Maternally Challenged

Another Week, Another Biopsy

Yes, I know, it does seem like I am working hard to get attention and sympathy these days, but I am not making this up.

Last week, I went for an endoscopy (a lovely procedure where they stick a little tube down your throat to look at your upper GI tract). This is something my doctor wanted to do because about 10 years ago he'd diagnosed a hiatal hernia and folks like me have to be scoped once in a while. No big deal, right? Being Medically Unusual, I've gotten used to having lots of weird things done to my body. As long as you give me good drugs beforehand, I'm cool.

Except that this time he found something called Barrett's Esophagus, which is a disease of the esophagus which ups your chance for esophageal cancer. He took a biopsy and I'm supposed to get the results tomorrow or Tuesday. So of course I hit the Internet and discover that folks with this condition have about a 1 percent chance of getting esophageal cancer in any given year, and that as long as you're getting scoped regularly, esophageal cancer is pretty curable. People die of it because it doesn't cause symptoms until very, very late--which, obviously, this isn't. Plus, my doctor didn't ever use the "C" word, and what's turned up so far is, in his words, "Not too serious."

It's funny, though, how little words can haunt you. "Too." Hmmm. It doesn't help that I have a friend who is dying of esophageal cancer as we speak, and I haven't even spoken to her lately because she can't talk anymore.

After the Full Crisis Mode I went into on the mammogram scare, I thought I'd try to just handle this myself, which was a complete load of horseshit. I can't handle anything by myself. In fact, I should not be allowed outside the house without adult supervision. As it is, I am periodically overwhelmed by fear, and as soon as I dump one delivery, another arrives. And even though I know that the very condition of being afraid is a futile attempt to control the universe--as if imagining some unwanted outcome will somehow make that outcome less likely--what's also true is that fear is a monster which does not engage in rational discourse.

So: I admit it. Once again, I'm not fighting a disease here so much as a state of mind. And the last go-around on this taught me that there are ways of doing that a whole lot more effective than diving down a hole, covering your ears and chanting, "LA! LA! LA! I CAN'T HEAR YOU!" to the universe. What I'd rather do right now is just own up to the fact that I am weak and scared and pretty f--ed up at the moment. Again.

Best Christmas Gift Ever

It's Christmas Eve, the kids are in bed, and David and I are about 45 minutes from collapse ourselves...but for some reason tonight I was thinking about a Christmas that happened when I was somewhere between eight and 11, on the cusp between childhood and adolescence.

My mom was big on Santa Claus. At Christmas she did all kinds of things to encourage our belief in him: she would ring bells in the hall outside our doors on Christmas Eve to convince us the elves were there; she talked to Santa on the phone; she helped us write letters to Santa; she encouraged us to look at a map of North America and figure out his progress over the course of Christmas Eve (since of course he came straight to our neighborhood; how he made it everywhere else was not an issue I bothered much about). One memorable year, she even got some boots, rubbed the soles in ashes from the fireplace, and made ashy footprints all over the carpet in the living room as proof that Santa had indeed come down the chimney.

Some people may say that this was a dangerous thing, that no parent should have gone to such lengths to perpetrate a myth, that when the truth came out the child would be disappointed and angry. Not true, at least not for me. At some point, of course, I figured out there was no Santa, and I was disappointed. But mostly I was impressed with the lengths my mom had gone to while the magic had lasted.

The Christmas I'm speaking of happened one year when I had pretty much reached the conclusion there was no Santa, but I had not actually said so out loud. I wanted there to be a Santa so much that giving him up was painful, and I enjoyed the mystery. On this particular Christmas Eve, I remember sitting with my mother on my parents' bed in their darkened bedroom, looking out the window over the neighborhood, and "seeing" Santa visit all the other houses.  I saw him  go to Jimmy Blacks' house, and Brenda Culverson's house, and Jimmy and Leanne  Pitts' house,  and then to my grandparents' house next door.  And then he flew away--because, my mother suggested, he realized I was at the window watching him. He would be back later, after I was asleep. I wasn't seeing anything, of course, but the pretense was magical. And it was a moment we shared, just the two of us.

The next year I was too old for such nonsense, and for years after that I thought of that incident as just an example of my mom's silly side. I think I had to become a mother myself to truly appreciate what she did for me that night. My mother never went to college; she was orphaned during the Depression and I am reasonably sure that there was never a moment in her own childhood when she enjoyed a similar moment of magic. Her childhood was so deprived that at one point she and her sister ate out of garbage cans to stay alive. But somehow this woman who had been given so little in life found a piece of imagination and creativity to pass along to me, along with the unspoken message that imagination and creativity were qualities that could create new realities in a humdrum world. It was a kind of faith that there was a reality beyond what our senses can tell us. Where she got this insight I do not know, but she gave it to me, and it's a gift I'll never forget.

Merry Christmas, all you moms out there.

And Why Should You Escape?

So today we are sending out the last of the Christmas cards, some of them with a letter enclosed, and it occurred to me that all four or five of my readers out there might be interested in our Yearly Recap, too. Hell, it took  me a WHOLE DAY to write:

At this house, our motto for Christmas letters is “All the news that fits, we print,” but we still pledge to keep it relatively short. For 2007, this will be no problem because, frankly, there are a few stretches of 2007 you wouldn’t want to hear a lot about. 

The bad news first. Tracy underwent some ECT treatments last winter for a severe depressive episode and we’ll spare you the details because, actually, we don’t remember them. ECT is known for doing a number on one’s memory of recent events, so it’s been a year of surprises: outfits we don’t remember buying, e-mail correspondents we don’t remember having met… On the plus side, it also wiped out the memory of several really bad Disney movies, and it helped Tracy recover. ECT is very effective that way—but then, amputation is effective on gangrene, too, and there are good reasons why neither treatment has ever really caught on. Still, while humans can’t sprout grow new limbs, they can and do grow new brain cells. It was a long haul, but we are pleased to report that things are now back to what passes for normal around here. Work-wise, Tracy has several projects going: you’ll see her in the Civil War Times soon, she’s working on something for the NYU Law Journal which will involve traveling to The Hague to interview an eminent judge who sits on the World Court, the paperback edition of her book came out this summer, and there may be another book idea out there somewhere. Life goes on.

In extraterrestrial news, David’s working on a NASA project that would, if funded by the Powers that Be, map the universe’s distribution of Dark Energy. What is Dark Energy? you ask, to which the brightest minds at NASA would answer: We dunno. All scientists know is that it is a mysterious force which accounts for about 25 percent of the energy in the universe, and it is, like, totally awesome, dude: it sends stars careening around galaxies, it can bend space and time, and it keeps that donkey kid in back of you kicking your seat for the entire duration of a trans-Atlantic flight. The official name for the project is ADEPT (Advanced Dark Energy Physics Telescope), but around here we just call it The Map of Where Is, Is. 

On the kid front: Rebecca is now 11, making her officially a ‘Tween, and so we have been introduced to the Great Big Honkin’ Attitude years. Not that Rebecca has ever lacked an Attitude, but up to now she had not brought it to bear on clothing. All that changed when she and Tracy went shopping for back-to-school clothes this year, and Tracy’s idea of fashion (subdued things with interchangeable components) fell victim to Rebecca’s fashion vision (spangles, sparkles, sequins and drapey things cut on the bias, all in hues unknown to nature).  Compared to this kid, Porter Waggoner would have looked like a funeral director. Well, okay, maybe that’s exaggerating a bit, but still: you see the potential for conflict. Rebecca is also deeply into the Cat Warriors books, and can diagram all the cat clans and interconnections thereof for anybody who displays the faintest interest, as well as for lots of people who don’t. (Our advice: don’t.) She has also caught the Horse Virus from her Aunt Nonny, and as any parent knows, “adolescent girl” + “horse” = “second mortgage,” so thanks a lot, sis. Rebecca takes riding lessons once a week at a nearby stable, where, besides learning how to ride, she is also learning to work with an implement known as a “pitchfork.” Our hope is that not only will she learn some horsemanship but that her expertise may someday transfer to using implements known as a “yard rake,” a “mop” and a “broom.”

Suzanne started first grade this year and has already won two professions of love from little boys in her class, which puts her one up on mommy at the same age. But then, Suzanne has these adorable freckles, which gives her an unfair advantage. She is a bundle of spontaneous bursts of enthusiasm (told for the fourth time to get out of the bathtub one night, she replied, “Okay, Mommy, but first I have to DO THE WET NAKED DANCE YEAH! YEAH! YEAH! BABY!!”—and there went another 10 minutes) and non-stop creative energy. At home, this means piles of paper, markers, paint, clay and other art projects in various stages of completion all over the place. At school, this recently resulted in a phone call from the vice principal informing Tracy that Suzanne and an unnamed male co-conspirator had been thwarted in their plan to tie each other up during recess. Suzanne has been banned from even touching a jump rope until after the first of the year; fortunately, the school supply list does not include "whips" or "chains." Otherwise, she keeps us busy with Inscrutable Questions (“Who invented broccoli?” and “How dark is pink?”are a sample) and creative manglings of common expressions (notably, “Fruit of the Loo,” which Tracy is thinking of marketing in the U.K. as a new brand of toilet paper).

No exotic vacations this year; we spent ours this summer a whole 100 miles from the house, at a mountain cabin in the Shenandoah Valley, where we went to a county fair (lots of fun, and who knew pigs could be so squeaky clean?), spent the day at a water park, did a bit of hiking (which prompted another Inscrutable Question, this from Rebecca: “Why is the Appalachian Trail so steep?”), and learned that a tiny little mountain chalet is way too small for three high-maintenance females and one outnumbered husband/father about two millimeters from the end of his rope. The kids had a blast; Tracy and David survived.

So that’s the year. And now that we think about it, it hasn’t been dull at all. Really: how many people get to map the universe? Or get paid for putting words on paper, for pete’s sake? So, as usual, once we look at the big picture we realize the good vastly outweighs the bad, and that goes triple since the recent pathology report came back marked "benign." (See previous posts.) Compared to 99 percent of the world, we are filthy rich; by any measure, we are incredibly blessed. We hope this finds all of you similarly situated. Merry Christmas.

Benign

The call came while I was negotiating the parking lot with a balky six-year-old and an arm full of packages, and I knew instantly it was The Call. I let my kid wander around unsupervised while I dropped everything--literally--and opened my cellphone.

"I have some good news for you," said the doctor, and that's really about all I remember his saying, other than the words "benign cyst" and "no malignancy" and "not until next year."

So I am left with a very bruised breast, unspeakable relief, and a new understanding of fear--and the human connections that can heal fear. Because the fear was the worst. I was pretty sure--reasonably sure--that even if the lump did turn out to be cancer, that it wasn't going to be a very big cancer (my own doctor hadn't felt it, two weeks ago) and I know that very early cancers are pretty curable these days. I knew this even though the word "cancer" tends to put me in full panic mode, since I watched my father die an agonizing death from it 26 years ago, which was way, way too soon. Breast cancer would not be anybody's choice, certainly, but I live in a country with some amazing medical technology, just down the road from some of the nation's premier health care institutions, and I have faced some pretty bad things before now. Cancer--at least, very early very curable breast cancer--there was at least a tiny chance I could handle. At least,  with a lot of help.

What I couldn't handle was the fear. The fear was what laid me low--specifically, fear of dying before my children were grown. Everybody fears death, but I feel fairly confident in speaking for a large majority of the planet's mothers when I say that there is a fear worse than the ordinary human fear of death, and that's the fear mothers have, the fear of leaving their children too soon. On that first day I said to the cosmos: "I'll deal with cancer, but you'll have to handle the fear." And you know what? From the anonymous cancer hotline counselor who listened to me sob for awhile, to the people who e-mailed me with words of encouragement, to the good friends who distracted me--the universe seemed to come together as if it had been planning for just this emergency, and with only me in mind. I was taken care of, and I felt it. After, I dunno, four hours of being completely and totally freaked out, I slowly began to feel calm again, and at night I went to sleep feeling as if I was wrapped in a silk cocoon of other peoples' love. I joked to one friend that I could practically see the good vibes, and it wasn't entirely a joke. Not to sound all New Age-y and all, but there is some kind of cosmic energy out there that I don't understand and I'll say no more about it except: I'm glad it's there. And I'm glad all you other humans are out there too.

Not Me. Couldn't Be.

This week I learned that an old friend has cancer. Her kids are about the age of mine, and so this news--after the initial shock of envisioning this person with a life-threatening illness-inevitably put my mind onto the unspeakable fear that every mother has: what if I die before my kids are grown? Because I know that's what my friend is thinking. That's one thing that comes with motherhood: the fear of your own death actually becomes secondary--to the fear of losing your children before it is time. It's a cliche, but it's true: you love your children more than life itself.

So when the call came from the mammogram folks, the ones I'd seen earlier this week for my usual yearly visit, I was primed for a freakout. The test has gone smoothly; I'd left thinking I'd gotten the all clear. Not so. "We saw something unusual," the lady said. "The doctor wants you to come back to another picture." Which I did. And then: "We still can't see it very well; we want to do a sonogram." And then, in a moment in which I felt myself disassociating from my body, I heard the words, "We want to do a biopsy."

I hit the internet the minute I walked in the door, before I dropped my coat. From it I learned that 80 percent of biopsies turn out to be of benign breast conditions. I learn that the survival rate for cancer is very high, especially if it's caught early. And it doesn't matter, because then the fear descends--the fear that something bad is about to happen, that I will have to leave my kids before I want to.

I spent some time this afternoon on the kitchen floor, sobbing. Now that freakout is over, and I am keeping it together, with the help of one or two good friends. Something here is getting me through, I don't know what, but I'm grateful for it. Somehow or other, it's gonna be okay--and by that I don't mean I'm confident I don't have cancer. I just mean that, cancer or not, it's going to be okay. At least, that's where I am at this moment. There's a 90 percent chance of another freakout in the next few days, but: one day at a time. Which is what I hope my friend is thinking, too.

If you are sending out good vibes, send some to her. And while you're at it, send some to me, too.

Sisterhood is....Toxic. Sometimes.

There was an interesting article in the New York Times yesterday about how friendship between women can go so very, very wrong. It was written by a woman who had pledged to a sorority in college, and then drank too much at a party one night and had a sexual misadventure (one which might even be called rape) For this she was branded a "slut" and drummed out of her sorority. Years later, when she was in a store with her two daughters, she ran into one of the women who had played a lead role in this unpleasant drama, who greeted her like the old friend she most definitely wasn't. While her former tormentor nattered on, the writer of the story stood there in shock, re-living the whole ordeal. Later, she asked: "How do we help our girls navigate the duplicitous female maze? How do we ensure that they behave authentically, respect humanity over fleeting alliances, and squash the nasty tribal instincts that can inflict lifelong distress? I don’t know. I’m afraid I never will."

It struck home with me--partly because I have two daughters, too, and partly because this kind of thing never seems to stop. If it's not some clique in middle school, it's the PTA clique at your daughter's middle school, or the nasty comment from the neighbor, or.....the list goes on. Anyway, I was moved to write an e-mail to the writer of this article, and here it is:

I have two daughters, too, and I've also been taught the hard way to be wary of other women--or, at least, other women in big groups. I learned this not so much by being the immediate victim, but by watching as my sister (two years older) became the victim. With her it began in the last part of elementary school and lasted throughout high school. You could say it lasted throughout life. I'm now 52; she's 54.

 

My daughters are ages 7 (almost) and 11. My oldest has ADD and is slightly chubby--two strikes right there. She's socially a bit clumsy, but she does have a few friends. She's now in middle school, and the other day I dropped her off at school late and watched her walk away from me. Another girl was walking towards me and I caught the look of disdain on the other girl's face as she glanced over my daughter's wet hair (she'd just gotten out of the shower) and the scruffy clothes she had on that day. I did two things. One: we went out that weekend and spent $300 on clothes (probably more than she really needed, but what the hell.) And two: we had a long talk (several actually) in which I told her that popularity was NOT to be sought. Period. That girls who desperately wanted popularity were either not going to get it, or were going to get it and were not going to be worth knowing. I told her, "All you need are two or three really good friends. In fact, all you really NEED is one good friend." And, of course, to have a friend, you have to be a friend. That's my solution to teaching her how to navigate the duplicitous female maze: don't go in the maze to begin with. Because the secret is, you don't have to.

 

Women (and girls) in groups can be vicious. One on one, and in smaller groups, they can be lifelines, and a whole different kind of emotional support than any man can offer. We're hard-wired that way, too--it's the flip side of the bitchiness. I have trouble trusting other women, too, but that's how it's always worked for me: a small, very select group of women I can be close to. One other thing: I've made an unshakable rule that I will not be friends with any woman who I can't be ruthlessly straight with. Now, nobody is ruthlessly honest all the time--but what I mean is, no pussyfooting around. No, "Oh, I LOVE it!" when you hate it. No big grins and pretending everything is hunky dory. No "be sweet" crap. No aggression in the guise of sisterhood. I strive to say what I mean and mean what I say. Sometimes it's gotten me into trouble; but mostly, I think, it's helped me meet like-minded women. They ARE out there. When I meet one, both of us tend to laugh in relief. They're not hard to recognize, after awhile.

 

So are the shrieking harpies. If I'd been you and met whatsherface in the store, I would have (after I recovered from my shock) said, "You know, Sherylee (or Bambi or whatever her name was), there's something I've been wanted to say all these years to you, and that's FUCK YOU, you miserable little hypocritical troll from hell." Then, I guess, I'd have to give my daughters a little talk about how nobody should use the F word except on extremely rare occasions, but that sometimes the rules have to be bent in order to stand up for yourself.

 

I hope you can see your way to having some women friends someday...if for no other reason to talk about how, ultimately, it's a society which values men over women which produces female  self-hatred, which in turn produces this kind of shitty behavior. Meanwhile, good luck with getting over this. I've seen my sister's experience, and I know it's hard. But you have daughters, and they need to learn how to pick people to trust, whatever gender they are.

 

All the best,

 

Tracy Thompson

I sent it off yesterday. Who knows? Maybe she'll reply. Maybe we'll get to be friends.

 

 

 

Giving Up The Addiction

A couple of years ago, I had a book contract that went sour. I still don't know exactly why. My editor was a highly respected name in the publishing world and I was thrilled to be working with her. Trouble began, though, when I turned in my first three or four chapters. I knew they could use improvement--what first draft couldn't?--but I was not prepared for the terse and scathing e-mail I got, something along the lines of "Well, this is frankly disappointing." That was it. No critique, nothing about what needed work, no guidance. This happened three or four times over the course of the next 18 months, which rank as the most excruciating in my career. I'd been a professional writer for more than 20 years and things had gone wrong, but nothing like this. I was baffled, distraught, utterly demoralized. On one particularly bad day, I actually crawled under my desk and sobbed. Eventually, things got so bad that my agent negotiated an end to the contract--which the editor's publishing house agreed to, on one condition: I had to repay my six-figure advance.

When my agent told me this, I had to check to make sure my ears were screwed on properly. I had to repay them, when I had tried in every conceivable way to fulfill my end of things, had asked repeatedly what I was doing wrong, had begged for guidance, and my editor had barely answered my e-mails? I couldn't believe it. I called the Author's Guild.

"It sucks," their lawyer said. "You're right and they're wrong. But if I were you, I'd pay up. Believe me, I've heard worse. And they've got a battalion full of high-priced legal talent. What have you got?"

I took a deep breath, and I took his advice. (The book, incidentally, is The Ghost in the House: Motherhood, Raising Children and Struggling with Depression. Another publisher, HarperCollins, bought it; since then it's sold two foreign rights, is now in paperback and has done quite well.) But I was writing checks to that editor's publishing house for a long, long time. 

Fast forward to last week. A non-profit group I've been a member of for some time sent out a mass e-mail about a book contract just signed by one of the group's former officers. The e-mail said that the book would be based in part on things that had been said by members in online discussions over the past several years, and it expressed the sincere hope that we would all continue to contribute our thoughts and experiences. There was a clearly implied hope that someday lots of us would buy the book.  The amount of the advance was not disclosed. But in the usual course of things that money goes straight to the author, minus a percentage to his or her agent to be "earned out" against future royalties, if any (and there usually aren't, unless the book hits the best-seller list).

The only reason this is interesting at all is that a couple of years ago, two members of the group (I was one) were barred from even discussing two topics they had written about--topics which were highly relevant to many members. One of the people who made this rule was the person who last week announced her own book contract. And the reason we--this other member and I--were given was that we had written books of our own, the mere mention of which, we were told, would be abusing our membership for personal enrichment by, you know....selling books. When people expressed an interest in the topics anyway, the group's leaders actually shut down the e-mail loop temporarily.

So. Two incidents--one pretty important in my life, one fairly minor. Both times, I was treated unfairly. Both times, I went ballistic. The first time, I had no recourse; I just had to take it. The second time I spent, I am embarrassed to say, an unbelievable amount of energy trying to reason with the folks in charge. And when reason did not prevail, I yelled and screamed (both online and in person). I wrote angry e-mails. I talked my husband's ear off. All in all, I did a credible imitation of Yosemite Sam in a full-force swivet. I got utterly fixated on the fact that these folks just did not understand, and I couldn't get away from the idea that it was my job, personally, to make them understand.

And both times, the Universe said: So?

And I said (condensing madly here, because actually this process took a couple of years): But I'm right and they're wrong! I'm right, I'm right, I'm right! And I'm being penalized and it's just not fair!

And the Universe said, Okay, but what's your point?

That one was easy. The point was being RIGHT, goddammit. And being right was a kind of high. Self-righteousness is the spiritual form of crack, and just as hard a habit to break. You give up your self-righteousness, and then turn around and realize that you're self-righteous about giving up your self-righteousness. Giving it up, really giving it up, is like a little death. Well, not "like"--it is a kind of death. Because you're killing off that kindergartener in yourself that's jumping up and down screaming about fairness.

The way I arrived at this conclusion was that after awhile, this posture of Being Right became a kind of psychic black hole: it swallowed up tons of energy and gave nothing back. I was very, very slow on the uptake here, but one day I was thinking about how that editor had shafted me when a new thought occurred: "I bet she doesn't remember your name." And the same thing last week: that e-mail got me all riled up again about this incident several years ago, and I fired off several rounds of e-mail before my frontal lobe came back online. And then I remembered how much time I'd spent online a couple of years earlier, how I had bored my husband to utter stupor with every itsy-bitsy detail.

And then I remembered something else--an incident that had happened just before I left the Washington Post, when I'd done a story about some financial hanky panky at a major animal welfare group. This was a non-profit that got donations from hundreds of thousands of little old ladies around the world, who dug into their Social Security checks or whatever and gave $5 here, $10 there...and the leaders of this group were living in what could only be called palatial splendor. The percentage of income that went to executive salaries in this organization was way up there. I asked one of those guys living in one of those palatial homes about some deal where he had padded his salary in the guise of some real estate deal. I remember that he made a little expression of distaste, as if I'd just belched or something, and he picked a piece of nonexistent lint off the leg of his extremely expensive suit. I got mad then, too. I wrote my story, and maybe some little old ladies out there stopped sending in their money--I don't know--but I do know that this man in his expensive suit went right on enjoying his palatial lifestyle as if I had never existed. Maybe I gave him an afternoon of heartburn, but that was about as much as I accomplished.

And then, finally, I got the point: It is not my job to fix anybody but me. I have a friend who says that our job is to send our energy outward--to create, explore, connect--and that anything which obstructs that process is inherently wrong. That sounds right to me. And so what was wrong here, truly wrong, was not what these people had done to me (or to the little old ladies of the world), but what I'd done to myself--how these events had lured me into an addiction of sorts, one which took a whole lot of energy and turned it inward.

And so now, by saying this, I hope that I have turned that around.

First the Socks, Then the Shoes....

The back door bangs open.

"Mom, is it supposed to rain today?" 

"I don't know."

"Are we supposed to have any bad weather any time today?"

"I don't know."

"Because the wind's picking up out there and it kind of scares me and Katharine, but we really want to play outside."

"Well, go outside and play until it starts to rain, and if that happens, then come inside."

"Okay! Thanks, Mom!"

The Moms' Disease

It's called Postpartum Depression, or PPD for those of us (too much) in the know. I've done a fair amount of research on this subject, both in the professional sense and in the Reality Bites sense. PPD is a subtype of depression which is not to be confused with the "baby blues," which virtually every new mother has for a few days or so. PPD is to the "baby blues" what a tsunami is to an ocean breaker. It makes you want to die, and this in spite of the fact that you have a new life to nurture and cherish. That's one of the worst things about it, in fact--that it happens at a time in your life when there is so much cause for joy. And that is also why so many women suffer it in silence, white-knuckle their way through the first year or so of motherhood: they are ashamed to be feeling so shitty when everyone expects them to be happy. Shame on top of depression is a lethal mix.

Here are just a few quotes from some of the women I interviewed for my book, The Ghost in the House (HarperCollins, 2006), who talked about this subject:

“I was afraid of her and ashamed of myself. I used to watch [my baby] sleeping and wonder with pride at how beautiful and perfect she looked. Then I would cry because I felt so sorry for her for her having such a screwup for a mother.”

“I lost me. I never knew me. And if I had a gun in the house, there wouldn’t be a me.”

Depression is a disease of recurrence; once those toxic neural pathways in the brain are ignited, they catch fire much easier the next time, and the time after that. That means any woman suffering from PPD is at risk of being on her way to a lifetime struggle with a disease that is the leading cause of disability in the world, according to the World Health Organization. And PPD, like maternal depression in general, is a disease that has a unique ability to spread the damage to the next generation. Research by Sherryl Goodman of Emory University, who co-authored the survey on which much of my book was based, has found that women who suffer from depression, especially women who suffer from depression during pregnancy, are more likely to have babies who are fussy, hard to soothe, colicky. The result, when the baby is born, is a vicious spiral: an unhappy baby who unknowingly creates more anguish for an unhappy mom, who then has trouble caring for this unhappy baby, who...That's what happened to this mom:

“My daughter cried for 8 weeks constantly. Finally, I was crying too. She barely slept. I barely slept…Finally, I stopped my life. I spent the entire morning deciding if I should give her up for adoption. It was that bad.”

Older cultures were a lot smarter about PPD than we are, and some still are. Some cultures routinely seclude a new mother for 40 days following delivery, a time in which she has nothing to do but rest, recuperate and care for her baby. Even in Elizabethan times, this was the case. Today, our "enlightened culture" ships new moms out of the hospital in 48 hours or less (even those who had C-sections); mothers who work for small employers (50 employees or fewer) are entitled to zero maternity leave. Zero. Is it surprising that doctors in this country aren't particularly attuned to this problem, and miss the diagnosis even when it's staring them in the face?

Here's a quote from a mother who is a physician, who suffered from PPD after the birth of her own daughter:

"The mother has to be pretty bad before someone picks it (PPD) up. In my experience, the physicians weren’t asking—the pediatrician, the obstetrician, the specialist. I didn’t see my internist, but I doubt she would have asked either—it’s not something we are trained to ask about.”

Today is Blog Day for the MOTHERS Act (S. 1375 ), otherwise known as The Moms Opportunity to Access Help, Education, Research and Support for Postpartum Depression Act, or MOTHERS Act. This proposed legislation, sponsored by Senators Menendez and Durbin, would ensure that new mothers and their families are educated about postpartum depression, screened for symptoms and provided with essential services. In addition, it would authorize money to be awarded as federal grants to researchers who are exploring the causes, diagnoses and treatments for PPD.

I end with one last quote--this one from an older mother who raised all her kids while struggling with depression, at immense cost to her and them.

"Depression is the parent with the most power."

Think about that for a minute. And then, when you're done, call or e-mail your senator. 

I Am So Not Worthy

It is now 8:13 p.m. East Coast time, and it was approximately 2:45 p.m. when I picked up my six-year old at school. Two hours after that, her 10-year-old sister came in. In that five and a half hour period, I have learned that:

I "never" play with my six-year-old.

I have a heart made of ice because instead of playing with her I chose to talk to the computer repairman. This proves I don't love her.

I am negligent. I did not make sure that my six-year-old had boots for Boot Day tomorrow. And they said it was going to be Boot Day ON THE ANNOUNCEMENTS, which if I had been there in her classroom with pencil and paper taking notes, I would have KNOWN.

I have no fashion sense. The outfit I laid out for tomorrow to the six-year-old was rejected with thinly disguised horror. "Uh......" (sharp intake of breath) "...no."

I am incompetent. The 10-year-old comes home, looks for bread to make a sandwich and is outraged. "You haven't gone to the store YET?" Similarly, I have not yet gone to the craft store to purchase items she needs for her Halloween costume. And she has been waiting a whole DAY. For God's sake, what have I been DOING all those hours she is in school?

(Sigh.)

My problem is I just ignore this stuff, or pretend to ignore it, or just say "give me a break" without explaining to any of my offspring that the world does not, in fact, revolve around them, until eventually I become aware of the fact that I feel like pounding my fist into a wall. Which is what I could do at this moment.

That's it. No insights, no great thoughts. Just a rant. And I'm done.