How to tell this has outgrown reading

No one is going to tell you when it has become too much. These are the markers a midwife or a doctor would use, and not one of them is about your faith.

Duration. More than two weeks, most days, and it is not lifting.

Function. Things have stopped. You are not answering the phone, not leaving the house, not eating properly, not managing what you used to manage.

Intensity of guilt. Guilt that is out of all proportion, or a settled belief that the baby would be better off with someone else.

Sleep that the baby does not explain. Lying awake in the window when you could be asleep.

Anything from the same day list in lesson one, which goes today rather than being weighed up here.

None of these says anything about your faith. They are the markers any clinician would use, and meeting them means this has grown bigger than reading.