I was not happy to discover that I was pregnant with my second child. It’s hard to admit that publicly.

There were a lot of reasons for my unease: I had more or less decided to stop at one child, and he was almost three years old. I felt like I had finally found a balance between motherhood and my career. I wasn’t sure that my marriage could take having another baby. And I felt far too old and tired to go through the rigors of pregnancy and the newborn months again.

But those were the rational thoughts: fairly normal, practical concerns for a 37-year-old working mother with no savings in the bank. What was worse – much worse – was the more abstract gulf of sadness that threatened to swallow me up, the sense that I had lost all control of my life and my body, that nothing but darkness could possibly lie ahead.

Incidentally, the words “nothing but darkness could possibly lie ahead” are not something that people want to hear you say about your pregnancy. My many friends going through the horrors of fertility treatments certainly didn’t want to hear it. Nor did my mom’s friends, who tried to quell any concerns I voiced with infuriating statements like, “It’s only a couple of years, it will be OK.”

My poor husband took the brunt of this. I routinely told him things like, “Thanks for sticking me with this baby you knew I didn’t want”, as though we weren’t two grown ups who were both perfectly aware of how babies are made. He was worried that I would give birth and promptly leave the country, never to be heard from again.

As much as other people didn’t want to hear about my depression, I didn’t want to feel it. Even when you’re thrilled about it, pregnancy is hard, packed with fatigue, morning sickness, strained muscles, and a host of other aches and pains. Throwing depression into the mix really takes away the light at the end of the tunnel. Heaving every morning while battling tears over the wreckage of your life is an experience I’d only wish on my least favorite people.

I also worried constantly that I was ruining the baby, that my inability to control my emotions was now going to produce a deeply flawed offspring. After all, I reasoned, how can a baby have stress hormones swirling around it all day long and not be affected?

My fears were not completely unfounded. “Children born to moms with one of the depressive disorders are at increased risk of being less attentive, more irritable, less likely to form facial expressions,” Dr James Betoni, co-author of the book Pregnancy Power, told me.

Depression During Pregnancy, a 2009 joint report from the American Psychiatric Association and the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, backs up that claim. However, it also notes that no research to date has connected depression experienced during pregnancy – referred to in the report as “antepartum depression” – with any developmental anomalies. Instead, its concerns are largely focused on the mother, and on the possibility that a depressed pregnant woman will not take care of herself as much as is needed, or that she may be more prone to taking risks that could lead to miscarriage or birth defects.

For pregnant women with major depressive disorders, things can get even more difficult. Antidepressants, which they may need to take during pregnancy, have been linked to fetal malformations, cardiac defects, pulmonary hypertension, and reduced birth weight. New research published in the journal Jama Pediatrics indicates that antidepressants taken during pregnancy can increase the risk of autism by 87%.

Nonetheless, the APA report notes, more research is needed – and no one is suggesting that women with a history of severe depression, bipolar disorder or a history of suicide attempts should stop taking their medication during pregnancy. Rather, the experts recommend that a woman’s ob-gyn and psychiatrist work closely together to mitigate the risks as much as possible.

The report also points out that antepartum depression – although not discussed nearly as much as its cousin, postpartum depression – is not all that rare. Between 14% and 23% of pregnant women experience some form of depression during pregnancy, the report says.

I found that to be true anecdotally as well. When I finally worked up the nerve to post about how I was feeling in a Facebook parenting group, I was surprised at how many women reported similar experiences. For me, what ultimately helped was a combination of time and therapy. Allowing myself time to get used to the idea of being pregnant and accepting the fact that it might take a few months for my hormones to settle down helped me feel less panicked.

But I also took more time to myself on a daily basis, getting up early to have a half hour of quiet before having to be a mom, scheduling a quiet walk in my day, stretching showers out a bit longer than usual. Just as the months were giving my hormones time to settle, those stolen moments helped my brain to develop a workable plan for the future.

As for therapy? For years I have advocated therapy for other people, but I never felt the need to go myself. When my husband asked me – with real fear in his eyes – whether I was planning to abandon this baby, I got unbelievably angry and defensive. Then I realized that I was beyond garden-variety doldrums and should probably talk to a professional. So I looked up therapists in my small town, found one with high marks on the Psychology Today site, and scheduled an appointment.

It was nerve-wracking to sit there and talk about myself for an hour. At first, I was skeptical that anything this stranger said to me could possibly straighten my head out. Then I discovered something: the simple act of expressing everything that had been swirling around in my head had the effect of making it all feel less terrifying, less dramatic, and more manageable.

One day, I told my very smart therapist about how worried I was that my mood was going to have an impact on the baby. She looked at me and said, “Well what is the alternative? You feel the way you feel, there’s no way around that. What are you going to do? Repress those feelings? I think that would probably be worse, for both you and the baby eventually. You have to just let yourself feel the way you feel and forge a path through it.”

And that is ultimately what I managed to do. I’ll let you know in a couple of months if my baby is crankier as a result.