Relationscapes: Exploring How We Relate, Love, and Belong
More than the Baby Blues (with Teresa Wong)
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NOTE: This episode includes sensitive discussion about postpartum depression and suicidal ideation, so please listen with care. If you're struggling, don't do it alone. Call the National Office on Women's Health at 1-833-852-6262, or you can text or call the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline at 988.
Introduction – 02:24
BLAIR HODGES: This is Relationscapes, where we explore who we are by learning more about who we're with.
I'm Blair Hodges, an independent journalist in Salt Lake City, and our guide in this episode about postpartum depression is Canadian author and illustrator Teresa Wong.
TERESA WONG - CLIP: Everything's easier if you don't have to hide it. It's less shameful if you can name it, and it's not just a jumble of feelings in your brain. I was just so happy to find out that I wasn't alone in this, that other people felt the same way.
BLAIR HODGES: After Teresa Wong gave birth to her first child, she became lost in a painful and hazy place called postpartum depression. Instead of basking in the love of her newborn, she was filled with anxiety, self-doubt, dread, and extreme isolation.
The ironic thing about the isolation was that a lot of women experience postpartum depression. Experts put the numbers around 10 to 15%. Finding words for what Teresa was experiencing helped her understand it, and then making art helped her share that understanding.
Her graphic memoir is called Dear Scarlet: The Story of My Postpartum Depression. It turns an isolating experience into an opportunity for connection. Teresa Wong joins us to talk about it right now.
Dreaming of Apples – 04:14
BLAIR HODGES: Teresa Wong, welcome to Relationscapes. Thanks for being here.
TERESA WONG: Hi, thanks for having me, Blair.
BLAIR HODGES: It's a real pleasure. We're talking about your graphic memoir, Dear Scarlet: The Story of My Postpartum Depression. I wanted to start with the cover. It's a striking cover. At a distance, it sort of looks like a person laying down maybe in a field of flowers or something. And the closer you look, you realize it's a person surrounded by all these apples, kind of buried in these apples. Where did that cover come from?
TERESA WONG: Actually, it is a panel in the book that I just kind of expanded to turn into the cover. But it's an image that stuck with me as I was drawing the book because it was probably just a couple of weeks into my life as a new mother, and I was having all these crazy dreams.
And in one of them, I had a dream that I was at the grocery store, and I was so tired that I climbed into a bin of apples, those big boxes that they have sometimes out, and just kind of laid there and tried to sleep while they kept pouring more and more apples on top of me.
I remember waking up from that dream and thinking, well, that was weird, but also, when have I ever had a dream where I was so tired that I had to sleep in my dream?
BLAIR HODGES: Right. [laughs]
TERESA WONG: And it was just an indication to me of just how tired and worn out I was as a new mother and with a newborn.
BLAIR HODGES: Right, this feeling of being smothered, of being buried, the exhaustion of it.
TERESA WONG: Yeah.
BLAIR HODGES: Did you have a lot of weird pregnancy dreams? Was dreaming kind of a thing you'd been experiencing before?
TERESA WONG: No, not really. I mean, I have weird dreams all the time, but nothing crazy. But I don't recall having strange pregnancy dreams. But yeah, this one stood out a lot.
And then after having Scarlet and my other kids, I had a lot of dreams where I'd be doing something and getting them to sleep, and someone would be out interrupting their sleep. And I would be so angry, and I'm not a very angry person in life. And so just all my anger was coming out in my dreams, and it was always—
BLAIR HODGES: Wow.
TERESA WONG: —again, regarding sleep. Yeah.
BLAIR HODGES: I also think this imagery is so symbolic because here you are surrounded by this fruit of fertility, this source of life, but it's burying you.
TERESA WONG: It's like smothering.
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah.
TERESA WONG: I didn't read too much into it. I'm not Freudian at all. I don't do a lot of dream analysis. But yeah, there's fruit, but it's a burden too. It's kind of weighing you down. It's heavy.
BLAIR HODGES: It's such a cool cover. It really is.
TERESA WONG: One major thing was I also wanted the cover to be red just because Scarlet is the color red. And so it just all kind of made sense to me. I had another idea for the cover, and when I presented the two, everyone unanimously—my publisher, the editor, all my friends and family—were like, no, use this one.
BLAIR HODGES: Do you remember what the other one might have been?
TERESA WONG: The other one was really simple, actually. It was another panel in the book where I'm sitting on the floor and Scarlet's doing kind of tummy time. It's later on in the book. And I just had put wallpaper basically on the wall behind me, and it just looked very plain, I guess, kind of indicative of the time you spend with a newborn, kind of sitting quietly while they play on the floor. [laughter]
Teresa as an Artist – 08:10
BLAIR HODGES: You mentioned the wallpaper, and I noticed in your panels, there isn't a lot of that. They're very spare. There's not a lot of stuff. Talk about the artistic style you approached this with.
TERESA WONG: Well, the style actually is born of my limitations as an artist. [laughter] And so at that point, when I first had the idea for Dear Scarlet, I knew I wanted it to be a graphic narrative. And so I had sketched it out and written the whole thing thinking that my friend Doug, who is an illustrator, a wonderful illustrator, would help me kind of bring it to life.
And so I gave him my sketchbook and he read it. And the next week we met up and he kind of pushed it back at me and said, no, I'm not doing this.
BLAIR HODGES: Oh!
TERESA WONG: And I said, what? And he said, “This story is so personal and so vulnerable that it has to come from your own hand.”
BLAIR HODGES: Wow.
TERESA WONG: And I said, are you sure? Because I can't draw. I can draw 20% better than what I've shown you here. This is already at the maximum almost of my drawing skill. And he said, I'm absolutely sure you have to draw this. Whatever you make will be fine.
And I wasn't completely convinced because I was scared that it would be embarrassing, because I'm not a trained artist. I didn't go to school for this. I hadn't drawn since I was a little kid.
BLAIR HODGES: Oh, really?
TERESA WONG: Yeah. It's not that I had a drawing practice. I started drawing again when I was an adult because of my kids, because you're sitting there scribbling with your kids and they say, draw me a bird, draw me a car.
BLAIR HODGES: This shocks me because you are good.
TERESA WONG: I just set out and I just did it. And I'm not good. I'm okay. [laughter]
BLAIR HODGES: No, no. But here's the thing. Here's what I mean by that. Good's relative, right? You have a style. You have a style that's—it's a spare style, but it works. There's a beautiful simplicity about it.
And it's not uncomplicated. You're using different perspective. You've got a lot of different things going on here. So I really am surprised, truly surprised, to hear that that was something you came to later.
TERESA WONG: Oh, well, thank you. I appreciate that. And I had always expected, even when I had finished drawing the book and gotten an agent and started submitting to publishers, I had always thought someone during this process would say, this is great, but let's just look at the drawings again.
Expecting, let's just get someone, hold up before we put this out into the world, let's fix it up. And no one ever did.
BLAIR HODGES: There's also the vulnerability of your story and the vulnerability of what you were going through. It's so well reflected in how you draw.
TERESA WONG: I think that's why I'm such a big advocate for comics and for people to try making comics, whether they feel like they're artists or not. It's because comics are so expansive and able to let anyone try as long as you can communicate the story and the feeling. And it takes surprisingly few marks to communicate.
BLAIR HODGES: Was this digitally done on an iPad or something, or was this hand-drawn on paper?
TERESA WONG: I drew it all on paper and then scanned it. So what I did was, after Doug refused to help me, I basically Googled how to make a graphic novel. And there's a wonderful graphic novelist for middle grade, kind of children's graphic novelist, named Raina Telgemeier. You might know her books from your kids.
BLAIR HODGES: I don't, actually.
TERESA WONG: No? Oh, she has wonderful books.
BLAIR HODGES: I'm going to look it up. Yeah. My kids are very familiar with Dave Pilkey.
TERESA WONG: Yeah, my kids love Dog Man. Exactly.
But Raina had put up a blog post, probably for children, [laughter] showing her step-by-step process of how she creates a graphic novel page. And I literally just followed that process, with the crappy drawing.
BLAIR HODGES: Incredible.
TERESA WONG: Bought the paper that she had, bought the pencils that she had—
BLAIR HODGES: Oh my gosh. I'm looking at your drawing of the Siberian tiger, right? There's this part where you saw the story about the Siberian tiger at the zoo that gave birth unexpectedly to a tiny cub. And you're thinking to yourself, "a two-pound cub for a 500-pound mother. How's that fair at all?" Well your tigers are so good!
But you've also got a black background. How did you fill in if you're doing it hand-drawn?
TERESA WONG: So I did hand-draw everything. And then I scanned it digitally. And then I used a program. I think back then it was called Manga Studio Pro, but I had bought this program hoping that it would help me fill in the blacks and also do the text.
And I don't actually know how to use that program. Everything about this book is completely hacked together.
BLAIR HODGES: Wow. This is so cool.
TERESA WONG: Yeah, I don't know how to use that program. I don't even know the name of the program anymore. But it was enough for me to get the words in and to fill things in.
BLAIR HODGES: For your font, was that hand drawn—that wasn't hand-drawn.
TERESA WONG: No, that was a font I found online that I bought the rights to use professionally. Everything about my process has changed since then and improved.
BLAIR HODGES: But did you do—there's kanji, did you do these characters?
TERESA WONG: Oh, so I asked my dad to write that. And then I scanned it in.
BLAIR HODGES: Cool. Again, I can't—people have got to check out this book. I love the art style, and I thought it matched the spirit of the book so well that it just—I mean, it seemed like you knew all along that, oh, of course, this is what I'm doing. So to hear that you didn't— [laughter]
TERESA WONG: No, it was a total, just a scrappy, hacky effort. [laughter]
BLAIR HODGES: One other question about the apples. Have you ever had that dream recur?
TERESA WONG: No, I haven't. I've had lots of recurring someone's-interrupting-my-child's-nap dreams.
BLAIR HODGES: That's the recurring one, okay. [laughs]
TERESA WONG: But never the apple one again. Never the one where I slept in my dream.
BLAIR HODGES: That's amazing. It's almost like the film Inception, except you didn't have a dream in your dream.
Motherhood Ambivalence – 15:25
BLAIR HODGES: Let's talk about the dedication page. You say that the book is a love letter to your three children and to your mother. And Scarlet is your firstborn child.
So the book opens up with a scene of Scarlet, and she's talking about what she wants to be when she grows up. Talk about deciding to begin with that scene where Scarlet's a little bit older now. You're not starting with the pregnancy.
TERESA WONG: Yeah, I'm not actually sure why. So many decisions I made were just intuitive and not as planned or thought out as you might think. I started as a letter. I kind of thought of that as a good way to back into the contents of the book and figure out what I wanted to say, because sometimes writing your book, writing anything as a letter, kind of helps you to focus on who the actual audience is.
BLAIR HODGES: Mm-hmm.
TERESA WONG: And what kind of information you're trying to communicate to that one person.
BLAIR HODGES: This will be a conversation I think that parents will recognize because she's saying to you, “I want to be a mommy when I grow up.”
TERESA WONG: Yeah.
BLAIR HODGES: Your immediate reaction is, oh, you could be anything actually, an artist or doctor.
TERESA WONG: Yeah, it was an interesting conversation we had, and I remember just jumping to, maybe you don't want to just do that because it's been hard.
BLAIR HODGES: Well, also because it seems like you couldn't really relate, because when you were growing up, you say you never thought about being a mom. I love this picture of you thinking to yourself, “I wonder if being a reader is a job.”
TERESA WONG: I mean, I still do, but I didn't grow up around kids. I never babysat. I just wasn't—
BLAIR HODGES: So you were an only child too?
TERESA WONG: No, I wasn't. I had a little brother. But he was only two years younger, so we're kind of the same.
BLAIR HODGES: Almost peers.
TERESA WONG: And then very few babies around and very little interest on my part of having children. I think I was pretty ambivalent actually.
BLAIR HODGES: I like all the scenes of your ambivalence. You're showing these thoughts you had, like, what if my kids hate me? What if I don't like kids? What if they grow up to be terrible people or do something bad? Or what if they regret being born? All these worries.
TERESA WONG: I had never even diapered a baby until my own babies. And so, yeah, I was very hesitant.
BLAIR HODGES: And did you think it was weird to think that way? Did you think a lot of people had these kind of thoughts about, oh, I don't know if I want to have kids because what if they hate me? What if something happens?
TERESA WONG: I thought I was weird. I thought I was kind of too messed up to have kids, like in my own mental health and mind.
BLAIR HODGES: Since then, have you connected with people now that the book's out that say, oh, it was such a relief to see you expressing these thoughts that are almost taboo, really?
TERESA WONG: I think so. Back then, I wrote and drew the book in 2015, and there was actually very little out in popular culture and book culture where people were very honest about how hard it is to be a mother, or how they didn't want to be, or anything like that, because our culture places so much on happy new mothers with happy babies, and this is all you could ever want and hope for. Very few people were talking about other feelings around the experience.
BLAIR HODGES: Well, I think there's some catharsis here.
TERESA WONG: Yeah. I don't think I started anything. I think it was just in the zeitgeist. Since then a lot more has come out in TV shows. There's a lot more talk about postpartum depression, postpartum anxiety, or about people choosing not to be mothers. And celebrities talking about their depression.
BLAIR HODGES: Right.
TERESA WONG: I think just as a culture, in the past, what has it been, eight years? People have opened up a lot more, expressing their feelings and not feeling like they have to hide or feel shame around those feelings.
BLAIR HODGES: That's one of the reasons I really wanted to interview you about this book, because as I was looking for things about postpartum depression, most of what I could find was kind of how-to books or medical stuff.
TERESA WONG: Yeah, clinical stuff.
BLAIR HODGES: I wanted a story.
TERESA WONG: Yeah. When I published my book, the only other book was Brooke Shields' memoir. Which probably wasn't that scary. And that had been out for many years. And it's like, really? That's the only—you know? And I know since then there have been more books out.
BLAIR HODGES: Sure. But people should get yours first, really. Let's be honest. [laughter]
Okay, so you got married, you're having these doubts about whether you want to be a mom. You say your partner was really cool. I love this picture of him as the stand-up guy. He's got his Star Trek shirt on here.
TERESA WONG: Yeah.
BLAIR HODGES: And people are asking you all these invasive questions. This will sound familiar to a lot of listeners, I think, where they're like, Congratulations, I guess time to have a kid now, huh? It's been a year. Are you guys having kids? Or don't you guys want kids?
These invasive sort of questions where I think people are trying to connect, but these questions are driven by culture's underlying push and pressure, I think, to have kids.
TERESA WONG: Yeah, absolutely. We got a lot of that, and a lot of our peers were having kids, and it did feel like we were being left behind or something. But I'm glad we had that time together as a couple. We did a lot of traveling, and I think I have a side—not a side career—my day job as a copywriter, and my career, I was more stable in my career before I had my kids.
BLAIR HODGES: Mm-hmm.
TERESA WONG: I don't have regrets about that, but yeah, there is a lot of pressure on young couples to just make it happen right away.
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, exactly. Continue the family line. [laughter]
One-Page Pregnancy – 22:16
BLAIR HODGES: So seven years goes by, and then we get one page about the pregnancy itself, which I really appreciated. This isn't a pregnancy book. So the page just kind of tracks the first trimester, the second trimester, the third trimester, and has a few little things about it.
TERESA WONG: I didn't have a good time in pregnancy.
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah?
TERESA WONG: I mean, I was lucky. It was fairly uncomplicated. I have other friends who had way worse experiences. But I had vicious morning sickness for four months with all three of my kids. And then with Scarlet, I had a lot of extra doctor's visits because we were close to having placenta previa, where the placenta blocks the cervix opening.
BLAIR HODGES: Oh...
TERESA WONG: And so they just needed to keep tabs on that. And so it was a little bit of a riskier pregnancy, but not really.
The other thing is I'm very small. I'm just under five feet tall. And she was a regular-sized baby, so it was just very uncomfortable.
BLAIR HODGES: It doesn't sound great!
TERESA WONG: There wasn't room for her in me.
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, this does not sound like the best thing to experience.
But I love the little moments because you're talking about—I mean, there's the mixed berry smoothie moment where you throw up in the bathroom stall and you say "it looked like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre." And there's also these moments on the same page where you say that the ultrasound technician said, "she has lots of hair," and you had this great thrill of thinking that you had this little person inside of you with their hair.
So there are these cool moments within your pregnancy that you remember fondly as well, which is surrounded by more misery.
TERESA WONG: Yes, there were nice moments, and just feeling the baby inside you is very interesting, right?
BLAIR HODGES: I mean, I only experienced it next to my partner, and that was interesting enough, so I can only imagine.
Putting Body Issues on the Page – 24:32
BLAIR HODGES: Scarlet arrives five days before her due date. She's an early bird. And the delivery itself is when we really start to get into some of the really tough stuff.
I'm looking here at page 21 where you're talking about your postpartum body, and you've drawn a diagram of yourself, and you're showing puffy face, dried vomit, thyroid issues, sore breasts, deflated balloon belly.
So this is really intimate, sensitive stuff. What was it like talking about those things that a lot of people might talk about with close friends or family, and you're putting it in your book here?
TERESA WONG: Again, when I was writing and drawing it, I wasn't thinking about that, which—blessing and curse, right? I was thinking of it as telling Scarlet what happened, really. And I wanted her to know what happened in all the gory details. And so when it came time to put the book out, again, I don't think I thought that much about how intimate the details were.
And by then, I guess also I had been removed from it. Scarlet was, I think, eight or nine when the book came out.
And so, yeah, I mean, I don't love the fact that people know I had hemorrhoids.
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, that looked like "clusters of grapes." You give us a good visual—but then you didn't draw that one though. [laughter]
TERESA WONG: No, I didn't. Yeah. But then I also am happy to share that if it makes another new mother feel a little less alone.
BLAIR HODGES: Sure.
TERESA WONG: Because no one talks about it.
BLAIR HODGES: No, that's not on the TV shows.
TERESA WONG: Yeah, when they're holding new babies and everything is calm and perfect and fine, no one talks about how you've got massive hemorrhoids you're sitting on and every part of you feels like it's gone through a war zone.
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, there's real bodily trauma. And I know pregnancy and delivery can differ for some people, but yours seemed traumatic. I mean, you were vomiting.
TERESA WONG: Yeah, there was a lot going on. I had bled a lot, and so I lost a lot of blood.
BLAIR HODGES: There's one part where all the panels just go dark, and you talk about how things started going fuzzy and you could feel heavy blankets being piled on you. It was dark. You started to feel calm. This is right after the delivery.
TERESA WONG: Yeah, I basically kind of passed out.
No Hallmark Moment – 27:29
BLAIR HODGES: And yet, you didn't get this beautiful moment people expect. Again, what we expect is the baby comes out, then the mom's so relieved and suddenly feels great, and they put the baby on mom and she's there, and it's so lovely—and you did not get that moment.
TERESA WONG: No. And again, it was fairly traumatic, but not as traumatic as I've heard other women describe. And so, yeah, not every mom gets that. Not every mom gets the Hallmark moment the first time they hold their baby. And that can feel shameful.
BLAIR HODGES: Right. Like you're not being a good mom already.
TERESA WONG: Yeah. I started behind already. That's the feeling I had because when I woke up, Sunny, my husband, had already learned how to feed her with a bottle. And I didn't know any of that. I hadn't even met her yet.
BLAIR HODGES: And here's how to change a little diaper, and here's how to pat her to burp her. And you talk about the first time you held her, you had been asleep for several hours after you'd sort of just passed out from it all.
And then here you saw her face. You say she looked like a little doll. So you had this moment here where you saw your beautiful baby, little round pink cheeks, and you held her for about 10 minutes, but you were still so exhausted that then you were like, okay, I—
TERESA WONG: Yeah. Take Scarlet back for a second here.
BLAIR HODGES: So you did have this moment, but you talk about watching your partner sort of become a parent faster than you, or feeling like you were behind and just feeling physically exhausted.
TERESA WONG: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.
BLAIR HODGES: It's really eye-opening for people who haven't experienced a delivery, whether they haven't delivered themselves or been with someone as they've been delivering, to see some of the possibilities. Again, this is your story.
TERESA WONG: Mm-hmm.
BLAIR HODGES: But it does highlight some of the possible traumas and difficulties that someone can experience there in the hospital. I think that's powerful.
TERESA WONG: Thank you.
Hospital Isolation – 29:36
BLAIR HODGES: Okay, so the aftermath of all of this is really when your postpartum depression sets in. And postpartum depression is a central theme of the book. And you're feeling kind of like a failure already at this point. Things just don't seem to be going well. You're barely getting any sleep at this point.
TERESA WONG: Mm-hmm.
BLAIR HODGES: And there's not a lot of help at the hospital either. There's a scene where you're just hoping someone can come and take her and put her into the little crib, the bassinet there next to your bed. And for hours, it all seems so lonely.
TERESA WONG: Yeah. It was unfortunate because I know that it doesn't always happen this way. But I had given birth to Scarlet kind of during a big baby boom in Calgary.
BLAIR HODGES: Oh wow.
TERESA WONG: And so when I got to the hospital, there were already many women waiting, and I got triaged and put into a delivery room. And then my husband had to run out and change our parking situation because we weren't sure we were staying until we got in.
And he said that when he went out to get the car, a few hours later, there were pregnant women laboring all down the hallway.
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah.
TERESA WONG: Because everyone had babies at that time. And they had actually even opened up other units that weren't the labor and delivery unit, but other units in this hospital, to receive pregnant women, to do deliveries. And so they were overrun at the time, and it just happened to coincide with my own issues.
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, so you're there alone, right?
TERESA WONG: Yeah, and so the nurses didn't come because it wasn't actually important, because they had so many other women to deal with.
BLAIR HODGES: Right. And they're like, okay, well, at least things are sort of stable there. But then, I mean, by 7 a.m.—so this is this long night of you just feeling exhausted and trapped, really—and then you're sobbing by the time your partner arrives in the morning. And right then you say a nurse suddenly sails in the room right when he's there.
And she says, “So I see mom is a little emotional today.” And then you say, “I wanted to punch her.”
TERESA WONG: I did.
BLAIR HODGES: You're writing this eight years later, and this memory seems to be seared into your brain.
TERESA WONG: Oh, I mean, it is. I felt that emotion very strongly. And like I said earlier, I'm not a normally angry person. So that amount of anger doesn't come up in me a lot. But I was very angry at the way that she said that about me when she just didn't know how much I had been going through all night.
Breastfeeding the Barracuda – 32:40
BLAIR HODGES: Then you've got to worry about breastfeeding. There's a lot of pressure, or a lot of encouragement, or whatever you want to call it, for people to breastfeed, and you kind of assumed that was just a natural thing, that it would be easy. And then of course it wasn't.
You had lost so much blood that producing milk was really difficult. So you had to pump. They encouraged you to pump a lot so that you could maybe get your body to generate that milk. And then Scarlet was what they call a "barracuda baby."
TERESA WONG: Yeah, that's what the lactation consultant said to me, that she just was a little chomper, and so it was quite painful.
BLAIR HODGES: I like this drawing of you where you're talking about Barracuda Baby. It's just a close-up of your face, and you've got these gritted teeth, and you're like, “Breast is best.” You're saying this slogan that people would repeat to you. [laughs]
TERESA WONG: Yeah. Well, that's the face I had when I was trying to nurse her. And all over the hospital, all over wherever we went with babies, there were these huge posters of “Breast is best,” and it was like they were taunting us.
That has changed as well too. I don't know if it's social media because social media wasn't huge back then. It was just kind of starting. And now I hear a lot of “Fed is best.”
BLAIR HODGES: Yes, exactly.
TERESA WONG: Any way you can feed your baby is good. But yeah, there was a lot of stigma, a lot of shame, a lot of feeling like I was doing everything wrong.
BLAIR HODGES: Right. So it was yet another area where you felt inadequate and started to process these feelings about bad mother, like, I'm not doing enough.
You show the scenes of you taking Scarlet home for the first time. I remember that with my kids starkly. I was stunned that we would just walk out of there with a baby and just—
TERESA WONG: I know, they just let us go. And now we have to keep this person alive? [laughter]
BLAIR HODGES: And you're starting to just really feel the depression is starting to really grow here. But there's a beautiful scene where you're meeting with a lactation consultant. And here's what you said about her. You said, “In the lactation consultant's office, I braced myself for a lecture about the importance of breastfeeding.” I mean, this is this person's career, right? And you say, “But she was the first healthcare professional who really listened to me.”
I wanted to hear what that was like for you to feel heard.
TERESA WONG: Yeah, it was a huge relief. And it was like she was giving me permission not to nurse Scarlet. And then she gave some good reasons. She said, you lost a lot of blood. You look very pale. You might not want to do this. You might want to—I'll show you how to use formula. I'll show you how to bottle feed. And I went in there not expecting that at all.
BLAIR HODGES: Mm-hmm.
TERESA WONG: And so just her kindness and the way that she saw me as a person, an individual, was what I appreciated the most.
Mom Guilt – 36:31
BLAIR HODGES: That gave you permission basically to stop hurting yourself by trying to force breastfeeding, and you were able to make a different decision.
But even that decision could also induce guilt. On page 42 you drew a diagram of mom guilt, and this is a drawing of Scarlet herself, and basically all the ways that her body was manifesting your choice, you felt, your choice not to breastfeed.
TERESA WONG: Yeah. And I still think about that sometimes. Honestly, mom guilt doesn't go away when the babies grow up. Scarlet's 13 now, still has food allergies.
BLAIR HODGES: And you wonder, right?
TERESA WONG: Yeah, I don't know. My other kids don't have food allergies. And so, yeah, it is kind of a possibility. I don't know. But again, I don't regret it because that's what we had to do at the time, and that's what I had to do to get myself better too, is to bottle feed and kind of heal myself first.
BLAIR HODGES: Mm-hmm.
TERESA WONG: And the bottle feeding also gave my husband more time to bond with Scarlet in a way that he didn't have with my other two children when I was nursing them. So he would get up at night and feed Scarlet as well as me. And I think that kind of gave them some special time together.
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. On that diagram, you point out there's extreme spit-up, like you had to wrap Scarlet in blankets so you wouldn't have to change her clothes. She had low weight. She had eczema, and you're wondering if that was related, and the food allergies, and the constipation.
But then also, the decision not to breastfeed took a toll on your own body as well, because your body would still try to produce milk, and that causes its own problems.
TERESA WONG: Yeah. Those few days, you have to basically, again, grin and bear it and suffer through your breasts being engorged for several days before your body gets the idea that maybe it doesn't need to make milk.
BLAIR HODGES: I like your drawing of the "rock melons." That's really funny here. [laughter]
More Than the Baby Blues – 39:05
BLAIR HODGES: At this point you say, “I don't know exactly when my tiredness gave way to sadness,” but it was pretty early on. And you're at a family doctor for the 10-day checkup, and the doctor there is asking how your mood is, and you're saying, “I cry a lot. I might be depressed.”
And the doctor just says, “Oh, don't worry. It's just the baby blues. Maybe try taking a walk every day.”
TERESA WONG: Maybe...
BLAIR HODGES: And you felt like this person's a specialist, so maybe either she's right, like I shouldn't be feeling like this, or maybe it's just gonna go away.
TERESA WONG: Yeah, I wasn't sure. I kind of knew of myself that something wasn't right. But again, we had not gone through this before. And so I had read about the baby blues. I didn't know. I'm still not sure actually what they really are and how they differ from depression, unless depression is just ongoing after.
I felt a little brushed off. But I also thought maybe she's seen this a lot. She knew what she was talking about.
BLAIR HODGES: I like that there's some little Easter eggs throughout the book. And in her office, there's one, a sign on the wall that says, “Only 2 issues per visit.” Is this real? Were they saying, like, only bring up two things?
TERESA WONG: You know what, I was talking about my book with another American the other day, and she brought this up, and I had no clue that this is because we are in Canada. We have taxpayer-funded healthcare, universal healthcare.
BLAIR HODGES: Which in many ways I'm jealous of. So, oh no!
TERESA WONG: Yeah, no, it's not a knock against the system, but really what they encourage you to do—and this is an actual sign in many actual doctors' offices—they need to keep you moving a little bit so that there's room for everyone. And so if you have more than two issues, you're supposed to make another appointment because they can't afford to spend an hour with you. Normally they spend like 20 minutes with you.
BLAIR HODGES: Did you ever try to plot and sneak four issues into two and be like, haha.
TERESA WONG: Oh, I mean, I've tried to sneak my own issues in while bringing my children. And some doctors are better than others. Some doctors don't have that sign up and are willing to take more time.
BLAIR HODGES: Interesting.
TERESA WONG: But yeah, many doctors do it for efficiency because they know that if they don't, then other patients don't get seen, right?
BLAIR HODGES: And maybe part of it is, people are like—their toe looks a little pink or something. Because parents might have a million questions. So maybe it's just to cut down on some of that a little bit too.
TERESA WONG: Yeah, I don't know. It's funny that you bring it up and that person brought it up just the other day because no one else has ever mentioned it. I don't know if it's an American-Canadian thing. Probably Americans notice it, like, what is that? Whereas Canadians would be like, oh yeah, my doctor does that too.
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. The other Easter egg I liked was the copy of What to Expect When You're Expecting, the book. It's on the nightstand, and you can kind of just barely see it out of frame, and you're laying in the bed utterly exhausted and totally depressed.
TERESA WONG: Yeah. And no one—yeah, this was not in the book. [laughter]
BLAIR HODGES: Yes. You did not expect this when you were expecting.
TERESA WONG: Yeah. Oh, thank you for noticing that.
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, I love that stuff.
TERESA WONG: I wanted to put that in as kind of a visual joke. Also, it's not a joke. It's for real. I did have that book! [laughter]
Gallows Humor – 43:09
BLAIR HODGES: I laughed and also I was like, "oh no!" I felt it. That's a magical thing to be able to do too, I think. It adds a little bit of gallows humor.
And then there's this exercise ball that's just giving me nightmares. Basically your husband goes back to work after four days, which, again, this speaks to capitalistic problems of not giving adequate parental leave for people.
And so now you're alone, totally alone for the first time, really. And you're just there, unable to move. And Scarlet's there. You're trying to bounce around this exercise ball, and you've got this frame of the clock just slowly ticking by. And I'm seeing you bounce on this ball in several pages, and I'm just like, oh my gosh.
TERESA WONG: Oh yeah, I spent so much time on that ball—
BLAIR HODGES: Seems like 20 pages.
TERESA WONG: With all my kids. Oh, that ball. We still have it.
BLAIR HODGES: Oh, cool! [laughs]
TERESA WONG: Now my kids play on it.
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, we still have one that our kids play with.
But to speak to all of this, people can inhabit or talk about the depression and the difficulty in a way that isn't ponderous or, I think, too heavy. There are times and places to really go deep and feel, but you're able to address the depression, the postpartum depression, and just the day-to-day mundane suffering, because there is mundane suffering.
There's suffering that's much worse, obviously. We know that.
TERESA WONG: Yeah, absolutely.
BLAIR HODGES: But you're able to explore sort of the mundane suffering, and people can do this through your drawings without getting too bogged down. I feel like it's a safe place to explore these ideas that you've created here. That's what I like most about the book.
TERESA WONG: Yeah. I think it also goes back to the fact that I drew it, and I couldn't draw exactly what it looked like or felt like because the pictures do kind of offer a little bit of relief from the heaviness of the text.
Pickled Pigs Feet – 45:17
BLAIR HODGES: I also liked getting to know the network of support around you. So even though you were having a lot of difficulties, your mother enters the story here. This is your partner's return to work. Your mom comes in and she says she's there to care for the baby, but you say she's really also there to care for you.
And this is beautiful. But you talk about the Chinese culture that she brings to it. She prepares all of these dishes, many of which you don't actually like, but she knew you'd have to eat.
TERESA WONG: Mm-hmm.
BLAIR HODGES: So she would come up with these kind of interesting ways to make you eat it. I loved this: “I need to take this dish back,” she says.
TERESA WONG: I think she knew at a deep level that I had not been finishing everything. And so she would watch me eat it or drink the soup or—
BLAIR HODGES: And some of these are traditional, right?
TERESA WONG: They're traditional. Yeah, they're traditional healing dishes, foods, and soups that a new mother would drink and eat to kind of restore the nutrients in her body. And so she knew they were important. She knew I needed it, and I had lost a lot of blood. So she added her own extra soup that was pig liver soup, because it had a lot of iron.
BLAIR HODGES: Of course. Can I just take an iron pill?
TERESA WONG: I don't know. I was already taking iron pills.
BLAIR HODGES: Oh wow. And there's the pickled pig's feet and ginger was another.
TERESA WONG: Yeah, that's a big healing food. Some new mothers in Chinese culture love that stuff, can't get enough of it. I think there's something to it. The Chinese civilization has lasted so long because they know how to take care of their bodies.
But yeah, it wasn't as pleasing to my Westernized tastes.
BLAIR HODGES: Right. Your mom just—it's so lovely, but it's also kind of complicated too in some ways, like some of the cultural things you say that she brought in.
TERESA WONG: Yeah, there are a lot of rules. You're not supposed to leave the house. You're not supposed to—
BLAIR HODGES: For a month or something?
TERESA WONG: For a month, yeah, except for doctor's appointments.
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah.
TERESA WONG: But you're not supposed to get cold at all. She wanted me to wear a hat in the house.
BLAIR HODGES: Oh wow.
TERESA WONG: Like a knit cap or something. It was September.
BLAIR HODGES: And you have such thick hair too, so it's like—
TERESA WONG: Yeah. And you're not supposed to shower. I did shower. But some people don't. You're not supposed to shower or bathe.
And you can see that that probably came from people living with no central heating in the 1800s. And so it all adds up. But yeah.
Despair, Fear, Self-Loathing – 48:13
BLAIR HODGES: You're there sort of experiencing this with your mom, and then after a month you're finally free to leave the house. But then you say you had nowhere to go, and there's a picture of you there at the Superstore just wandering, you say, pale-faced through the aisles. And I was sure that people were staring.
And you're asking yourself, how can people just go on with their lives? And you're seeing another mom pushing her baby. She's smiling, she looks really happy. And you're starting to wonder at this point if there's something really wrong with you. You even ask, “Am I some kind of monster?” at this point.
Because you're seeing people say, “Oh, I bet you just fell in love with her at first sight.” And you're thinking to yourself, no, I didn't. Am I—what is wrong with me?
TERESA WONG: Yeah, no, I did. That is a feeling I had throughout the first few months of having Scarlet. It was just, everyone is—everything's just back to normal, but I'm not back to normal. Why can't I do this? People do this all the time.
This is life. This is the basis of our civilization. People do this under circumstances that are way worse than mine. I am privileged. I had money. I had help. I had family nearby. But yeah, I just couldn't understand what was wrong with me.
BLAIR HODGES: Right. And obviously there's got to be physiological things involved here as well. This postpartum depression isn't just psychological, but your body, the hormone changes, and just the way your brain's actually working, that your joy stuff could not fire in your brain. You're in this cold and sort of dark place, and day after day starts to seem more and more repetitive.
You describe you're barely sleeping. You didn't actually really feel hungry very often. Your partner would come home after a day of work and say, “How was your day?” And you'd say, “Boring yet hard.” It was this weird nowhere place, it kind of seems like, that you're describing.
TERESA WONG: Yeah.
BLAIR HODGES: And your baby was only six weeks old at this point, and I see your despair is kind of turning to fear here. And you recall a quote from the poet Rainer Rilke, who wrote, “Perhaps everything that frightens us is in its deepest sense something helpless that wants our love.” And that hit home for you because it's almost like you wanted Scarlet to need you less.
TERESA WONG: Mm-hmm.
BLAIR HODGES: It was scary to be needed like that.
TERESA WONG: It was, and it is, right? That's the kind of scariness of parenthood, is that there's a little person there who expects you to care for them and protect them and keep them healthy and safe. And really, we're all a little bit lost in that. We don't know what we're doing.
Like, I know we're the adults, we're the parents, but—
BLAIR HODGES: Oh, I was shocked to find out how clueless adults are as I became one. I was like, oh wait, these people have no idea what they're doing.
TERESA WONG: We're just a little further ahead down the road. We don't actually know. And we don't actually know how we got there either.
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, right. And we see this despair, this fear, and it even—there's this moment where you and your partner are in bed. It's late at night, you're trying to get some sleep, you finally drift off to sleep, and then Scarlet begins to cry again. And you're just covering your face, and you roll over, and you say this line that just took my breath away.
You say, “I think I hate her.” And your partner's like, “Oh, she's just a little baby.” And you say, “He was right. I didn't hate you, Scarlet. I hated myself.” You started to feel a self-loathing here.
TERESA WONG: Yeah, it's that kind of, why can't I get it together?
"I Need Help" – 52:23
BLAIR HODGES: But to the rescue comes Chris Martin of Coldplay, of all people. [laughter] Truly. And I like how you say this. So you heard a song playing on the radio, and by the way, I love this song. I really do.
When you try your best but you don't succeed.
When you get what you want but not what you need.
When you feel so tired but you can't sleep.
Stuck in reverse . . .
Lights will guide you home and ignite your bones.
And I will try to fix you.
BLAIR HODGES: And then you say, “I was undone by a Coldplay song. How embarrassing!” [laughter]
TERESA WONG: They're not known as the coolest band. But yeah, I love that song too, and not just because of this moment—
BLAIR HODGES: So this is a real moment? Like, you—
TERESA WONG: An absolutely real moment where I had been in the car and I had heard the song, and I was lying there in bed later that night thinking about the words, kind of wishing I could be fixed, basically. I didn't know how things were going to be fixed. And just running through the song in my mind and just crying and—
BLAIR HODGES: Wow.
TERESA WONG: And it was kind of a breakthrough moment because then my husband came back from feeding Scarlet and, seeing me just blubbering, sobbing, and going, "everything's wrong. I need help."
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, those three words stick out to me. There's a panel of you just covering your face and the three words, “I need help.”
TERESA WONG: Yeah.
BLAIR HODGES: Like being able to say that finally was a turning point for you.
TERESA WONG: Yeah. We went to see a different doctor who confirmed, just even from that little checklist, that I had postpartum depression.
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. Can I read that checklist here?
TERESA WONG: Oh yeah.
BLAIR HODGES: It's on page 79. Your diagnosis was textbook. You say signs of postpartum depression include: excessive crying, feelings of shame, guilt, or worthlessness, recurrent thoughts of suicide or death, loss of appetite, changes in sleep patterns, fatigue or lack of energy, fear that you're not a good mother.
Out of all those things on the list, Teresa, you didn't depict any of the suicide or death thoughts that I can remember.
TERESA WONG: Yeah, I kind of—I didn't want to go that dark. I did have those thoughts, but again, this is a letter to my daughter.
BLAIR HODGES: The darkness that you experienced was real to the point of even considering dying by suicide.
TERESA WONG: Yeah. And so in the book, though, I kind of just alluded to lots of thoughts of just going away, that if I just drove off into wherever, that she'd be better off without me. And so I think that was the overriding feeling.
Moving Forward with a Postpartum Doula – 55:57
BLAIR HODGES: And then you connect with a postpartum doula, which is something that I'd never heard about until I read this book. And I think your partner is the one who made the connection.
TERESA WONG: Yeah.
BLAIR HODGES: And you're picturing this hippie-dippy Earth Mother type, you say, this sort of, "hello, the world is beautiful!" But no, you say it turned out to be exactly who you needed. What was your postpartum doula like?
TERESA WONG: Oh, she was great. She is great. She is a total professional. She was actually the president of the Calgary Doula Society.
BLAIR HODGES: Oh, no kidding.
TERESA WONG: Yeah. Just happened to have an opening at that time to come see us. And she was just efficient. She just kind of walked in and knew what to do for both Scarlet and me. And she kind of showed us a bunch of techniques to help me get through the day and to help feed her better and burp her better and bathe and swaddle better.
Until that point, she was breaking out of every swaddle we had tried.
BLAIR HODGES: I remember that.
TERESA WONG: Yes.
BLAIR HODGES: The arm, like one arm will fly up.
TERESA WONG: And she just—she knew what she was doing. And she told me the first few days that she was there, “My job is to work myself out of a job,” to equip you so that you feel confident and taken care of.
BLAIR HODGES: It's such a relief. It's a relief at this point in the book. And that's what you say too. This came with a measure of relief, like getting a diagnosis itself.
TERESA WONG: Yeah, knowing that it was actually something and not just me.
BLAIR HODGES: So getting the diagnosis—and you say that didn't solve everything right away—but it did get you some energy. In fact, now you were openly talking about your diagnosis. You're enthusiastically telling people, hey, this is kind of what's going on. And that itself was helpful too. It seems like you could just tell people what's up.
TERESA WONG: Everything's easier if you don't have to hide it. If you don't have to hide your feelings, it's less shameful if you know what it is, if you can name it. And it's not just a jumble of feelings in your brain.
BLAIR HODGES: Right. And some of the feedback you might get from people you could actually respond to. Like if someone was like, “You just need to focus on the positive.” There's a drawing here of someone saying, “You just need to focus on the positive,” or “That's not that bad,” or, “Oh, been there, done that.”
And you're able to say, hey, no, this is a real thing.
TERESA WONG: This is a real medical condition. Yeah. And there is treatment. It's recognized by doctors.
BLAIR HODGES: And it's not just a medical condition, but there's also cultural elements to it. And this is, I think, important how you point this out. You learned the idea of the airplane oxygen situation. For anybody who's flown on an airplane, they say if you're flying with children, be sure to put your oxygen mask on first and then put an oxygen mask on the child.
And moms are so often expected to just—a good mom will sacrifice herself and give everything, be the "Giving Tree" mom, which, you know.
TERESA WONG: Yeah.
BLAIR HODGES: But here you're being told—that cultural message is being countered by professionals who are telling you, actually, to be a good mom, you should also be a good person and take care of yourself. And there's a balance to be struck here. It's not about sacrificing yourself. That's not healthy for you or your kid if you approach it that way.
TERESA WONG: I think so. And that message also has gotten out a lot more in recent years, I think. Or maybe we as a culture are just questioning that Giving Tree idea, where you just give, give, give, and then you give it all away. Is that really beneficial for your children?
Is that really beneficial for you as a mother?
BLAIR HODGES: Yep.
A Quiet Sisterhood – 01:00:12
BLAIR HODGES: And as you're talking about your diagnosis now, you're meeting other people who had experienced postpartum depression as well. How was that for you? It seems like just connecting with other people could be empowering, even just knowing that they're there.
TERESA WONG: Yeah. I think just seeing women that I knew and respected who were able to share a bit of their experiences, or just knowing that you're not alone. And so many people since the book has come out have come to me and said that same thing.
It's like, I was just so happy to find out that I wasn't alone in this, that other people felt the same way.
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, I'll read this page. You say, “As I shared my struggles, others began to share theirs with me, making me feel like part of a quiet sisterhood. It surprised me how many women I knew who had gone through postpartum depression, women I'd always respected and looked up to as mothers and admired as strong people.”
“I also noticed that they all wore glasses, but that's probably irrelevant.” I love these drawings of these folks. And so these are real people, right? There's Claire.
TERESA WONG: Oh, yes.
BLAIR HODGES: Lael, is that how that one's pronounced?
TERESA WONG: Yeah, that's right.
BLAIR HODGES: And then Karen and Denise. This is awesome to see this little community. And you did call it a quiet sisterhood. But it sounds like you believe this sisterhood is sort of getting louder even since you wrote the book.
TERESA WONG: Yeah, I do. I think people are more vocal about their mental health issues in general, that our society is changing and more ready to recognize that people struggle with mental health issues and postpartum issues.
Recalling Sweet Moments – 01:02:03
BLAIR HODGES: At this point in the book, it seems like the fog has lifted from your mind enough to reflect on things that you really loved about Scarlet. And I love these pictures where you have the sweet moments. You remember her first smile. You remember her strange napping positions. One of them is called "the zombie," which is like—
TERESA WONG: Yeah, yes.
BLAIR HODGES: Yes, I have seen this zombie as well.
TERESA WONG: So good.
BLAIR HODGES: And you talk about her dimpled hands and her little sausage arms, and you talk about her charming little baby hats. And you talk about when she nuzzled into you after getting her first vaccine. So she was seeking your comfort, and how good that made you feel. And when you figured out how to talk to her, when you're saying, “Promise me you'll do your best to look like me, okay?”
“But don't tell your father.”
TERESA WONG: So sensitive.
BLAIR HODGES: You're having these fun little moments. So as the fog's lifting now—and I love where you place this in the book, right? Because some of these memories were happening all along.
TERESA WONG: Oh, yes.
BLAIR HODGES: But when you're in the midst of postpartum depression, it's almost like you can't fully appreciate or enjoy them. And so we as readers don't really get to either. So we kind of journey with you a little bit, if we're really paying attention to your story, to see how the world—you're sort of seeing it through these dark lenses until the fog starts to lift.
So where you decided to put it in the book was really moving.
TERESA WONG: I never thought about it that way. Thank you for that, actually. That makes sense.
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, you did it.
TERESA WONG: Well, no, like I said, there's a surprisingly little amount of planning.
BLAIR HODGES: That's awesome. I love it.
TERESA WONG: The telling of this story.
BLAIR HODGES: I think that's probably the magic of your book. You were just telling your story. You were thinking of Scarlet. You were writing this out.
Partner Impact – 01:03:50
BLAIR HODGES: I also appreciate where you talk about how your partner was impacted by postpartum depression too, the difficult things he experienced. What do you think was hard for him as you experienced that?
TERESA WONG: I think just watching me go through that, but not being able to do very much about it. And he did what he could. I mean, he really did. But yeah, it's kind of that feeling of loss of control and helplessness, but then also, I'm assuming, the feeling like he also has to help keep this baby alive, and he also is new to it and doesn't know what he's doing.
BLAIR HODGES: He seems pretty patient. There's the garage door incident where—
TERESA WONG: Oh yeah.
BLAIR HODGES: You slam into the garage door on a quick trip away.
TERESA WONG: Yes.
BLAIR HODGES: And it seems like he was just like, hey, I'll take care of it.
TERESA WONG: He was just—I was really surprised that night when he said, “I was just happy to have something that I could fix.” That was like, you just make a phone call, you pay some money, and it's done.
BLAIR HODGES: He finally had a problem that he could just do something about. Witnessing a partner, a loved one, a friend, a child suffering in a way that you can't immediately help resolve or anything is its own kind of pain.
TERESA WONG: It really is. Absolutely. And they do—I mean, he didn't need the—but they do have resources out there for fathers or partners of women who have postpartum depression because it's its own journey.
How the Light Gets In – 01:05:29
BLAIR HODGES: And the fact of writing this to Scarlet, there's so much in here. What a beautiful gift, first of all, for Scarlet. And then you say, “Your first two months in the world were the hardest two months of my life. But I'm not telling you all this to make you feel guilty. I wanted to show you that you don't always have to be strong and that you can come back after losing yourself. Becoming a mother did not happen naturally or easily for me. I felt like a failure most of the time, and I believed that you deserved so much better. All I could do was rely on your father to take care of us both. I wanted to die. But I'm thankful I didn't. I hope you never go through depression, postpartum or otherwise. But if you do, please know that I know what it's like.”
And that's what your letter is doing, I think, for Scarlet, right? There are things you can't just fix, but sometimes just knowing that someone at least understands a little bit can make a really big difference.
TERESA WONG: Yeah. And that's my—for all my three children, but also just for anyone reading the book. Right.
BLAIR HODGES: And you close with the Leonard Cohen song. “The birds, they sang at the break of day. Start again, I heard them say. Don't dwell on what's passed away or what is yet to be. Ring the bells that still can ring. Forget your perfect offering. There's a crack, a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in.”
And so with Leonard Cohen at the end instead of Coldplay, which is good. [laughs] Both of them reference light, I noticed.
TERESA WONG: Oh yeah, I didn't realize that.
BLAIR HODGES: I didn't until just now. “That's how the light gets in.” And then, of course, Coldplay's “Lights will guide you home.”
TERESA WONG: Oh wow, what a great connection. Yeah, no, totally unplanned.
BLAIR HODGES: So many moments of cool serendipity.
TERESA WONG: I love it. Yeah, I love it.
Another Pregnancy – 01:07:32
BLAIR HODGES: Then you have this postscript that I wanted to ask about too, because, oh man, this is where you say, okay, we've just been through this with you and just seen what you went through. And then you got pregnant again, and Scarlet was only eight months old.
TERESA WONG: What was that like?
BLAIR HODGES: Because you had just really been through it.
TERESA WONG: It was extremely scary. Yeah, to the point where when I first took the pregnancy test, I didn't know how to process the feelings. So I actually kind of hid it.
BLAIR HODGES: Oh, wow.
TERESA WONG: Until I could figure out what was happening. But then my husband found it. But no, mixed feelings because, yeah, we had just been through so much, and I was just starting to feel better. And we were very worried that things would kind of go the same way.
But also, I am very happy that I had my second child quickly, because I don't think I would have—if the choice were up to me, I'm not sure I would've had more children after that experience. And so kind of just jumping right back into it was what I needed, I guess, to have the family that I wanted to have.
BLAIR HODGES: And then you were, I think, a little bit more prepared. Did you experience postpartum again with your second?
TERESA WONG: I did, but not till much later. So we were very prepared, and we had AJ, my doula, in the delivery room right after I gave birth. And she was there at home with me for the first few months. My husband had also taken kind of a work sabbatical for six months.
And yeah, it was all—
BLAIR HODGES: This should be the norm, though.
TERESA WONG: I know, right? Yeah. And so it was wonderful, actually, at the beginning. And then it wasn't until later on, until Eden was, I think, about eight months old, if I recall, where I started having the feelings of depression again.
BLAIR HODGES: And this time, were you aware enough to be like, oh, I recognize this?
TERESA WONG: Yeah. This time I knew exactly what was happening, and so I sought help right away and started seeing a therapist. And yeah, it was pretty smooth. No depression is great, but it kind of went very smoothly, and I was able to work through a lot of things.
BLAIR HODGES: And then with the third, was it kind of the same?
TERESA WONG: Yeah, no, I had no depression with my third. And that time, actually, we were even more preventive in the sense, because I had been seeing this therapist with Eden. When I got pregnant again, we had some perinatal sessions.
BLAIR HODGES: Mm-hmm.
TERESA WONG: So even during the pregnancy, started talking about the potential for postpartum depression. And with the third one, it was kind of—I did get that whole Hallmark—
BLAIR HODGES: Oh, good.
TERESA WONG: Typical, or not typical, but stereotypical. Yeah, where I had this—I write about it in the book—this rush of, wow, this is so great. But I had not felt that until then.
捱 (Ngaai) – 01:11:06
BLAIR HODGES: Right. I also like in the postscript how you bring up the Cantonese word that your parents often use, and help me pronounce it.
TERESA WONG: It's ngai.
BLAIR HODGES: Ngai, okay. And this is a more nuanced version of the English word “endure.” So maybe take a second to just explain what that term means to you.
TERESA WONG: I mean, it's just a saying that you have to ngai. You have to just keep going, keep doing whatever, just endure this part of life, and then you'll get through it. The time will pass.
BLAIR HODGES: And there's also—I like the nuance to it—is that sometimes grief doesn't lead to growth necessarily. This is just as much about survival as endurance, right?
TERESA WONG: Yeah.
BLAIR HODGES: So sometimes it's like, just survive. Just keep going.
TERESA WONG: Yeah, you just keep going.
BLAIR HODGES: Rather than, you're gonna do it.
TERESA WONG: No. Yeah, there's no—the ngai is not a triumphant kind of concept. It's just like, it's heads down, power through kind of thing.
Scarlet and the Book – 01:12:13
BLAIR HODGES: Sure.
Well, how does Scarlet feel about the book now?
TERESA WONG: Oh, I guess okay. We haven't talked about it recently. When it first came out, I sat all three of them down just to make it clear, first of all, that these were events in the past, and that when I had Scarlet, I was very scared and sad.
But that didn't mean that I didn't love her and that it changed the way I felt about her.
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah.
TERESA WONG: And then with the other two, it's like, just because I wrote a book about Scarlet doesn't mean that—
BLAIR HODGES: Where's my book?
TERESA WONG: Yeah. That this is actually a book for all three of you, but it's about Scarlet because that was when I first became a mother. And they've all read it many times. I don't know how much it really hits.
BLAIR HODGES: Well, that's what's cool about kids, is it can hit them different at different stages of their lives, and it certainly will.
TERESA WONG: Yeah. But yeah, they're pretty chill about it.
BLAIR HODGES: Nice.
TERESA WONG: They asked if I was famous, and I said, no, no, not at all. [laughter]
BLAIR HODGES: Yes, you are. You're on Relationscapes!
TERESA WONG: That's right. [laughter]
BLAIR HODGES: All right. Well, I want to tell people a little bit about you before we get to the final question. Usually, I'll reintroduce you throughout the interview, but I'm just so enraptured by this story that I forgot to. So this is Teresa Wong that we're talking to. The book is Dear Scarlet: The Story of My Postpartum Depression.
And it was a finalist for the City of Calgary W.O. Mitchell Book Prize. It was longlisted for the CBC Canada Reads in 2020. And she's also done comics in places like The Believer, The New Yorker, McSweeney's, and she teaches memoir and comics at Gotham Writers Workshop. And she was also the 2021–22 Canadian Writer-in-Residence at the University of Calgary.
So a lot of accolades in addition to all the stuff that you do at home as well. You had three kids in five years, which is a real piece of work in its own right. And so that's awesome.
Regrets, Challenges, and Surprises – 01:14:23
BLAIR HODGES: Teresa, I did want to close with our segment that we always do here on Family Proclamations.
It's called Regrets, Challenges, and Surprises. And this is a time for an author to think about if there's anything they would change about the book now if they could, if there's anything they regret about it, what was the most challenging part of writing it, or what was the most surprising thing about writing it.
And you don't have to speak to all three of those, whatever.
TERESA WONG: Okay.
BLAIR HODGES: Whatever you feel—if you've got a good story for one of those. That's kind of what we're looking for.
TERESA WONG: I mean, I'll do two of them. A regret—we've already talked about my drawing skill. I do wish that I had drawn it better or used a better font or something. I wish the book as a package looked a little better. And there's one panel in particular that I will point out in case anyone—
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, which one?
TERESA WONG: It's when I'm giving birth, and I am lying on the table, and I'm yelling, “I can't do this,” and my husband and the doctor are yelling back, “Yes, you can.”
BLAIR HODGES: Yes, page 13.
TERESA WONG: And I look like I am about seven feet long.
BLAIR HODGES: Okay, well, that's fair. I didn't notice that until you pointed it out.
TERESA WONG: But yeah. Sometimes I look in the book and go, I could have—yeah, no, I could have done that better even with the skill level I had at that point in time.
BLAIR HODGES: Okay, here's the tip. Here's what you do. You say, “Oh, see, this is—I felt so stretched, so thin in the torture of this moment.”
TERESA WONG: Yeah. So that's what I was going for.
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah.
TERESA WONG: And surprises. When I was writing the book, I think I surprised myself because I still made myself cry when I wrote it. And when I read it, it's a different kind of crying because I am past the depression. I am healed from that. But it's just a sadness for, I guess, the person I was.
BLAIR HODGES: Right.
TERESA WONG: And I wish I could go back and kind of give her a hug. But yeah, I think I am still surprised at how moving I find the story.
BLAIR HODGES: I agree. I don't want people to underestimate a graphic novel. This book has so much emotion in it. I felt it too, I have to say. And I think people that check the book out can feel the depth of emotion that your drawings can evoke. I know you're talking about maybe feeling self-conscious about them, but their sparseness, the thin lines, the starkness, the emptiness where you weren't putting wallpaper and all this other stuff everywhere—it really did sing.
It really brought, I feel like, the emotion right off the page. So thank you so much.
TERESA WONG: I'm glad. I'm glad it does that. And as much as I don't love all the drawings, I am happy with the story, and I'm happy with how well it communicates and connects with people. I've gotten lots of great feedback from readers.
BLAIR HODGES: And what's your favorite feedback? Is it just people saying thank you, or?
TERESA WONG: Yeah, no, you know what, my very favorite thing was a woman reviewed it for the news outlet Bustle, I think it's called Bustle. And I read her review. And in the review, she writes that she was looking at a page—and she had had a baby about eight months prior, I think—looking at a page in the book that shows my postpartum brain, my depressed brain, and realized herself that she had been having all those same thoughts and ended up going to her doctor and seeking help for postpartum depression.
So she kind of diagnosed herself out of that page. And that to me was just an amazing, amazing thing. Never intended. But I'm so glad that the book could help someone in such a real and tangible way.
BLAIR HODGES: That's wonderful. It is such a good book, Teresa. It's called Dear Scarlet: The Story of My Postpartum Depression, a fantastic graphic nonfiction book. And I just want to say thank you for writing it, and thank you for joining me and talking about it today.
TERESA WONG: Oh, thank you. Thank you for all your kind words.
Outro – 01:19:32
BLAIR HODGES: Thanks for listening to another episode of Relationscapes. I'm going to recommend an important Fellow Traveler episode right now because postpartum mental health is in the news. It's September 2026, and the Lindsay Clancy trial is wrapping up right now. She's a mother in Massachusetts accused of killing her three children in what looks like a pretty clear-cut case of postpartum psychosis.
But first, let me say that postpartum psychosis and postpartum depression are not the same thing. Postpartum depression, like we talked about in this episode, is much more common. It involves the symptoms that we went over. Postpartum psychosis is more rare. Only about one in a thousand or so women are thought to experience it.
To learn more about postpartum psychosis, check out my interview with Ayana Lage, author of Missing Me: A Memoir of Postpartum Psychosis and the Long Road Back.
AYANA LAGE - CLIP: I was very aware of the risks of postpartum mental health. I'd heard of postpartum psychosis. It didn't even cross my mind as something that could happen to me, but I'd heard of it. But I think I kind of had this thought of, I've already been through so much when it comes to pregnancy and fertility and all of this.
Like, I deserve to have a good experience, so that's what's gonna happen.
BLAIR HODGES: And then I've got a few more Fellow Traveler episodes to recommend. These ones feature other graphic novelists who are using their art to explore human identity and social justice issues. There's my interview with Mary Catherine Starr. It's called “Eat the Damn Peach and Other Love Stories.”
MARY CATHERINE STARR - CLIP: Women often will tag their male partners in the comments, be like, LOL, it's us. And it's not the greatest story. But they can laugh about it, and then it kind of starts this dialogue, and it's a much less intense way to bring this stuff up.
BLAIR HODGES: And then my chat with Aubrey Hirsch called “Back to the Feminist Drawing Board.”
AUBREY HIRSCH - CLIP: They don't want us to understand that there's a problem. They don't want us to speak up about it. They don't want us to make changes that are gonna make things more equal for us and make life harder for men. So I think it's really important that we're allowing women to tap into our not only individual but collective rage.
BLAIR HODGES: If you're enjoying Relationscapes, take a second to rate and review it in Apple Podcasts. You can also rate it in Spotify. You can also help me grow the show by recommending it to a friend. So if somebody in your life came to mind while you were listening to this one, send them a link.
You can follow me on Instagram or TikTok, where I'm posting videos and clips from each episode and other bonus stuff. I'm @_relationscapes. Mates of State provides our theme music. I'm your host, Blair Hodges, an independent journalist in Salt Lake City, and I hope to spend more time with you soon here on Relationscapes.