Maternally Challenged

The Nuclear Option

For about four months now I have been slogging through a prolonged period of depression. It's actually not the worst I've ever had, in the sense that I have not been actively trying to destroy myself and I've been capable of doing routine work, but it's been bad. The phone rings, and I don't answer. In the mornings I count the hours until I get to go to bed again. I am detached and flat with my kids. My libido is--pffft! Worst of all, I cannot think of a reason why I should continue to be here, what possible interest there could be for me on this planet for another five years, let alone another 25. I have started and put down a dozen books; my concentration doesn't last past chapter two. And if reading is impossible, writing is even more so, which is why there haven't been many blog entries lately. My career as a writer seems over; every day, I feel a little bit deader.

A lot of things have led to this, none of them anybody's fault; it's just the way life is sometimes. My mother died just over a year ago, and I miss her acutely. I published a book I had poured the last three or four years of my life into, and--unlike my first book--the interest from the mainstream media was nonexistent. (Which is not to say that I regard it as a failure or not worth doing; whoever is reading this has probably run across my book; the fact that the mainstream media didn't pick up on it has nothing to do with the importance of the topic; and I know it's helped some people.) But still: the book was written against long odds, and I guess I had hopes that it would spark more of a public conversation than it did about the topic of depression and motherhood, so there's disappointment, to say the least. This year has also been a year of health issues, probably not coincidentally: surgery on my knee, an unusual number of colds and stomach bugs and fevers, arthritis in my neck and lower back. This was the year we established a health club membership and I was going to finally lose those 20 pounds (again). Didn't happen.

But mainly, it's just the fact that it's winter--February, to be exact--and this has always been my worst month. It comes every year without fail. This year it came early. And every day for the past three or four months, I have felt a little bit deader, a little bit less like ever coming back to life. I upped my meds, and that didn't help. I started in on the benzodiazepines again, even though they are addictive, for the same reason that you reach for morphine when you're having surgery: it blocks the pain of constant anxiety...even though there will be hell to pay later on.

Depression takes a toll, and not just on you. Repeated episodes of depression have been associated with decreased volume in the hippocampus, the area of the brain where emotion and memory are integrated. For people who think antidepressants are a crutch, here's some news: a lifetime of untreated depression can literally leave you brain damaged. And that's saying nothing of the damage to your family: the husband who gets a hologram for a wife, the children who beg, " Mommy, can you spend some time with me?" only to hear, "No, I can't, I'm sick." They get fooled, because the person they know as mommy is still making dinner and picking them up at school--she's not on life support in a hospital anywhere--but she's not really mommy. She's the person who is inhabiting mommy's body, and, increasingly, that person is a ghost. (Which is why I chose the title I did for my book,The Ghost in the House.)

All of which comes as background for my reason to take a step which may sound extreme: electroconvulsive therapy, or ECT. Yeah, I've seen One Flies Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and I know that what people think when they think of ECT is of a drooling Jack Nicholson at the hands of a punitive medical establishment, a shell of his former self. ECT began a bit that way, but even in the 1960s it was nowhere near as barbaric as Ken Kesey described. Today it's often done on an outpatient basis, and among its more famous consumers is Kitty Dukakis, wife of former Democratic Presidential candidate Michael Dukakis, who has written her own book (with co-author Larry Tye) entitled Shock: The Healing Power of Electroconvulsive Therapy. Mrs. Dukakis' experience is extremely atypical, in some ways: she gets "maintenance" ECT about once a year, since her experience with depression follows an extremely predictable pattern (which, come to think of it, mine does too). I also have two friends who have gone through ECT, one of them twice and one of those times back in the bad old days before they sedated patients or gave them muscle relaxants to mitigate the physical effects of the artificially induced seizure, and before techniques were developed the minimize the (usually temporary) memory loss associated with ECT. Even so, both of these people said it helped them.

How does it work? Doctors don't know. But then, they don't know much about how antidepressants work, either, just that they usually do. The brain is still very much a mystery to science, even though we know more about it than we ever used to, and it may well be, as a scientist at Eli Lilly once told me, "If the brain were simple enough for us to understand, we would be too simple to understand it." About all we know is that a low-voltage electrical current, when passed through a portion of the temporal lobe, will induce a temporary seizure, and that this in turn changes the levels of neurotransmitters in the brain (which is what antidepressants do, by a different mechanism). Still, it remains extremely controversial. My own psychiatrist was not thrilled with my idea; he calls the ECT doctors "shock jocks." But one of the things you learn when you have a chronic illness is that, in the end, it's not your doctor who will be living with the results of what you do or what you don't do. It's you....and your family. In the end, my psychiatrist wrote the referral, and said he could understand my decision even if he didn't agree with it.

I had my first treatment yesterday. It was like getting hit by a truck (and I can say that with some authority, having survived being hit by a car as a teenager while getting off a school bus). Today, I have some muscle aches. It also gave me the mother of all migraines, and for an hour or so I was extremely disoriented. But then things slipped back into place, and now I can even remember the anesthesiologist saying, "You're going to sleep now" as he pressed the syringe into my IV. I also know that last night I looked at the sunset with real appreciation, and that after I went to bed I cried for a long, long time. They were healing tears. I felt much better after I was through.

Am I doing the right thing? God only knows; I don't. All I know is I have two little girls that I love, and a husband I love, and things I want to do. And when I die, whenever that day comes, I don't want anybody to be able to say it was for lack of wanting to live.

The Slog

Trying to write while one is depressed is like trying to write in a foreign language. It's like typing with mittens (and my typing skills are shot to hell, too). In two days of working on a book review, I have managed to come up with 500 not-that-great words. A whole 500.

Coal mining would be easier.

February Looms

Dunno why, but this is the worst time of year for me. Short days, short temper, short on inspiration. And then there's the January realization that, once again, we have gone absolutely fucking insane buying gifts for the kids. We know this because half of them are still in the closet, unopened. But the Hello Kitty tent I bought seven years ago, which is held together at this point with duct tape, is still getting hauled out every week.

Next year, I swear I'm going to give my kids a package of brown paper bags and a box of crayons. Maybe I'll throw in an orange.

The ghost of Christmases past haunts me every time I open a closet around here, even though lots of my consumer excesses have gone to the Salvation Army--like the Interactive Winnie-the-Pooh we bought Rebecca for her third Christmas, which you programmed by inserting a computer chip in its butt, after typing in your child's name, the names of her friends, her favorite stories and songs, etc. I spent $100 on this thing and I was so excited about it I couldn't wait for Christmas morning. David goes up and gets Rebecca and brings her downstairs while I set up the Pooh to greet her. Rebecca was still a little groggy when this mechanical bear suddenly whirs into life and a droopy little voice says, "Hullo, Rebecca." Her response:

"EEEEEEEEEEEEEEKKKKKKKKKKKKK!!!!!!"

The Pooh never got played with. Eventually Rebecca could bring herself to touch it--she seemed to regard it as a kind of Special Education student among her regular teddy bears--but then she dropped it down a flight of stairs and the Pooh developed a clacking kind of speech impediment in his jaws and I finally ditched the thing. When I think of the $100 I spent on it I want to cry, but that's probably nothing compared to the thousands of dollars Rebecca will spend someday on a shrink, telling him/her about the time her parents tried to scare her witless.

So you'd think I'd have learned, but no: a couple of years ago we bought Suzanne a mechanical bear that asked for hugs and wanted to be fed, and had its own special bottle that it slurped from. Suzanne played with it for a day and that was that. But it was only $30.

This year Suzanne had her heart set on an interactive ballet game, which came with a battery-operated mat that told you where to put your feet and a plastic "barre" on which our budding dancer could practice. "Bo-ring" was the pronouncement. And the thing is, I knew that. I knew it before I ordered it. But, in thrall to my child and the idea that no wish go unfulfilled, I bought that piece 'o crap anyway.

And now it's Suzanne's birthday coming up. More presents. She doesn't play with half the stuff she has already. This is madness. Kid-driven, consumer madness.

 

And They Call These HAPPY Pills

Forgot to take my meds last night. As anyone who lives with/on depression medication can tell you, this is not a good thing. I took my pills the minute I discovered my error, but missing a dose does something to you that takes about a day to sort out. It's nearly noon and I am just now feeling vaguely human. And my brain feels like it is floating in my skull, not connected to anything, sort of like whatever is inside one of those Crazy Eight balls. I turn my head and it takes a second or two for my eyeballs to catch up with my skull, and then for my brain to catch up with my eyeballs. Fellow sufferers will recognize what I have just described as The Zaps. Those who have no idea what I'm talking about: thank your lucky stars.

The Slog

Another "woe is me" post, you say. Let joy reign unconfined.

But no: this is a public thank-you to my husband. Someone asked why I don't write more about him--well, it's because he doesn't want me to. But there are times when I have to violate that rule, at least a little, just to say that he gets brownie points in heaven for putting up with me, and I am not indulging in a sly little side run toward self-pity when I say that. Living with a person who occasionally suffers from depression can be hell. I read somewhere once that the secret to happiness in marriage is to take a good look at yourself in the mirror every morning and say, "Well, you're no bargain, either." That's pretty much my motto. Whatever faults my husband has, I can see him and raise him two. We've been married long enough now for me to know that marriage is only sometimes a lovely autumn walk in the park; sometimes it's a muddy hike up a mountain in the rain. I look at pictures of happy couples in the wedding section of the paper and think: long hard slog ahead, folks. No getting around it. Marriage is just like that, and the people who don't know that are all too often the ones who create the divorce statistics. The day-to-day creeps up on you, and the constant demands of the kids, and the need to pay the bills, the late-night exhaustion that makes sleep more attractive than sex. The secret is laughing as often as possible, because there is always something funny going on if you look for it, and just plain hanging in there, because better days are ahead.

Not only does my husband hang in there, he also unloads the dishwasher and folds laundry and cleans up cat vomit, and he does it without complaining. (Well, mostly. He's only human.) And have I mentioned he makes telescopes for outer space? Is that cool or what?

So: thanks to a superior human being who rarely gets the credit he deserves. And sorry about breaking that rule.

Hello Again

I should have seen it coming. In fact, I did.

It's fall--a time of year in which I either feel extremely happy or extremely despondent, rarely anything in between. We're coming up on the one-year anniversary of my mother's death. The days are shortening. I have recently had knee surgery, and it was harder than I thought it would be, and the recovery is taking what seems to me to be a long time. So here we are: I am depressed.

Nothing dramatic happens; I just gradually go away. Last night I had the image of myself as a kind of hologram, getting grayer and more colorless, and then fading out of the picture. My kids sense it: they are super clingy and hug me at every opportunity. Suzanne has in the past few days taken to coming up to me at odd moments and saying, "I loooooooovvvee you," which is of course true, and my love for her is so intense it hurts, but then a five-year-old shouldn't feel the need to say that to mommy so often. Rebecca just lays her head on my shoulder. "Snuggle," she commands, and I do. She is nearly 10; the snuggling years are passing fast. "How are you feeling?" my husband asks, meangingfully, and I say, "Not great," and he says, "Your mom?" and I say, "Yes," and then I say, "I'm going to bed." I leave him watching football. I want to be with them, I do; I am lonely in here. But the bell jar, as Sylvia Plath called it, descends, and it is soundproof.

All I can do is keep getting up. I am going to the gym right now, even though I'd give anything to just crawl back into bed. I plod along. One foot. In front. Of the other. And meanwhile time passes, life passes, and joy passes, and I am not present.

Is Maternal Depression a New Thing?

People ask me this question a lot, and the answer is, I don't know for sure. I'm not a scholar or a historian; I haven't done nearly enough research to offer a definitive answer. One thing I do know is that women--mothers in particular--have throughout recorded history been extraordinarily limited in having any time to themselves; every word they managed to commit to paper about their interior lives is gold, because it is all, relatively speaking, so very rare. (One of the reason for the explosion of momblogs in recent years, I think, is that, at last, we get to talk! To each other! Across time and space! Do you know how revolutionary that is??) Another fact is that every era and every culture has its own way of classifying and naming illness--so, no, women in the 18th century didn't get "depressed." They called it something else. The question is: what?

When I started researching my book, The Ghost in the House: Motherhood, Raising Children and Struggling with Depression, I did a lot of hanging out at the Library of Congress, where they have an amazing collection of first-person writing by American women in their American Women's History collection. There are diaries, letters, pamphlets--all written by American women, some of them famous but most of them not famous, detailing the fascinating mundane aspects of their domestic lives. They had no idea they were writing for history, but they were--and some of the things I found sounded to me an awful lot like despair, hopelessness, an oppressive sense of guilt and an aching sense of futility...something we 21st century people just might call depression. Not surprisingly, much of this emotion was couched in religious terms.

From The Diary of Martha Laurens Ramsay, a Charleston, S.C. woman who lived from 1759 to 1811, comes this entry, when she would have been 32 years old.

August 6, 1791:
These three past days have been black days. Lord, deliver me from sin, especially from those which so easily beset and so often oppress me. My soul longs for deliverance and rest.

And, from the 16th of the same month:
Terror and dismay take hold upon me. O, if men knew me as I am known to my God, I should be trampled under foot; the church would disown me; the greatest sinners would abominate me; my husband, that loves and thinks well of me, would wonder at me, and mourn, and I should be hated of all men.

Martha Ramsey was, from all I could tell, a loving wife and mother with no particular reason, in the culture in which she lived, to feel like such a sinner. Perhaps there was some event which she never wrote about which brought about her torment--a secret abortion? an illicit affair? a spiritual crisis? We can speculate. But one of the possibilities (and I speak as a child of the Bible Belt, who grew up convinced that hell was her destiny) is the beast we now call depression.

A Handy Dandy Reference Guide

 This is blatant self-promotion, but I confess to being slightly agog at the number of mentions that The Book (The Ghost in the House: Motherhood, Raising Children and Struggling with Depression) is creating in the blogosphere. Since I don't have time to do anything else today, here's a list of who's saying what:

http://spyderkl.net/?p=175
http://jbjones.blogspot.com/2006/08/i-wouldbut-i-cant.html
http://www.amalah.com/amalah/2006/08/blog_interrupte.html
http://www.blogsheroes.com/feed/parentinganddepression
http://thismodernworld.com/3069
http://fortherecord.wordpress.com/2006/08/15/dear-dooce/
http://inneedofgrace.blogsome.com/2006/08/16/dooce-reviews-book-about-maternal-depression/
http://www.hipmama.com/node/24153
http://wakingupastonished.blogspot.com/2006/08/so.html
http://orangeconezone.wordpress.com/2006/08/15/more-on-that/

http://jujubeejenny.typepad.com/my_weblog/2006/08/skip_right_on_o.html
http://limberlime.com/2006/08/13/maternal-depression-irritability-and-guilt/
http://welborn.blogspot.com/2006/08/ghost-in-this-house.html

And, just so nobody thinks I'm sitting here smoking Gauloises in my Chanel suit while fielding offers from film agents, here's how I have spent my day:

5 loads of laundry
dealing with three force-five swivets/ screaming hissy fits from the 9 year old
one screaming hissy fit of my own
trying, unsuccessfully, to get the 5 year old to nap
breaking up about 8 full-bore screaming sibling fights
packing for a trip to Wisconsin loooong before the crack of dawn tomorrow

This, ladies, is the reason Jane Austen never married.

Oh, yeah, and last item:
eating prunes to cure my constipation (Dooce, are you listening? Prunes, honey. Prunes are the cure.)

The Impostor Syndrome

We all know what this is--the feeling that, deep down, you don't deserve any good fortune, that sooner or later people are going to see past this lovely veneer of accomplishment you've managed to construct to find the Truly Inadequate Person within. Groucho Marx even made a famous joke about it: "I'd never belong to a club which would have me as a member." I don't know if Groucho suffered from depression; I don't know if depression is a prerequiste for this feeling. All I know is that I've had a bad case of The Impostor Syndrome lately.

The occasion for this is the publication of my new book, The Ghost in the House: Motherhood, Raising Children and Struggling with Depression, which debuted Aug. 8 and which has been getting raves in the mom-blog world ever since. All of which has induced in me an uneasy sense that the other shoe is about to drop--the somebody out there will sneeringly point out that my research is worthless, or that I'm a whiner/slacker mom, or that the book just plain sucks. And perhaps, soon, somebody will.

Or I could, as my friend Andi Buchanan (of Literary Mama fame) suggests, consider the possibility that maybe, just maybe, I've written a good book. And while I was digesting this idea, I got an e-mail from from oldest friend in the world, an e-mail containing some serious Buddhist-inspired wisdom. Meghan Caughey and I go back to Mrs. Hendry's Kindergarten on Highway 29 in College Park, Georgia. Today she is an accomplished artist, and a person who has walked through the hellhole of schizophrenia--a place darker and scarier by far than anything depression has to offer--and emerged on the other side. She lives in Oregon, we haven't seen each other in decades, but the spiritual connection between us is profound. Meghan, I hope you don't mind the quote, but it was so great I had to share:

"You are a vehicle, a vessel, the messenger. I know the compliments go against the self-critic in your head, so I can see why it is maybe hard to take it all in. But you wrote something that was genuine and about the truth. The self-critic hates the truth and wants you to feel bad. But people recognize your work as valuable and want to communicate their experience of this to you and to others. The self-critic must be over-ridden and the truth must prevail. The small ego is wrapped up with the self-critic. The deeper essential self knows the truth and recognizes the value of one's work and is gracious when recognized."

The small ego is wrapped up with the self-critic. Ooooh, that's tough, which is why I like it. It gets at the essential truth of the Impostor Syndrome, which is that it is itself an impostor: it is a form of arrogance masquerading as Poor Little Me. It's a way of saying that you, and only you, can be the arbiter of what's really good and what's not--and that your friends and admirers are either a) too dumb to know the difference between good and mediocre or that b) they are sucking up to you (which is a fairly unflattering view, to say the least). Deep down, the Impostor Syndrome is about Pride, which they don't count as one of the seven deadly sins for nothin'.

So: I'm giving it up. The Impostor Syndrome, that is. Which is not that hard to do, because the alternative is not raging egomania ("Me! Me! Me!") but simply the recognition that you've been given a gift and that this time you've used it well. You have not obstructed the cosmos; you have not impeded The Flow. Now, that, I gotta say, is a nice feeling, and one I'll take any day.

Meanwhile, I'd like to give a great big thank you to all the reviewers out there who have read the book and have their own penetrating insights to offer. For those of you who haven't caught up with your internet reading this week, here they are (and I'm sorry about not linking directly to your home pages, guys, but this is my third try at posting this thing and every time I try to do that I lose my post--so bear with me):

Monday--Jen Lawrence, of MUBAR
http://tomama.blogs.com/mubar/2006/08/this_blog_post_.html and http://www.mothershock.com/blog/archives/2006/08/mothertalk_the_1.html

Tuesday--Mir at Woulda Coulda Shoulda  http://wouldashoulda.com/2006/08/08/blog-book-tour-the-ghost-in-the-house/ and http://www.mothershock.com/blog/archives/2006/08/mothertalk_blog.html

Wednesday--Jenny at Three Kid Circus
http://threekidcircus.com/threekidcircus/archives/2006/08/mother_talk.html and http://www.mothershock.com/blog/archives/2006/08/mothertalk_blog_1.html

Thursday--Asha Dornfest at Parenthacks http://www.parenthacks.com/2006/08/mothertalk_blog.html and http://www.mothershock.com/blog/archives/2006/08/mothertalk_blog_2.html

Friday--Tracey Gaughran-Perez at Sweetney
http://www.sweetney.com/001372.html and http://www.mothershock.com/blog/archives/2006/08/mothertalk_blog_4.html

Keep an eye out for Heather Armstrong, aka  the fabulous Dooce, who promises to weigh in on this subject on Aug. 15 via her column on Alpha Mom.  And, if you still have time on your hands after all this, you can look up some mainstream media reviews on my  website.

Gotta go. The kids are pounding at the door.

Proustian Questions

Recently, Her Bad Mother , a.k.a. Catherine Connors, asked some Proustian questions about blogging, which I will now attempt to answer:

1) What is the quality you most admire in a blogger?

They gotta make me laugh. Or maybe cry. But mostly I am looking for a laugh.

2) What is your most marked blogging characteristic (or, how would you describe your blog)?

Hard to say. I've been keeping a journal in some form or other since I was 14. So this seems very familiar. I just have to remember to keep my kids' real names out of it, is all.

3) What is your greatest virtue as a blogger (what do you most like about your blog)?

I try to say things other people are thinking but don't dare to say. Or, alternatively, make people laugh.

4) What do you regard as the principle defect of your blog?

Too much about me, not enough about current events. Which are truly frightening, so much so that I'd rather cover my ears and yell "Nyah Nyah Nyah!"--so, as you can see, I have trouble sticking to my goal.

5) What character of fiction do you most wish had a blog?

I would change this question to "what character in history," and my answer would be Elizabeth I. I used to be her, you know. Others have made this claim, but they are all con artists. I am the genuwine article.

6) What [other] historical or real life person do you most wish had a blog?

George W. Bush, because I truly do not understand how that man thinks. I mean, something must be goin' on in there, but I'm damned if I can figure out what it is. My best guess is that it is a looping re-run of "Animal House," which probably reminds him of his own days at Yale. He was not the John Belushi character, but wishes he was.

7) What is your present state of blog (present state of mind as a blogger)?

Bemusement. What will we all do with ourselves when Peak Oil hits and the generators go down and the batteries run out?

8) What is your blog motto?

"It's a weird fuckin' world, ain't it?" No, I'm sorry--my real motto is "They say children will drive you crazy. But what if you're already there?" It's either that or "Sisterhood is powerful. Motherhood is nuclear." I forget.
 

9. What do I regard as the lowest depth of misery?

Mental illness, which I know a little too much about. But then, I've never had to go grocery shopping in Beirut while the bombs are falling, so I could be wrong about this.

10. What is your idea of earthly happiness?

Well, at the moment, since I'm feeling kinda puny and have been up coughing all night, it would be lying in the warm sun in a hammock with a syringe of Darvon at hand. But I am trying to cultivate healthier habits. Actually, marveling at my children's beauty is a pretty good pastime.