Jennifer Koehler grew up the way most Pennsylvanians do, hating New Jersey. So suffice to say, she wasn’t all that thrilled when she found out she had to move here.
She was even less thrilled when it damn near killed her.
But then, that’s what post-partum depression is like. The agony of hating your life at a time everyone tells you it’s the best time of your life.
The pain of fantasizing about packing your car with everything but the baby and driving until you find a place where no one knows your name and won’t come looking for you. And all of it felt in a place you never wanted to be and don’t know any more than you’d know how give directions to the tallest tree in Siberia.
So it was certainly a good thing Koehler found the MOMS Club of Lawrenceville-East when she did. “It saved my life,” Koehler says without a trace of irony. “It really did.”
Koehler’s battle with depression and her subsequent sanity rescue began about three years ago. She and her husband, Stephen, were the parents of a 22-month-old son in Lansdale, Pennsylvania, and for the most part, everything was fine. At least until they realized they were going to have a fourth at the table.
The money the couple made wouldn’t be enough to support two children, especially since Koehler was going to be out of work for a while. Stephen had to make more money, so he took a job with Comcast in Mt. Laurel, where he’s a network designer and project manager. All well and good until the absurdity of an almost two-hour (each way) commute made itself obvious.
So Koeher went from an orderly, manageable life, surrounded by friends and family in a place she knew and had grown quite comfortable in to packing her bags and moving to Lawrence Township, near her husband’s native stomping grounds. She wanted nothing to do with New Jersey, which didn’t help.
“Every time we visited,” she said, “whenever we’d cross that line I’d start with ‘New Jersey, where all the chemical plants are,’” she says. “They don’t charge you to get in but they charge you to get out.”
What also didn’t help was that Koehler was eight months pregnant and was forced to leave her job as the manager of an eye doctor’s office, at which she’d worked her way up the ladder, to move to what she believed was the land of smoke stacks and congested highways. Worse, she knew nobody there, apart from her husband’s family who, she says, told the couple they’d be there to help as much as they needed it.
“But you know how that goes,” she says.
Though Stephen’s commute was now down under an hour, he’s still away from home from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. every day he goes to work. So Koehler was home with a toddler and a newborn daughter (who had colic), isolated from everyone and everything she knew. She couldn’t even get out of the house to get her driver’s license and registration done within New Jersey’s 90-day window, because at the 90-day point, she was up to her bleary eyes in no sleep and that curious blend of noise without conversation that occurs in a house where small children can’t really have deep, solid talks yet.
The whole experience was a rapidly descending jail sentence, Koehler says. “I was extremely lonely with my husband working long hours and being stuck at home with an extremely fussy and colicky baby and a toddler who, at his age, spoke in just grunts, whining, and pointing. He spent his days watching Elmo while I tried to deal, and I became depressed very quickly.”
Koehler’s mother-in-law had mentioned the idea of maybe joining a MOMS Club — a support group for stay-at-home mothers, but Koehler dismissed it. Her perception of the club was something like “Real Housewives.” Of wherever.
She would eventually find the exact opposite to be true, but for the time being, Koehler was housebound.
When she was able to venture out, she she took her children to see a free music performance at the Lawrence Library.
Her son, just 2, crawled away and into the lap of a purple-haired stranger and started playing with her tablet. Koehler apologized and the women told her it was all right, and Koehler realized that for the first time in weeks she was actually speaking “grownup” with someone else.
As it turned out, the stranger was Traci McMahon, who belonged to the MOMS Club and convinced Koehler she should join. When Koehler learned what the club full of regular moms in working families could offer her — i.e., a sympathetic ear, some genuine been-there-done-that perspectives, and, most importantly, some practical help like watching the kids for an hour or “just having you over to their kitchen for coffee and letting you talk,” she says — she joined.
The effect on her psyche was immediate. “I had no idea how isolated I was,” Koehler says. “I realized I didn’t know how to be a stay-at-home mom.”
Koehler’s story is a fairly common one among MOMS Club circles, says Karen Cerra, treasurer of the Lawrence-East chapter. Cerra, a former legislative analyst for the Association of Environmental Authorities, moved to Lawrence with her husband a few years ago from upstate.
She didn’t know Koehler when she joined, but says the story — that of being entirely overwhelmed, lost, isolated, and mired in depression — happens a lot.
“And it happens real fast,” Cerra says. You come home from the hospital and everyone’s around, but then two weeks later, you’re on your own in a strange land. And boom. You’re in over your head.
Cerra did not have quite the level of isolation Koehler did. She is the type to seek out things and people as soon as possible, and she had at least been in the neighborhood a while before leaving her job, so she was familiar with the area.
But she’d never seen it. “I went back and forth to work every day, but I never ventured out into the neighborhood,” she says. She suddenly had a newborn and realized she knew nothing about what to do or see now that she was in town full-time. The club, she says “opened my eyes to so many things to do around here. For free.”
Koehler, now 34, responded so much to the club that she’s now its president. Incidentally, she and McMahon, the club’s secretary, are such good friends, that they’re each other’s babysitters. Which comes in handy because Koehler now has a third — “and last” — child, a daughter, born in November.
The difference between Baby-then and Baby-now, she says, is night and day. “I’m actually enjoying having a baby this time,” she says. “I wasn’t doing that with my other daughter.” She also benefitted from two weeks worth of meals made by other moms in the club, a function that members undertake whenever someone in the group has a newborn or a medical emergency, says Cerra.
Koehler now helps organize events and community service activities for the group, which has about 40 members. The club’s biggest outreach project on the horizon is the Preschool & Children Activities Fair, which MOMS will host on Saturday, Feb. 6, at the Lawrence Community Center at 295 Eggerts Crossing Rd., from 1:30 to 4:30 p.m.
The event is a one-stop shopping for information about area preschools and activities for young children in the Lawrenceville area, Koehler says. There will be a craft table and face painting for kids and info about the club and other area organizations for parents.
“We will also be collecting pet food and items to donate to the Trenton Animal Shelter,” she says. “Please consider bringing a pet item to donate.” Attendance is free and the public is welcome. Call (609) 851-0828 or email lvillemomsclub@yahoo.com for more information.
Previous fundraisers have helped numerous community organizations, such as the Lawrence Library, Lawrence Nature Center, LTPS, HomeFront, Lawrence Community Center, Lawrenceville Main Street, Women’s Space, Anchor House, and the Boys and Girls Club of Lawrenceville.
Doing these events is Koehler’s way to help pay it forward, considering how much joining the MOMS Club and getting out into the community actually did for her. And she’s now happy she can use her story and experiences from the trenches of depression and stress to help other moms who feel the way she did.
“There’s a new mom who just joined and already she’s so much more engaged,” Koehler says. “She told me ‘I can’t believe how isolated I was.’ It was the same thing I said.”
