"I see," said the blind woman, looking for the black cat in the coal scuttle at midnight.

I've been feeling so good lately. The medicine has really been working. I even was at a point where there was not only a lack of suicidal desire, the very idea of committing suicide seemed bizarre and incomprehensible.

That was very nice while it lasted.

I must be about ready to have my period again, though, because I've been feeling increasingly bad this last week. No, I'm not feeling suicidal, but I'm having a hard time thinking clearly and I've been feeling sad and irritable. Everything seems so hard. So I'm not out of the woods yet. But I'm getting there. This is infinitely better than the way I was feeling a couple of months ago.

I realized something the other night, though, and I'm not sure why I never put this together before. I guess postpartum depression was just something I never had a reason to think about, back then.

According to my father, his mother had a nervous breakdown after her second child. I don't know exactly what constituted a "nervous breakdown" in her case, but whatever it was, it was severe enough that she was hospitalized for it, for several months.

It was centered around having the baby, I know, because it was decided they shouldn't have any more children. My father was an accident and for several months Grandma, I am told, refused to even acknowledge that she was pregnant. To compound her distress, he was premature. According to Dad, she wouldn't hold him after he was born and was conflicted about him for several years.

While this has been a tragedy for my father, and a huge factor in his maladjustment to life, I finally think I understand what was going on with my grandmother.

Duh, Jennifer, she had postpartum depression! Maybe even postpartum psychosis. (Did they hospitalize people for depression back then, or did it take hearing voices?) How could I not have seen that?

I'm guessing this was something I inherited from her, like a bad fuse lying in wait in my anatomy until the conditions were right to overload it. I need to talk with my siblings about it. If this is something hereditary, my sisters and our daughters and nieces need to be prepared. We can keep any other woman of our line from being caught off guard by this illness, if we can educate our family about it.

I had a midwife scold me once for reading "What to Expect When You're Expecting". She felt that it was unnecessarily alarmist and that if I got familiar with it I would scare myself into seeing trouble in every hiccup. I don't see knowledge that way. I like knowing everything I can about the situations I face. If I know what can go wrong, then I can act to prevent it. If I can't prevent it, then I can at least be prepared to cope with it.

Oh, but I feel sorry for my grandmother and father. Both of them suffered so much because of this, neither of them understanding, probably, that it wasn't anyone's fault. It was just lousy biochemistry.

Sometimes life can really suck.