Category: Post Partum Depression

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Why is it that my sister hates me so much?  For over 50 years, she has resented the fact that I even exist.  Talk about a champion grudge-holder.  I’m told my FOO considers me to be pretty good at it (projection much?) but I’m no match for this woman.

For starters, she doesn’t really know me at all — she and I only lived together for about a year, my first year.  When she left for college in Chicago, she practically never came home again that I can remember, except for a few holidays.  So it’s not likely that we had a difficult history, or clash of personalities.  If I somehow did something to annoy her, well, I would have been less than 5 years old at the time.

Later, it became clear to me that her dislike of me was well-established by the time I was college age.  She and I rarely conversed, almost never wrote letters (I can think of exactly one of mine that she answered) and it was my husband who noted that she has to this day never once called me on the phone.

If she blames me for the whole stressful, traumatic year after I was born, I had zero to do with that, either.  Bad things happened, but it’s not like I had any agency in them.  Blame the adults!  Blame our parents!  Blame Mom for not having the hysterectomy, blame Dad for wanting sex, blame them both for not using birth control, blame Mom for failing to “accept children lovingly from God”, blame whoever for not hiring someone to take care of the younger kids — but for the love of Christ, don’t blame an innocent, helpless baby.

Blaming a baby for being born, and wrecking a family because of that, is truly vile, not to mention unhinged.  I can understand our mentally ill mother doing that, because she couldn’t do any better — but my genius sister can and ought to do better than that.

Did I ruin “her” place as the only girl?

Or did I become Daddy’s favorite, a spot she secretly coveted?

Was she mad that I got the red hair?

All of those ideas just seem so freaking petty — probably because they ARE petty.

I can think of only two things that are “big enough”, that she might “reasonably” hold against me (“reasonable” in this case meaning by the standards of this dysfunctional FOO):

1) Holding me responsible for “what I did to Mom” by being born — in other words, because my birth pushed Mom over the cliff into full-blown post-partum depression — which becomes “I caused Mom’s mental illness”, and by extension the Divorce.

This might also include guilt at her not being able to “save” Mom — she was no longer able to cover up for Mom’s dysfunction, because not only did it get a lot worse after my birth, but now Dad was also home all the time, and then she left for college.

If I hadn’t been born, Mom wouldn’t have lost her marbles, Dad wouldn’t have been told things by Mom’s psychologist (“she hates your guts”), and my sister could have headed off to college with a clear conscience.

(I was told that Mom stood at the door and watched her leave, possibly crying, but as I recall it was described as Mom was feeling sorry for herself and the loss of her indentured servant, rather than that she was going to miss her older daughter.)

I feel like this is a fairly long chain of “logic” though, and it’s just not quite simple enough to drive a lifetime of irrational hatred.  Which is why I lean towards something a little more specific:

2) Holding me responsible for her suicide attempt, and the blot on her otherwise pristine, holier-than-thou-by-a-long-shot soul.  Suicide is a mortal sin, and I can easily imagine that my sister would be seriously pissed (not to mention terrified) about having one of those on her record.

Blame-shifting would be instant psychological relief.  I made her do it, simple as that, not her fault at all.

Next, cue a lifetime of cultivating an “I’m a better Catholic than you’ll ever be” reputation beyond reproach, as insurance — a way to tell yourself that YOU couldn’t really have done that awful, sinful thing… unless, of course, some other EVEN MORE AWFUL PERSON (baby!!) MADE YOU DO IT.

If this were to be true, it’s one of the saddest things ever.  Not only did she not get any help for this that I ever heard of — it would have probably been viewed with Old-Testament judginess, rather than New-Testament love & concern.  Did no one stop to think for a minute that hey, if someone actually tried suicide — maybe things are REALLY REALLY BAD??  Maybe the adults involved are making terrible decisions under stress?

But probably the stigma of mental health issues — first Mom’s and then my sister’s — kept everything under wraps and within the family as much as possible.

It’s admittedly a lot of conjecture — but whatever it really was that my sister unfairly blames on me, effectively wrecked my family for me.  I was always wrong, always the scapegoat, never in the club.  My other siblings, and presumably her children, followed her lead.

I wish I could not care, as she does.  But there’s some people I still miss.

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File Under “Obvious”

“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.

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Postpartum Crazy

It can happen even to someone with their shit together and a loving, supportive husband. Full NPR article here.

Lisa wanted to be the perfect mom. She was ready to be the perfect mom. She and her husband lived in San Francisco, and Lisa had worked as a successful entrepreneur and as a marketing executive for a Silicon Valley tech company. When it came to starting her family, she was organized and ready to go. And that first week after her baby was born, everything was going according to plan. The world was nothing but love.

…”I needed to feed her — that was the most important thing. And my well-being didn’t matter.” She was barely sleeping. Even when she could get a release from what felt like breastfeeding purgatory, she couldn’t relax. As she got more and more exhausted, she started to get confused.

… Lisa says, “It felt like the walls were talking to me.”

… she noticed police helicopters circling over their apartment. “There were snipers on the roof,” she remembers thinking, “and there were spy cams in our bedroom and everyone was watching me. And my cellphone was giving me weird messages.”

Lisa told her husband… she was going to jump off the Golden Gate Bridge. And that’s when her husband told her he was going to drive her to the police station himself.

Her husband, David Abramson, remembers it as one of the worst days of his life. “I’m bringing my wife to the hospital and then checking her into an inpatient unit,” says David, explaining what really happened that day. “It was really, really challenging.”

“That was probably the most heart-wrenching thing, was having to leave her that night with the hospital staff,” he says. “You could see in her eyes and her body language that she was panicked.”

Lisa doesn’t remember any doctors or nurses telling her why she was there or what was going on. But she does remember, about a week into her hospitalization, her husband bringing a printout from online about postpartum psychosis.

“I really was just like, ‘No. I’ve heard of postpartum depression,” she says. “No! I have never heard that there’s postpartum crazy.”

But postpartum psychosis is real. Studies suggest it affects about one or two women out of every thousand that give birth; some doctors now think even more women than that are affected, but go undiagnosed. Without proper treatment, some of those women end up dying — by suicide.

Dhami is an expert on postpartum mental illness, and often treats cases of postpartum psychosis that OB-GYNs mishandled. Based on her clinical experience and observations, she says, a lot of doctors don’t know the early signs of postpartum psychosis; they don’t know that the symptoms wax and wane.

“A lot of times the patient will present very clearly, then at other times, will present with acute confusion and disorganization,” Dhami says.

It’s what happened to Lisa Abramson — feeling like she was of sound mind one moment, and then believing the walls were talking to her in the next.

“This is a symptom that clinicians who are not trained in this field can easily miss,” Dhami says, “Because when they see the patient in their office with the family, they can think that the patient is normal and is probably suffering from sleep deprivation — and discharge them home.”

After Alice gave birth to her son… everything started to spiral.

“There was a definite snap,” she says. “I started yelling about things that didn’t make sense. They made sense to me.”

To her family, it was just an incoherent rage. They called the police and they took Alice to the nearest hospital that had an available bed…

During her three-week stay, she saw her son once, for 20 minutes.

It’s hard for her to admit what it was like coming back to him, after she was discharged.

“It felt like a burden, “Alice says. “It felt like, ‘How am I ever going to do this?’ I held him, I bathed him, and I did all the things — but the connection was not there. I lost time with my son and I’m never going to get it back.”

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Smiles

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2014/oct/24/terrible-effects-postnatal-depression-mental-illness

“…I am a lifelong sufferer from depressive illness. I have spent many years trying to work out why, and I have come up with many possible explanations. To date the most convincing one I can find is that my mother unwittingly “gave” it to me… through the tragedy of her own postnatal depression.

“My mother’s depression was a closely held secret. In fact, none of my family could remember Jean, my mother, having it. Perhaps there just wasn’t a name for it then. But when she died, more than 30 years after my birth – she killed herself after a depressive episode – and I checked, many years later, on her medical records, there it was in black and white.

“The note comes in July 1956, six months after my birth. It reads: “It would appear that her present relapse has been going on since the birth of her first child.” She was prescribed potassium bromide – an anticonvulsive and sedative, a precursor of modern antidepressants. Later, until 1959, there were prescriptions of phenobarbitone and Largactil. Phenobarbitone is another tranquilliser, Largactil is a “phenothiazine for treating schizophrenia and other mental illnesses, particularly paranoid symptoms”.

“So for the first three years of my life – at least – my mother would have been suffering some form of psychosis. What I was faced with for the first few years of my life was a mother whose emotional spectrum, presumably, was limited, and registered at the dark end.

“I suspect I would not have often looked up to see a delighted, smiling face.”

“I cannot say with certainty how causally tied [my own depressive episodes] are to my experience as a newborn of my mother’s depression. But more than one developmental psychologist has explained to me how profoundly sensitive babies are to their mother’s facial expressions. As I understand it, the unresponsiveness of a depressive mother who cannot mirror her baby can lead to the development of a depressive child. The report rightly recognises this, noting the effect “over decades on their children’s prospects, both in terms of development in the womb and during the crucial early years”.

I can still vividly remember the second visit to my therapist, to whom I had just started telling the whole tangled story, and who had given me the assignment of trying to define any “beliefs” in my FOO. I had come up with “Mom is never wrong” and “Susan is never to blame.”

I voiced those two phrases and then I looked at her and asked, “Are those the same thing?” And she instantly got the biggest, widest smile on her face, a genuine, happy smile of approval.

And I suddenly REALLY wanted to see that again.

Immediately, viscerally, desperately, I wanted – NEEDED – to make her smile at me like that again.

The feeling was so strong, and unexpected, that I immediately did my best to hide it, and I didn’t mention it to her, ever.

In hindsight, it is more accurate to say that, while at the time my THOUGHT was to “make” her smile at me — what I really wanted was simply “for her to smile at me like that again” — without the part about me having to make her do it.

Because of course a baby doesn’t usually have to “do” anything to make a mother smile at her. Sometimes the mother just smiles, I expect.  But in my case, I think it shows that I didn’t get that kind of smile — the smile that says, I love you, for no reason other than that you are here — and deep in my mind, it became established that I had to do something to make it happen. I wasn’t going to get it for just being me.  Not from her, anyway.

And the pattern continues into the years that follow. Maybe my siblings picked up on her dysfunction, through things as subtle as a smile that didn’t happen, and mirrored HER. Maybe they were trying to gain her acceptance and approval as well, I don’t know. Maybe this is why I have never been able to make my sister laugh.

I do know that I wasn’t ever “really” a part of the family in some eyes, and for years I tried so hard to “make” them smile at me and accept me — when acceptance should have been automatic — but because of my mother’s illness, it wasn’t.

But the one place that I did get those kind of smiles was from my dad. Not quite the same as from a mother, I am sure, but I got something, enough to keep me from being a complete lifelong depressive mess.

In fact, I may have been saved by the factor written about in this article, which was what led me to the one that inspired this post. My guess is that with my birth and my sister’s, my father wasn’t depressed. I heard stories from my mother about how he insisted on giving my sister her first bath. And while at the time of my birth, he may have been under stress from the move and the new job, and confused or even angry about how my mother ran a household, and how she reacted to my birth – I’m going to say he probably wasn’t depressed.

“The report, like many modern social care reports, focuses on the economic cost of such illnesses, which strikes me as odd. It is the human cost that is primary – the agony of mental illness, which is very often avoidable with treatment, being passed from mother to child.

“… For me and thousands of others, the long-term costs are, 50 years later, being pinned to a bed by your own mind unable to think anything but the blackest thoughts… I haven’t suffered postnatal depression – but I have suffered from it.

 

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More on PPD

I wonder if any of this sounds familiar to my siblings?  I know one young brother says that he remembers Mom crying all the time.

I knew I was struggling with postpartum depression when my daughter was just six weeks old. I cried every day, and tossed and turned every night. I was nervous and anxious. Suicidal. But instead of talking to my husband or reaching out for help, I suffered in silence. I slapped on a smile and pretended everything was OK. I lied even though I knew I should have been open and honest about my struggles. I knew I should’ve told someone — anyone —how miserable I was. How unhappy I was. That I wanted to die. But the truth was I couldn’t tell anyone about my postpartum depression (PPD) because I was scared. Scared others would see me as flawed and unstable; worried people would see me as an unfit parent. I couldn’t tell anyone about my PPD because I was terrified that if people saw who I’d become, they’d take my daughter away from me.

It all started with the crying. A few tears here. A heaving, uncontrollable sob over there. I would cry if I spilled a glass of water or if my coffee got cold. I would cry because my husband was going to work; because I was tired; because I was hungry; because the house was a mess. When the baby would cry, I would sob beside her even louder and for longer. Everything triggered a sobbing response from me, and no matter what I did, I couldn’t stop crying. I’d soothe the baby, and the tears would begin again anew. Nothing helped, and everything else only seemed to make it worse.

Before long, the tears came without rhyme or reason, and soon, they streamed down my face unnoticed. I could comfortably carry on a conversation while crying. Then, however, the sadness shifted. I became angry and anxious. I’d tense up the moment I heard my daughter’s cries. I’d stiffen at the thought of touching or even holding her. I became bitter and resentful, and the rage I felt consuming me was absolutely blinding.

When I found myself recoiling from my daughter, I knew something was wrong.

When I told myself that I hated my daughter, I knew things needed to change.

When I wanted to leave and abandon her, I knew I was sick.

But then, one cold November day, I couldn’t keep it together any longer. I couldn’t hide it any longer. I couldn’t keep it a secret. My daughter was having a fitful afternoon, and she was teething, screaming, crying, and refusing sleep. I did everything I could, but I felt my will collapsing. Then I had a vision; a disturbing, terrifying vision. I saw myself holding my daughter, feeding her, rocking her, and coddling her, and then the next, I was squeezing her. Hard. The way a mother should not hold her child.