A/N: Requested as "April suffers postpartum depression/disconnect after Jack's birth." Before that it was requested when Roberta was the headcanon first baby, so it's only slightly different from the original prompt.

I will say that it's not all gloom and doom, but still :(

Everyone gets the baby blues, or a lot of women do. April knows that. Those first few days, she chalked it up to that. Out of all the things she ever wanted to be, when she had Jack she wanted to be there for her kid. It wasn't that her parents were negligent - if she could tell herself something in her teens it would be to lighten up and realize her mom was trying - but April doesn't remember a time when her parents really cared about what she did. They let her do what she wanted to, but none of it felt like it came from a place of love. Instead it felt like they were trying to get her out of their hair.

All parents do that, and she knows even Leslie freaking Knope can do that at times. April doesn't want to be that kind of mother though. She wants to be someone her son can go to and talk to, and not feel like she doesn't "get him."

She wants to do everything she can from the start. April wants to breastfeed and be there whenever she can, and though Andy will naturally spend more time with him she wants to be a great mother.

But she can't.

Those first few days. That's all she kept telling herself, was that this was just natural. It was okay to have trouble sleeping and wake up from night terrors in coughing fits. This is normal, she tells herself. She smiles at Andy and when he isn't looking she asks herself if this is really normal. But she has to go to work, where she can actually help people. That thought, above all else, makes her feel like shit. Physically, she can feed Jack. But when she tries to, something about it feels strange and foreign and April loathes that more than anything. Even that simple, natural and human act is out of her sphere of understanding. It makes April hand him over to Andy and go to the bathroom, wanting to hide the tears from him.

Then those days become more. She wakes up at three in the morning after going to sleep past midnight every single day. Her bones ache when she opens the fridge, but she can't help it. April wants to deal with it - and be a strong person, she tells herself, and a strong, capable mother - but her fingers ache when they open cupboards. Even then, she can't do much more than drink a glass of water and sit up, doing absolutely nothing but thinking.

April told herself she can do this.

What if she can't?

She tries not to read about her symptoms, because she already knows what it is. She knows, logically, but emotionally she isn't prepared for it. She doesn't want to have a name for seeing her child and not feeling anything. For everything else, she wants to beat it into her. She tells herself she loves Jack, and she tells others that, but... it's not there. It's not met by anything other than hatred inside of her, and not at him. He's a defenseless child, a beautiful baby boy. He deserves none of this, and neither does Andy, so all that's left is hating herself. How shitty of a mother do you have to be to not love your own fucking child?

She's stuck with this question for nights on end. She knows it's not baby blues anymore. That time's long past, and she knows it's not just being tired from the aftermath of birth. April knows it by definition because she always asked the doctors when Andy wasn't around what she should do if this happened. She knew exactly what this was, but didn't want to think about it.

Then Jack cries out and she tries to go help him. When she picks him up and pats his back, whispering that everything's okay and mommy's here, he won't stop. He keeps crying and she tries to feed him, but that doesn't work either. He doesn't need cleaned or anything, he just won't respond to her. I'm fucking broken, she thinks. Can't even take care of my own kid.

When Andy comes in after an hour of the baby crying, she's sitting on the chair next to the crib with her face in her hands and tears seeping through her fingers. She just wants to be a good mother, and she can't even get that right.

She tries. Day after day, she tries. He's no longer used to breastfeeding and she hates that she'll never get to be the proper caregiver she wants to be. April knows she doesn't have to be that, but where does it end? When will it be something more than that? Simple, little things like those that April should be capable of handling are impossible to deal with, and irreversible. She can't go back and have a do over, so she sulks at work and goes home to Andy, who by the day looks more and more worried, and tells him she's okay. She knows that he doesn't believe her, but she keeps telling herself he doesn't see it. She doesn't want him to see it. In their lives, she might not be as chipper or determinately, constantly happy as him, but she doesn't want him to think that she doesn't love her child.

It goes on like that for weeks until April wakes up one day to find Andy holding Jack in the living room, sitting on the couch, and his face looks so broken she doesn't know what to do. He just stares down at their son, their perfect little boy, and she hates what he looks like. Andy should be proud, and happy, and instead she's making him hate it.

"Morning," she says, looking at the two of them.

He doesn't respond at first, just looking at the bundle in his arms. Andy has so much love to give, an astronomical amount in comparison to what April can handle, and he should be giving it wholesale over to their child. But with his wife unsure what she's dealing with, and unsure that she can give the same love to her son, he's left looking almost heartbroken. When they were talking about children, she took some time to get used to the idea and April never thought of that as being forced into anything. Who in the hell was going to force her into having children anyways? But, Andy didn't push it to the point where she felt pressured into it.

It's what made her decide to do it. He gave her space, months, to think about it and though they talked about it in those months, April never once felt anything but Andy's expansive love in those conversations. He truly wanted kids, and he wanted them with her. Not once was it ever a factor that he'd leave her to have children. It was always about the kids themselves, and about April being okay with it.

And she was, she truthfully was. She did love the first time he saw Jack, because Andy's face was pouring over with emotion that she was giddy to feel illuminating the room. When she held him the first time, too, she felt that. She felt like he was a new bit of joy she could experience, and help shape, and bring something great into the world. Her thoughts never swayed from wondering if she was capable as a mother, but she thought she could do it at first. She thought.

"Hey," he gets out eventually, his voice rattling and dehydrated.

"You... you got him?" she asks, trying to tear herself from looking at them.

Andy looks up and he smiles weakly. Weak and low, sad, and all the things Andy isn't. "Yeah," he answers, nodding before going back to looking at Jack.

"Is he hungry?" she asks like she can do anything about it.

"Nah," Andy says without looking up at her.

There's a long, dark silence where April stands fidgeting with her hands. If she could get herself to stop thinking like this she would, for the love of everything she would want this to end so that Andy could be happy and she could be the mother she wanted to be, but it's not that easy. And it hurts. It hurts like seeing her husband shrug her off. It hurts like her son crying all the time around her and not having a way to fix it. She started out wanting to be the perfect example of what someone that is impossibly in love with her husband can do to love her children... and now she's already failed. She's already broken and totally incapable of handling it, and it fucking hurts.

Not only Andy, though. He certainly doesn't deserve it. All the way up through the pregnancy he reminded her that she's in charge and that it's her body, and a bunch of other stuff from his single semester of Women's Studies, and it's everything she already knows. But she wants it by then. And it's not only him, but Jack. He's her son - and the amount of times she has to remind herself that he is her child is terrifying - and she should love him, and love everything about him, but she can't and it hurts.

"You wanna... um, you're," Andy starts, cradling Jack in his arms and making April want to close her eyes and forget that she's thinking like this just for one moment. What she wouldn't give to see Andy holding Jack and feel an explosion of heat and love in her chest. "Are you okay, honey?"

April sits down on the chair across from the couch. "I... I-I'm..." she takes a long breath and she tries her best to answer him truthfully. She wants him to know what it's like to have April love what they've done. "I'm fine."

"No you're not," Andy says so matter-of-factly it's just another in a long list of horrible disappointments in her life.

Disappointing daughter, disappointing intern, disappointing wife. Disappointing friend, disappointing employee, and now a disappointing mother.

"What?"

"Babe, you're not... do you need to talk to me about something?" his voice is soft and she wants to cry again, just from the pure and natural Andy there is in that voice. "You can always tell me stuff, you know that-"

"I said I'm fine," she reminds him, but April's already curled up on the chair without thinking about the motions.

"Do you..." he looks down at Jack and gives the sleeping boy another sad look. "Did you wanna look at stuff?"

"Like what?" she asks him, scared.

"You know... we talked about it, babe," Andy's voice is falling apart but he's trying so hard to look composed. April finds that loathing in her chest and wants to burn it out of her body, just excise it once and for all. "We talked about it when you were pregnant."

"Andy, we can't do that now. He's already born," she says slowly.

"I meant... like, y'know, adoption," Andy says and his voice completely breaks when he says the word. He looks down and kisses Jack's forehead, and she can see he's already gone.

Andy was never an attractive crier, but he's holding together a little bit.

"No," she immediately defends. "You love Jack."

"But you don't," Andy chokes out, and his eyes get redder and wetter by the second. "Babe, I know you hate that you did this and you regret it..."

"I don't," she replies in a weak voice, barely able to say it.

"It's okay, I shoulda known," he stands up and walks to the nursery. He returns a little while later, April unable to follow him and hear what he's saying to Jack. "I should've known you were just doing this for me-"

"I didn't!" she says a little louder than she intended. "Babe, no, I don't want to give up our son."

"But I want him to be happy, and I want you to be happy... and you're not," he takes her hands and it's the most intimate contact they've had in a week. "Babe, you're not."

"I didn't ask for this, Andy. I don't want to feel like this-"

"So we'll talk about it in the morning and figure out how we get this started-"

"Why are you being like this?" she whispers, crying. She can tell she's got tears in her eyes because she can barely make him out through them. His voice is breaking and shaking, and all kinds of things she hates to hear. "Andy, I told you already: I don't want this, and I mean I want Jack. I want to love him, I do."

"It's making you miserable. I don't want you like that, and if it means we have to... if we can't have our son, then I want him to be with people that will love him," Andy sounds hollow and the words he's speaking don't have any weight to them.

"Andy, we're not doing that," she answers and moves forward, hugging him tightly. He returns it immediately and she has to dig her face into his chest because looking at him like this hurts, too. "I don't wanna give up. I just... I don't know what to do."

"We can go talk to someone," he says softly into her hair. He kisses the top of her head and her chest vibrates with a kind of love that's indescribable, something that she doesn't understand and never will but it's directly aimed at Andy. "We'll go talk to a doctor and a head doctor and we'll... we can do this."

"It's called a therapist, and yeah... yeah we can," she nods into his chest and leans up to kiss him. "I can do this."

When they break apart he smiles ever so faintly, just enough that it makes her feel a little better. "You can do this, honey," he amends. "I believe in you."

The first doctor explains that this is all normal. April hates that, and hates hearing that she shouldn't be too worried. That's all a fucking lie and she tells him as much. They visit another doctor who says she can help April get into a therapy program and possibly see if medication helps her. That makes April feel much better and she even kind of wants to hug this doctor. Maybe it's because she's a mother, April finds out, but she doesn't dare ask her if she understands personally. Andy doesn't look happy, but he's always by her side and he always asks her if she's okay talking to another person about this.

If she's going to be a good mother, she's going to fight this. That makes Andy smile, and it makes her feel better because he truthfully believes she can do this.

"So, Ms. Ludgate, you're in the door at the end of the hall. To the left, Dr. Michaels," the nurse smiles at her and April nods. She takes Andy's hand and leads him to her appointment.

This is the only one she gets to have Andy with her for. If it's successful, or at least if the therapist thinks it's successful, they'll turn into solo affairs. It scares April, but she's strong. She reminds herself that she wants to be as strong a mother as Andy was a father and husband. She realizes, then in that short walk, he's all of that. In a time when she couldn't handle it, and things were terrifying, Andy didn't leave her. He didn't think the burden too great, and abandon his son, because he was and is strong enough.

She smiles at him and squeezes his hand. He's going to be an amazing father.

It's not an outright success, but she schedules another appointment. Then another, after the second. She has a prescription for something that comes in a little tinted bottle, and April remembers to take them every 24-hours as instructed.

Things they talked about, her and the therapist, she tries to work on them. April spends an hour with Jack, and tries to create memories in that short time, before she hands him off to Andy and lets herself go do something else. Whether that be studying a client's portfolio or talking to Leslie, or emailing her therapist, she does it. Then, late at night, she visits with Jack again. It feels so regimented and unnatural - not like a real mother should feel - but April does it because it's all she can do.

"How's he doing?" Leslie asks her.

"He's fine, and he's starting to warm up to me again," April tries not to choke up saying that, over the phone, because it hurts to say but it makes her so happy. "God, I sound like an idiot-"

"Not at all! How's he eating?"

April smiles and wipes the bridge of her nose, taking a tissue and sneezing because God, she's hormonal and emotional and it's annoying but refreshing. "He's eating just fine, just not... he only does formula right now."

"Take your time, and don't believe for a second it makes you a bad mom if you stick to formula," Leslie says through the crackling filter. "It's perfectly-"

"Leslie, ugh, I've had this talk with like, twelve doctors," she laughs and sniffs. "I just really want to."

She can't see it, but April knows Leslie's smiling. "Okay."

Eventually, after two weeks, she can feed Jack again. The first time she does it, and he latches on and he ends up smiling at her in the blind, dumb way only a newborn can, April cries. Whether it's the overload of emotions or the medication making her loopy and hormonal, she can't help it. And it feels so good to hold him, and cry, and with her shirt unbuttoned she holds him closer to her and kisses his cheek. He laughs a little thing, a squeak, and she can't help herself before she's making the strangest, weakest sounds of laughter with him.

A weight appears behind her and Andy kisses the back of her head. She looks down at Jack and, for the first time since giving birth, she loves him.

The single greatest thing about her life is her friends. And, one of them, she can always talk to whenever she needs her. If Andy was the rock she needed right then, Leslie was the faint, distant lighthouse that she could follow into the confusing and treacherous waters April found herself in.

"How are things going? With... with Jack," Leslie asks her, setting her coffee cup on the table.

"Amazing," April says slowly. "I have another session this Friday, and then I think they're going to lessen my prescription."

"Oh my God, that's so good to hear," Leslie hugs her and it's something she honestly needed. "Do you wanna talk about it? How's the feeding, is he getting all cute and chubby? God, Sonia had the biggest baby cheeks and they were so cute..."

April smiles as Leslie continues. This is the kind of mother she wants to be. Leslie doesn't need what April does, but as time and professional help have taught her that's okay, and she can nod and ask Leslie about how she handled feeding and the sensitivity. She should have known that Leslie was the exact kind of mother that could handle three kids, and that she could feed them naturally, and Leslie could be all of that without help. But, April's strong and brave in her own way because she's fighting this. She can look at Jack and smile, and feel that real love in her, and though it might have taken time, she's there.

"It makes you really sensitive, I know, but it just... I think there's something in it about the hormones, but then you look at them," she sighs, "or him, like you, and you think 'holy crap, I've brought this into the world and he's... I'm his mother.' It feels right, y'know?"

"Yeah, actually," April smiles and chuckles. "I actually do know what you mean now."

"You're a great mother April," Leslie reassures her, touching her arm. "Now, did you want a brownie or were you just going to stare at the table all day?"

April gives her that old, shy smile that she thought she'd given up years ago, but it's okay to have right now. She reaches down and takes two of the warm desserts, quickly devouring one and protesting when Leslie tries to take the other one.

This is her role model. In work, in life, and in other ways. Maybe Leslie wasn't the exact person she wanted to be - after all, she's married to Ben and ugh, gross - but she made April want to be better at times like these. Even though she's strong enough, now, and can only get better in taking care of her family, April likes knowing that she has someone she can rely on that isn't Andy. Other people are necessary, and Leslie helps her find that time in her day to talk about Jack in a way that makes her realize she's hopelessly lost in love for her son.

It's a sunny, dry heat in Washington for once. The humidity calms down for one afternoon, and sometimes when the wind blows it actually feels comfortable. The sun beats down on the pavement, but no one's walking in their bare feet anyways, and on top of that there's always a cool drink or one of those breezes to look forward to. People walk down the streets lined with stores and cafes, and April eyes them all from the table at one of those little diners with outdoor seating. Normally, she'd prefer the cool air inside but the seats are open at eleven o'clock and she'd rather see the sun and feel the wind on her skin than bland air full of people's voices and their old breaths.

Through the mist of laughter and people talking, the busy traffic loud, she turns and looks in the stroller. Jack sleeps through all of it, used to Andy's loud voice and the volume of a city, and she smiles. She takes his hand and he naturally wraps around her finger while April busies herself with finishing her sandwich. The door to the diner opens and Andy comes out in a hurry with one very large milkshake in his hand and two straws in the other.

She looks down again at Jack and he's awake, but only blearily blinking and not screaming. A vast, unknown depth of heat passes through her when he looks around, confused and with her finger still firmly in his hand, and sees her.

He laughs out loud, a squealing sort of thing, and she smiles at her son.

a/n: Postpartum depression is a very serious thing. Just like depression or any other mental illness, it does not mean you are broken. Don't take my word for it or my fanfiction as something to take note of if you come across someone who has suffered/dealt with it.

Sometimes, you don't fix it. Sometimes it's impossible to. Sometimes that means you have a child you don't understand or truthfully love, no matter what you say. I didn't want this fic to end like that, because I think April does have a wide and caring enough support group to help her and she definitely has the means (though that isn't always enough) to solve the problem through treatment.