I didn’t pick it up. Though medication may be the right choice for other women in my position, I chose instead to work with my therapist to shift my perspective on what emotions I “should” be feeling during pregnancy. I chose to give myself permission to go through matrescence, which like my own adolescence 20 years earlier, proved to be a time both thrilling and fraught.

When it comes to pregnancy, society has, as Grose told me, “a moral halo around anything construed as natural.” This might lead people to believe that there is a right way to be pregnant, or that there is a script for a normal pregnancy. But “there’s a wide range of normal that nobody knows about,” Birndorf told me.

“How distressed are you by these thoughts and feelings that you’re having?” she asks women to consider. “How much is it impacting your functioning? How much is it changing how you move through the world? If those answers to those questions are ‘a lot,’ then you’re talking about something else.”

Normal or natural pregnancy for me, I came to realize, involved the same mild depression I’d been living with for years. The more I looked at my feelings—with the support of my therapist and my husband; in a daily journaling practice; sometimes with friends—the more it helped to think of myself as going through “matrescence.” I was never diagnosed with prenatal depression, perhaps because my depression was not, and will not, be confined to pregnancy. My therapist helped me to acknowledge the fear, the ambivalence, and the profound change that becoming a mother entails. Maybe pregnancy was a chance for me to transform my relationship with depression, with control, and with my body, he offered; maybe I would meet this challenge and give birth to two new people in the fall.

I did not expect that being depressed during pregnancy could lead to wellness, but 10 days from this writing, when I meet my son, I’ll do so knowing that I’m as healthy as I’ve ever been in my life, with greater self-awareness, a firmer grip on my own coping skills, and a clearer voice with which to reach out. “If you can figure out how to help yourself or get the help you need during your pregnancy, you may not end up with a postpartum problem, because you’ve dealt with it during pregnancy,” Birndorf said. If pregnancy is a time to prepare for the arrival of a new life, I’ve done all I can.