Identity loss after having a baby - is this a crisis or a crossing?

Crisis and crossing describe exactly the same facts. A woman six months after a birth who cannot locate herself, who is functioning, who is not ill and is not fine. The two words agree on all of that and disagree completely about what should happen next.

I land on crossing. It took me a while, and the other case is stronger than most people who use my word are willing to admit, so I want to put it properly before I argue against it.

The case for crisis, made honestly

Crisis is descriptively accurate about the acute part. Something changed suddenly and decisively, the tools that used to work have stopped working, and you cannot continue as you were. That is close to the dictionary definition, and it fits.

The word also has an older meaning underneath the alarm. Krisis in Greek is a decision, a turning point, the moment in an illness where it resolves one way or the other. Read that way, crisis does not mean disaster at all. It means the point at which something gets decided, which may be a better description of the fourth month than anything softer.

And crisis mobilizes people. This is the argument I find hardest to answer. When you tell someone you are in crisis, they come round on Saturday. Nobody has ever cleared a weekend for a developmental transition.

A crisis gets a response. A crossing gets a nod and a book recommendation.

The real damage the softer word can do

"This is a normal transition, it happens to everyone, it takes a few years" is true, and it is also a highly effective way of getting a woman to wait.

I have written elsewhere on this site about a stretch of weeks after my son was born that I have never satisfactorily filed, and that I mentioned to nobody at the time. I had a framework by then. The framework said this was ordinary. Ordinary things do not seem to require a phone call.

The framing gets used by other people too, and more comfortably than they realize. A partner who does not want to hear that something is wrong is grateful for a word confirming that nothing is. So is a GP with seven minutes and a form about the baby's weight. So is a relative who did all this without complaining and would rather you did too.

It also flattens circumstances that are nothing like each other. A woman with paid leave, a present partner and money in the account is in a different position from a woman with none of those, and calling both of them crossings implies their difficulty is one substance in two quantities. Sometimes what is happening is not developmental at all. It is an emergency about money, housing, safety or help, and the transition language settles over the top of that like a blanket over a hole in the floor.

The women this framing fails are specific, and I do not want to be vague about them. Women whose distress is a treatable illness, who wait because the vocabulary told them waiting was appropriate. Women who are on their own, or unsafe at home. Women whose birth was traumatic, or whose baby spent weeks in intensive care, and who never got the ordinary version of anything. A word built for the average case is worth very little to somebody in the tail, and it can cost her time she does not have.

What crossing is actually claiming

The claim underneath the word is structural rather than decorative, which is why I think it survives the objections above.

Rites of passage have a documented shape. Arnold van Gennep set it out in 1909: separation from your former status, a middle phase belonging to neither the old nor the new, then incorporation into the new one. Victor Turner later gave that middle phase most of the attention and called it liminal, describing the people inside it as ambiguous, stripped of position, no longer what they were and not yet what they will be.

That is an uncomfortably precise description of a woman in her fourth month. Not sick. Not who she was. Not yet whoever she is turning into. Suspended, and in most of the societies van Gennep studied, that suspension was expected, structured, witnessed and understood to end.

Dana Raphael was an anthropologist, and when she named matrescence in 1973 she built the analogy into the sound of the word: it is meant to rhyme with adolescence. That comparison carries a lot. Adolescence is disorienting and takes years, it rearranges the person permanently, and nobody treats it as an illness or waits for the child to come back.

The word decides what counts as getting better

This is why the choice is not cosmetic, and it is the argument that actually moved me.

Under crisis, recovery means return. The baseline is the woman you were, and progress is measured as distance traveled back towards her. That test cannot be passed. The baseline is gone, and you will spend years failing an examination whose pass mark is a person who no longer exists.

Under crossing, there is a far bank, and it is not the bank you left from. Nothing is being restored. You are going somewhere, and not recognizing yourself is the middle of the water rather than proof that you are drowning.

I cannot demonstrate that one of these is truer. I can tell you that one of them produced years of self-recrimination in me and the other one did not.

What choosing crossing costs

It has no timeline, so it cannot tell you when to worry. Crisis has a threshold built into it. Crossing has none, and a framework with no alarm in it will never sound one.

It asks for patience, and patience is a resource that some circumstances simply do not supply. Telling a woman with no leave, no money and no help that she is in a meaningful transition is not far from an insult.

It can be made beautiful, which is where I think most of the harm is done now. There is a version of this language that arrives with candles, soft photography and the word "sacred", and it is the same silence in better lighting.

And it puts the work on her. A crossing is something you do. A crisis is something other people do something about.

The other question, which is not about framing at all

Whether you have postpartum depression or postpartum anxiety is not answered by choosing a better word, and it never was.

Those are clinical conditions with diagnostic criteria and treatments that work, and they belong with a GP, a midwife, a child health nurse or a psychologist. I am not a clinician, I am a woman who went through this and read the field afterwards. Nothing on this page can tell you which side of that line you are on, and neither can an online quiz.

You can be crossing and be unwell at the same time. One does not rule out the other, and the transition being real is no evidence at all that the illness is not.

If the weight never lifts, if you cannot function, if your own thoughts frighten you, that is a conversation for this week rather than one for after the weekend.

Where I land, with the objections still standing

Crossing. For me, and with everything above left in.

I use it because it points forwards, and because it stopped me measuring myself against a woman I have no route back to. I would not offer it to a woman I did not know well as the first thing I said to her. And I notice that the people most attached to this framing tend to be the ones who came through with enough support to find it beautiful, which should make all of us more careful with it than we are.

What I have not resolved is whether crossing is true or merely more bearable. I cannot fully separate those two in myself. I am suspicious of my own preference here, because I chose the word that let me stop blaming myself, and I suspect I would have chosen it whether or not it was accurate.

Something to carry

Test the word by what it makes you do, not by how it sounds.

If the one you are using makes you wait, when some part of you already suspects you should be asking somebody for help, then it is the wrong word for you this week, whatever it turns out to be for me next year.

A crossing you have to walk yourself. Nobody is coming to pull you out of the water, and that is the honest price of the word I have chosen. It is worth knowing before you pick it up.