I Quit Heroin So I Could Breastfeed

On postpartum, mental health, and resilience

We’re so excited for you to meet Emily Hancock, then girl genius behind the Women's Work substack. She’s freebirther, nurse, a farmer, and a card carrying Radical Mom. Get ready to fall in love.

I was 21 when I first learned what it meant to have another living being depend on me in a truly tangible way. I thought I knew before. I thought I could imagine it. The second her skin touched mine I felt the all-encompassing need of this tiny being. Her warm, slippery, writhing little body felt like the concept of desire embodied. Her desire to find her place, to wriggle her way to where she was supposed to land, to where she would be safe, was so palpable in her movements and her cry. I was fully submerged in the turbulent sea of her need while simultaneously being called to rescue her from it. It was only with lots of time, time spent up at night with her alone, nursing her, that I would learn how to float alongside her in peaceful waters, rather than flail about.

Before I became pregnant with this magic daughter who taught me how to float, I was a heroin addict. I was in the business of floating by way of my opiate receptors and boxed red wine. I came to my addiction through a compulsion to squash my anxiety, my depressive tendencies, my perfectionist leanings and my low self-esteem. From childhood I always felt wrapped in a nervous layer of unease that drugs dissolved, I could laugh freely, divulge my secrets without fear and where the world felt okay for the time being. 

I had a pronounced shyness as a child. Shyness that I am now convinced originated in a sort of evolutionary mismatch between my personality and the time/place I was born into. This led to social anxiety. Anxiety led to self medication with opiates and alcohol and marijuana and benzos. Ongoing addiction, an emotionally and physically abusive relationship and poor self esteem led to a cycle of mania and depression.

In a sense, I became pregnant at the perfect time. Even though I had a few months of sobriety under my belt, the temptation to use started to creep back in. Now with a being developing inside me, it was do-or-die time. I chose to be brave and take the path that required more of me. 

I was full of fear during my pregnancy. I was afraid that my inherent flaws would taint my baby, that the badness that lived in me would take over. But I also felt excitement, tenderness, and a fundamental need to make things right for this baby.  But I also felt a compulsion to control all the little things around me. I fixated on how clean the countertops were, how to organize her onesies by color, how many times I checked the locks on the doors.  A mix of cleanliness-is-next-to-godliness and classic OCD symptoms that the opiates had suppressed.

When I first got clean, obsessive compulsive rituals helped soothe my newly sober brain. I would snap my fingers over and over in the car while driving over bridges. I checked the windows and doors ten to fifteen times. I had to turn the lights off in a certain order, starting over for every mistake. I’d do knocking in patterns on the window sills until I heard the “right” quality of sound.