Baby blues. In men?

A few weeks after our first child was born I had a particularly rough night with out newborn son. I remember tearfully saying to my husband that I thought I might have post natal depression. I remember his long pause and then him saying he thought he might have it as well.

Apart from wanting to yell at him loudly that this was a conversation about ME not him, I dismissed his words as being stupid. After all, he didn’t carry a baby in his stomach for nine months and then undergo a hugely traumatic labour did he? He didn’t have nipples that were cracked and bleeding, he certainly wasn’t being woken every couple of hours to feed a small creature that needed changing and settling as well.

So what the hell was his problem?

Turns out I wasn’t depressed that time. I was just hugely tired. I’m pretty sure he wasn’t depressed either but I did read a report recently that was very interesting. It said that yes indeed, men can suffer from post baby blues as well. This is not the same as clinical depression, but apparently the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development found that 62 percent of fathers felt blue some time during the first four months following the birth of their baby.

Once I’d gotten over my annoyance with my husband for not being as sympathetic to my woes as I wanted, we ended up having a long chat. Turns out he was worried he wasn’t being a great dad. He felt bad he didn’t wake up every time our baby cried. I reassured him that it was a gift that he didn’t because one of us needed to get some sleep.

We agreed on some new boundaries about looking after our baby, like me going to sleep earlier and him staying up to answer any wake up calls. He’d bring him in for feeds and then take him and change him and put him back to bed. That way, I got some longer stretches of sleep and he felt like he was helping.

After a while the fog started to lift for us both.
Chatting about how tired we both felt was really important and both of us knowing the baby had changed our lives so much meant we both didn’t feel so alone.
Do you talk about your worries with your partner? How do they feel?