“Depression during pregnancy and in the year after childbirth is surprisingly common. It’s estimated that 1 in 7 pregnant women will suffer depression while pregnant or following childbirth.
“The consequences of maternal depression can be severe, according to Davidson, who describes a “cascading set of problems” including premature birth, low birth weight and failure to thrive. After childbirth, new mothers who are depressed can be neglectful and inattentive to their newborn, putting the infants at risk for an even greater number of problems.”
As a society, we really, REALLY don’t want to talk about the idea that motherhood isn’t all sunshine and rainbows. The idea that a mother could NOT love her child is flat-out disturbing to a LOT of people.
I know, because as a kid, in order to describe the unusual distance in the relationship between my mother and myself, I used to say that I “didn’t have a mother so much as kind of an aunt.”
Looking back, I can see where this put a lot of people off. It made adults uncomfortable. They didn’t like the sound of it, they didn’t deal well with it — UNTIL I gave them some kind of explanation, or excuse.
The excuse part went like this: “My parents are divorced, and I live with my dad, so my mom isn’t at home all the time.”
This made some kind of sense, so people took it at face value, because the alternative — to ask why on earth would 4 blocks mean that I couldn’t have a close relationship with my own mother — well, that’s one rabbit hole that no adult ever went down, to my recollection. There weren’t that many divorced people around at that time and place — I was definitely the only kid with divorced parents all through elementary school — so no one had much of an idea what a “normal” divorce looked like.
Later on, a few of my friends probed a little deeper, and to them I would say, “She’s not there to fight about things like what I’m wearing or how much makeup I have on or whatever.” And this made sense to them, at the stage where they were asking the question. (In fact, it turned into a strategy — when we were going out in high school, we’d get ready at my house so my friends could avoid such confrontations.)
But despite such easy explanations, the idea that a MOTHER’S LOVE could be changed by a short physical distance still doesn’t actually make sense. And she was neglectful of me prior to The Divorce, anyway.
There was something truly wrong there: whether it was my mother’s mental illness, the electroshock therapy, the two month-long absences during my first year – all things beyond anyone’s control – or her maladjusted way of dealing with adversity, which was to cast blame around and scapegoat, along with the clear indications that she just was not interested in being a mother.
I think if the root cause were confined to that first year of my life, if she had wanted to have a loving relationship with me and had worked at it, that we would have been able to have a better relationship. But she didn’t put in much effort. (And it’s clearly the adult’s responsibility here to do so, not the child’s.)
We never were close, especially physically: we rarely hugged, we never sat side by side on the sofa, “Love you” and a kiss was confined to goodbyes, and as I lived further away and saw her less often, occasionally hellos. No wonder she saw my childhood physical contact with my father as abnormal and perverted, as I sat on his lap, or he rubbed my back.
In later years, it didn’t take much to break whatever bond we had. In my freshman year of college, while on the phone, I must have said something that she didn’t like, and she claimed to take offense “at my tone” and wanted me to apologize. I refused to do so, and we didn’t speak for about a year and a half.
HOLY SHIT. Just think for a minute about just how abnormal that is. Not speaking to your youngest daughter (who is 18 or 19) for a YEAR AND A HALF because you didn’t “like her tone”!
But it got worse. Shortly after college, there was the time she stayed with me in Texas while Joe & Susan were getting married, and my then-boyfriend-now-husband noted that every time I went somewhere with my mom, I came back crying, because of something nasty she had said to me.
The worst of those was when my own mother told me to my face, “I like Susan better than you, because she’s nicer to me.”
I will bet money that any of my siblings who read this will say to themselves, “Well, that’s perfectly understandable.”
No, it’s not. It’s abnormal. It’s considerably fucked up. Mothers who love their children do not say shit like this.
I’ve long wondered whether our mother was unhealthy and maladjusted and mentally ill with all her kids, or just with me. Of course, no one will discuss it, so there’s no hope of finding out for sure.
But I feel like the fact that they have found ways to excuse EVERYTHING awful she ever did, means that they were in training to do so for a very long time. She may not have been depressed or psychotic in the early years of her parenting, but I will bet money she was narcissistic. With Dad often absent during the week, she would not even have had to be all that subtle about it. And I’m so grateful I was saved from growing up enmeshed with that.