CW/TW: Postpartum Depression

My beautiful girl is five months and four days old today — exactly a day younger than the WHO's official declaration of Covid-19 as a pandemic — and I'm surprised and impressed I can keep track because time seems to be elusive, days slipping away before I realized they had even begun, each blending unapologetically into the next like I'm living in my own Groundhog Day, and as the pandemic rages on, as it has been doing for months (and sending me into frequent panicked and paranoid episodes) with little sign of ending anytime soon, I am now another couple weeks into feeling a complete lack of motivation to do any self-care when the rest of my days are filled with nursing and rocking this sweet, easygoing baby who will never know the Before Times, which is not necessarily a bad thing  but still makes me sad and nostalgic on her behalf, as well as wrangling her rambunctious four-year-old brother who knew the Before Times well enough to remember going to his grandparents' house two or three times a week, going to classes and activities and eating donut treats on the way home, and who now sometimes misses his "friend" who is really his cousin, which makes my empathy towards him that much stronger because I, too, am dearly missing my friends, so I worry about his mental health just as much as my own, which isn't right because I can't bring myself to shower on a daily — or even semi-regular — basis, and even when I do, the steamy daggers pound on my shoulders, drowning me in the terrible, disturbing thoughts and visions hammering my brain, telling me my baby is in grave danger unless I  get out NOW or that her brother is being smothered or choked right outside the bathroom door (by whom, I'm unsure, but they will do it slowly and grotesquely to punish me) because I am so selfish for wanting to wash away the residue of my mistakes.