Heather B. Armstrong is kinda like the Howard Stern of mommy bloggers. Visitors flock to her website dooce.com to see the former Mormon turn everyday life in Salt Lake City into an uproarious rant in which few topics are spared -- and no one is left unscathed.
Her devoutly Mormon parents are frequent targets. As are Republicans. Potty humor is big too, whether it's a pregnant Armstrong trying to empty her bladder in a cramped airplane bathroom or her daughter's love of the word "poop." But mostly Armstrong invites the world to watch just how much life has changed for a website designer, live music lover and early-adapter-of-all-things-Web who is now a wife to the saintly Jon and stay-at-home mom to daughter Leta. (Two dogs, Coco and Chuck, have become celebrities in their own right.)
Armstrong has also used that evolution to cast a spotlight on her years-long bout with crippling depression and how medication made it all better. Her new book, "It Sucked and Then I Cried: How I Had a Baby, a Breakdown, and a Much Needed Margarita," chronicles her decision to stop taking drugs so that she could become pregnant and her struggles to adapt to motherhood as well as her subsequent descent into postpartum depression. She held off returning to her pre-pregnancy medications because she wanted to continue breast-feeding her daughter -- and did so, until the pangs of anxiety became so disturbing that she feared harming herself, or her family.
"I thought about suicide every day during those months. I thought about how I would do it; perhaps I would hang myself with the dog's leash, or maybe I'd grab every single pill we had in the cabinet and drown them with a couple shots of tequila. I wanted to do something, anything to stop the pain," she writes.
Ultimately Armstrong checks herself into a mental institution and credits it with saving her life, giving her time to focus on herself and allow a doctor to supervise the administration of a powerful drug cocktail that worked almost immediately: "I felt a difference within two hours, and if you ask Jon he will tell you that when he saw me that afternoon he saw Heather for the first time in seven months, not that awful woman who liked to throw keys at his head."
