, my baby has to be happy and napping. I have to be doing all the cooking and cleaning. Like, but I also expected my partner to help out with that stuff. But when he didn’t it was – when he didn’t I felt like it was falling onto me, and with following – falling on me and me not doing it I had a lot of feelings of, like, failure to living up to – because, like, when you look on social media, like, there’s a lot of moms out there that have – they – they portray that they have a perfect clean house, and so you’re like, how can you do all that and have your baby? And trying to figure out breastfeeding and stuff like that. I had a lot of issues with that, and had a lot of lactations consultants and stuff come through.

But yeah, just like dealing with that expectations and yeah, I was just, like, hoping that breastfeeding was going to go flawless and I was hoping to exclusively breastfeed, and when that didn’t go right there was a lot of disappointment in that. And as well too, like, there’s a lot of – I feel like there’s a lot of expectations on our – like there’s a lot of influence from social media as well that, you know, your baby has to be dressed in the nicest clothes and you have to have the nicest things for them and stuff, and so sometimes I felt guilty that I couldn’t provide that to my daughter financially [laughs].

Yeah, and I feel like, you know, like I mentioned, I felt that I was dissociating a lot going on social media but that was probably toxic for my mental health [chuckle] because I was seeing lots of moms doing it all while I wasn’t. But then I also ended up finding some people and some of their pages on there where they were kind of more raw and realistic in their experiences. And I found those to be comforting. But yeah, I found that there’s a lot of unrealistic – a lot of unrealistic type of influences out there, or portrayals out there.

And, you know, a lot of times when you can get, like, a hundred compliments and then you get one, one insult, you focus on the insult rather than the hundred compliments. It’s kind of similar to, you know, social media you see – you can see a lot of people going through the struggle, but then you still see those people who are able to do it all and you still feel like it’s expected of you to do it all.

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