Author Archives: Jennifer Butler Basile

Maternal Health Month, Maternal Health Month 2014, may is maternal mental health month

It Just Makes Me Sad

News broke late last week that a California mother had taken the lives of her three children.  Conduct a man-on-the-street interview and you’d likely hear outrage, vile epithets directed at the monster who would kill her own offspring.  My own husband brought it up to me in a pained tone of voice.  He was disgusted.  It IS disgusting when such a thing happens.

But I’m not angry at her.

Horrible events like this make me sad.

Sad that three lives on the cusp were snuffed out.  Sad that poor defenseless, innocent babes were terminated.  Sad that the father had to watch his bloodied babies be carried from his home; that his partner in life, in giving life, was the one responsible.

Sad that no one connected to this woman perceived any threat of dangerous behavior. Sad that perhaps she felt she couldn’t express such feelings before it was too late for fear of judgment, backlash.  Sad that she didn’t know how to get help.  Or perhaps didn’t have such resources available.

Sad that things like this continue to happen needlessly.

We live in a society with a different-hued ribbon for everything – and things like this still happen.

And woman like this are still labelled as crazy.  I found ONE account that handled this story sensitively.  (Read here)

In the anger and outrage that follow such an event, it’s easy to point fingers.  Why was she left alone with the children?  Why didn’t anyone ensure she got treatment? Thankfully, I never experienced postpartum psychosis (nor has it been substantiated that this woman did); even still, I hid my negative feelings for fear of judgement as a bad mother.  I never asked for help because my struggles were so far out of the realm of a competent mother.  Would I have been more likely, then, to admit to homicidal thoughts toward my children?  Not something someone who loves and cares for their children – which all postpartum mothers do on some level – would readily admit.  Therefore, there may not have been warning signs of this impending tragedy.  Many postpartum mothers are uncannily adept at masking the turmoil inside.

So here’s the lowdown:

  • For all its awareness, we still live in a society where women are compelled to hide their unhealthy mental symptoms.
  • For all the coverage of tragedies such as these, a lot of people still cannot recognize or suss out the warning signs and symptoms of the mentally ill to prevent future scenarios.
  • For all the resources available, the paths to these therapeutic and rehabilitative programs are still unclear and/or blocked.
  • For a species that values nurturing, we are quick to throw a troubled and needy person under the bus.

There is work to be done, people.  It is sad that we cannot look each other in the eye and see the need in that person.  It is sad that we look away for fear that the beast inside us will be awakened by the raw reminder in front of us.  It is sad that, instead, we cannot look and see a solution, a way to lift up the depressed and rise together.

kids

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Maternal Health Month, Maternal Health Month 2014, may is maternal mental health month

Playing the Odds

 

We always hope that our child will get the best characteristics from that special person we partnered with and ourselves. A winning combination. We hope that the less desirable pieces of ourselves will be filtered out in the next generation. Unfortunately, that doesn’t always happen.

Our second daughter was an easy baby. She ate well. She slept well once she discovered her thumb. She rolled with the punches of a dual-sibling household. Her laugh came easily as did her socialization. We labeled her gregarious and thought for sure she’d be comfortable in any social situation as she grew.

Partway through her year of preschool, she began complaining about going. No one likes me. No one plays with me. Kindergarten followed with more of the same, with daily fights of shoe, sock, and shirt selection – one of which ruffled me so much I slid into a tree one snowy morning. This year, it intensified, with afternoons added to the agenda. Denial of a specific snack or a disagreement with one of her sisters would send her reeling. Over-the-top anger. Violent outbursts. Negative self-narrative.

My husband and I tried extra cuddles and attention, positive reinforcement, avoided giving such outbursts attention . . . it only seemed to escalate. It was not a fun time, to say the least. What finally pierced my heart was when she began with self-harming statements.

I’m just going to throw myself out the window and break my head.

It would be better if I just died.

How would you feel then?

I doubted whether my first grader had horribly morbid intentions. I sensed it was a more dramatic way to express inexpressible incredibly pissed-off feelings (which was later confirmed by the school psychologist) and that she didn’t fully understand the gravity of her declarations. BUT – and a big one – I’ve read and heard enough about mental illness to know you never take such statements lightly. And I’m a former English/Language Arts teacher, used to evaluating journals and writing pieces where many such revelations come out in school. Teachers and school personnel have strict protocols to follow surrounding such language – even if it’s erring on the side of caution.

What scared me most about these statements was that they reminded me so very much of my own running narrative born of postpartum depression: I hate my life. Just kill me now.

Had my child inherited the very worst part of me, the part from which I truly hoped she and her sisters would be free? In tense conversations after the children went to bed and my husband and I tried to find a solution to this seemingly impossible one, I said, You know why I’m paranoid, right? He did. Though he’s never seen me as such, he knows I think of myself as broken, flawed, and that my worst fear is that it affects the children. What if she’s got what I have? This fear hadn’t fully formed itself in my soul until those words issued from her mouth, but then it blossomed exponentially. We agreed to make an appointment with the school psychologist.

Fortuitously, the school psychologist’s curriculum already brought her into the first grade classroom discussing identification and expression of feelings. Ironic. Perhaps my anxious little bean hadn’t progressed far enough into the curriculum, but my concerns meshed nicely with the goals of the program. The school psychologist helped us extend and reinforce what they’d been discussing in the classroom in our home.

It wasn’t an instant fix. Though it started with a great amount of enthusiasm, a week into our initiatives had my daughter ripping up the yellow diamond of construction paper listing her triggers (you know, the warning zone meant to make her more aware of them in order to cut them off at the pass). In her calm moments, she could tell you exactly what bothered her. When she was seeing red, there was no talking her down until she’d run herself out. Closer to the end of the year now, I hear her using more of the language from the school program on her own. It makes me happy to see her acknowledging ‘rock brain’ moments and telling said rock to get lost.

And that, I think, is the memory and lesson I choose to take away from this year. For all the machinations I took this year, in the end, it was she who enacted the change. She has the power to determine her own destiny. She is not a mini-me, though she looks an awful lot like I did as a child. She isn’t my clone, complete with my anxious tendencies. After all, she inherited her father’s temper, too. 😉 She is a unique individual who will create her own unique solutions for any problem she encounters.

Being aware of how my genetic make-up may influence the presentation of her behaviors is good to keep in the back of my mind, but it shouldn’t be in the forefront.  Using what I learned in my struggles to create a support system for her only makes sense and compassionate parenting, but it’s not a self-fulfilling prophecy.  She is a certain percentage of me, a certain percentage of her father, but she’s 100% herself.

 

a onesie gifted to us by a dear friend

a onesie gifted to us by a dear friend

 

Related Posts:

Vantage Point

You Got Some ‘Splainin to Do

 

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Maternal Health Month, Maternal Health Month 2014, may is maternal mental health month, Weekend Write-Off

Sometimes My Mommy Gets Angry

 

The book begins like any other for children. A breakfast scene, a mother making pancakes for her daughter in a sun-filled kitchen. She helps her dress and tells her how “beautastic” she looks before sending her off to school with “a kiss and big smile.” But here, the mood shifts. Annie, the daughter, hopes that Mommy “is still smiling when [she] comes home” because “sometimes my mommy doesn’t smile at all.”

angryAnd it is no mistake that the tone and plot of the book changes with a shift in mood. Sometimes My Mommy Gets Angry by Bebe Moore Campbell is the story of a child living with a mother suffering from bipolar disorder.

Indeed, when Annie returns home from school that afternoon, it is not smiling Mommy that greets her. Her mother yells at her to stop making noise, to get in the house, to ignore the neighbor’s inquires about her school day. Then she turns on the neighbor, accusing him of always spying on her.

And apparently this isn’t the first time, for once Annie gets inside, she follows a well-scripted plan. She calls her grandmother. “Mommy is yelling again,” she says. After her grandmother assures her she’s done nothing wrong, she tells her to go to the neighbor’s house until she comes to get her if she feels scared. When Annie tells her she’s not scared talking to her, she is to get her “secret snack without bothering Mommy.” But most importantly, to “think happy thoughts.”

The next day dawns much differently than the first. The rain pours down rather than sun through the windows. Annie is left to fend for herself, eating cold cereal rather than hot pancakes. But her friends help her brush out the knots she missed in her hair. They joke and laugh on their walk to school despite the raindrops.

True to her grandmother’s directive, Annie does manage to think happy thoughts. She says, “Sometimes my mommy has dark clouds inside her. I can’t stop the rain from falling, but I can find sunshine in my mind.”

How do we, as parents, ensure our child finds the sunshine in her mind – even when we simply cannot? Whether it’s from bipolar or another mental illness, how do we shield our children from the worst of the disease without also blocking out our love for them? Annie’s grandmother emphasizes that her “mother loves you even when she’s yelling.” She even goes so far as to say, “It’s okay for you to be angry. I know you love her too.” How do we teach this give and take and encourage our child’s healthy feelings in response to our unhealthy ones?

An author’s note before the story, which also provides important information on bipolar disorder and other mental illnesses, states that “the ‘village’ that supports the children of the mentally ill – the grandparents, aunts, uncles, teachers and neighbors – can help foster within these fragile children a sense of security and hope that life can get better, and encourage self-esteem in the face of extremely trying situations.”

Is that how we parents support our children? By farming it out to the surrounding village when we can’t do it?

This book is directed toward the children of parents with mental illness. I’m looking at it through the lens of guilt and worry that comes from being a parent with mental illness. Perhaps I should take Grandma’s advice: have a healthy snack, look to the support of neighbors, and think happy thoughts. I feel terrible that my conditions keep me from being ‘the end all and be all’ for my children. But maybe I never was supposed to be anyway. Maybe it really does take a village.

At the very least, Sometimes My Mommy Gets Angry takes on the task of telling the story of one special little girl’s resilience in the face of great difficulty. And that’s a story a lot of kids out there really need to hear.

 

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Maternal Health Month, Maternal Health Month 2014, may is maternal mental health month

A Child Registers Who’s Raising Him

 

“But a child is a sensitive instrument. You can hide the factual truth from a child, but you can’t blanket influence. Your agitation will out, and over time it will mold your child’s temperament as surely as water wears at rock. It was not until I was nearly twenty, deep into my own way with anxiety, that my mother spoke to me explicitly about her anxiety and the grief it caused her. But by that time she essentially talking to herself. I’d become her. It wasn’t merely genetics. It was the million little signals: the jolting movements, the curious fears, the subtle avoidances, the panic behind the eyes, the terror behind the hugs, the tremor in the caresses. It was the monkey. A child registers who’s raising him.”

– from Monkey Mind: A Memoir of Anxiety by Daniel Smith

 

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Depression, Maternal Health Month, Maternal Health Month 2014, may is maternal mental health month

It’s the Depression Talking

 

After writing yesterday about how so much of my writing makes it sound as if I hate my role as mother, I got to thinking.

 

I don’t hate being a mother.

I don’t hate my children.

I don’t hate my life.

 

It’s the depression talking.

 

Aside from shoving cotton into the mouth of the Debbie Downer who has taken up residence somewhere in my grey matter, I wouldn’t change anything about my life. I wouldn’t make different decisions. I wouldn’t rearrange the pieces.

Though far from perfect, this is pretty much the life I always wanted to live.

And I’ve known that. For quite some time. I know I have multitudes of blessings for which to be thankful, highest on the list those three little beauties. Only now have I figured out why I couldn’t make the leap to gratitude, to joy.

Goddamn depression.

I’m well acquainted with the irrational/illogical movements of anxiety vs. the rational/logical progressions of what​? Someone in her right mind? I can access that part of my mind. It’s functioning quite well, in fact. It just never wins. That raw part of me, that most primal adrenaline-sucking beast always wins. It rules me with an iron fist to the already queasy gut.

The sun is always shining in my part of the world. I’m just below that low-hanging, suffocating layer of clouds beneath it. I haven’t figured out how to fly up and out of it.

cloud-3

from howstuffworks.com

 

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Maternal Health Month, Maternal Health Month 2014, may is maternal mental health month

Debbie Downer

 

So I’m kind of selfish. I struggle with depression (read: not always a bag of laughs). I sometimes get lost in the vortex of my anxious thoughts.

Perfect candidate for motherhood, right?

When one writes a mental health blog while suffering from said mental illness and in the midst of mothering, it’s hard to write a post that doesn’t make it sound like you hate your job and/or children.

For the record, I don’t.

I love my children.

My mother told me that I must be doing something right because they [the children] adore me. I replied, Well, they won’t have an overinflated sense of ego, that’s for sure.

How much do we put away? How much rubs off on them? How much can you vent/piss/moan/complain on posts and not have people call family services, Samaritan lifelines, EMTs, etc.?

I don’t know how much this blog is my release valve or an incubator for my negative thoughts. Scratch that. They’re there anyway. It’s like denying the existence of the devil.

I wonder how much I look like an agitated, anxious, depressed mother on the outside. Or if no one knows. No one can see. I wonder how many of us are walking around wearing a camouflage coat. It may the woman sitting right next to you. It may be the face staring back at you from the mirror.

Is it possible to separate our maladies from the little being that grew inside us? Will they be able to thrive outside that shadow?

Rottenecards_8812197_jw2kkmk9yx

 

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Maternal Health Month, Maternal Health Month 2014, may is maternal mental health month, Recovery

Return to Zero

Stigma.  Silence.  Simply impossible to say the right thing.

All of these surround the topic of neonatal death, miscarriage, and stillbirth.

Tonight, a film determines to shatter all that.

Return to Zero tells the story of a couple expecting their first child, whom they are devastated to discover has died before he could even be born.  It is the first feature film to tackle the uncomfortable and uncovered story of this type of tragedy.

Perhaps no one wants to watch a film with such a difficult plot, but certainly no parent wants to find themselves playing the starring role.  Just as we all find comfort and empowerment in reading our story on the page, finding our face on the screen, this film should prove powerful – and hopefully therapeutic – for parents who have been silenced by the horrific events of stillbirth.

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Maternal Health Month, Maternal Health Month 2014, may is maternal mental health month, Weekend Write-Off

Stranger than Fiction

 

You just can’t make this stuff up.

 

We’ve all heard people say this. We may have even heard some pretty good instances of the phenomenon. Read Kelly Kittel’s Breathe: A Memoir of Motherhood, Grief, and Family Conflict, however, and you’ll find perhaps the best exemplar of it ever.

Kittel’s story starts much like many other love stories: with the birth of a precious baby boy. We learn to know and love Noah, Kittel’s fourth child, right along with her. Amidst the love and adoration, though, there is an undercurrent of tension. Relations with extended family increasingly interfere with the Kittels’ close knit circle of immediate family, creating conditions ripe for catastrophe.

A tragic accident involving Noah is unfortunately and unbelievably only the first tragedy to befall Kelly and her family. In her quest for “an oversized house and a plastic car overflowing with round-headed pink and blue babies while [she] navigated [her] way through the Game of Life,” Kittel experienced miscarriages and an unnecessary stillbirth, unsupportive and argumentative family members.

Through personal anguish and legal battles, spiritual searches and encounters with nature, Kittel somehow arrives victorious on the other end, relishing each and every moment with her family of five living children and the spirit of those in heaven. Even with all its loss, Breathe is always – on every page, in every word – a life-affirming story.

I was fortunate enough to have read Breathe in its entirety before publication. Shortly after Kelly joined our writers’ group, she began sharing excerpts of her story, until we’d read, critiqued, and discussed the whole thing. We stroked the cover of her first proof when she passed it around the circle one night (it really is velvety soft!). We cheered her on upon its release on May 14, the birthday of her dear son, Jonah, his one and only day upon the earth.

Kelly Kittel wrote this story for those precious sons robbed of the oft-neglected privilege of breathing. But she also offers a poignant story of survival – her own. And in doing so, she most certainly will help countless mothers and women do the same.

Breathe-Cover

 

 

 

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Maternal Health Month, Maternal Health Month 2014, may is maternal mental health month, motherhood, Perspective

Wavelength

There comes a time when you see your mother as a being separate from yourself.  It’s not as an infant when you realize you exist outside her body.  It’s not when, as a toddler, you assert your independence.  The tumultuous teenaged years don’t do it.  Even becoming a full-fledged adult doesn’t do it.

She will always be your number one fan, miracle-worker, therapist, and helpmate.  She will always allow you to be self-centered when you come calling because you are her world.  She is your MOM.  (No Pressure 😉 )

But there are moments when she does something on an even more amazing level of awesome – perhaps even sublime – in which you see in crystalline form what a perfectly human and beautiful individual she is.

The first time this happened was when I was an early teen.  My parents, consummate do-it-yourself-ers, were in the middle of some household project that necessitated the transit of a long ladder through our tiny kitchen.  One inadvertent swing of the ladder swept the decorative items off one of the display shelves surrounding the window.  A crystal-clear unicorn, whose knobs and nodules captured and refracted the sun’s rays into rainbows, shattered against the stainless steel of the sink below.  I heard my mother scream like I never had before: a desperate, anguished wail.  She cried as she gathered the pieces.  This was another thing I rarely – if ever – had experienced with my mother.  These were not the welled-tears of sentimentality; these were big fat gobs of grief.

Being a young person, with no framework within which to place this, I asked my mother what was wrong.  She explained that the unicorn had been a gift from her sister when she had lost a baby.  Four years prior to my birth, my mother had delivered my would-be sister, stillborn.  This was my first encounter with this information, with this grief.  While I now had a framework, it was shaky.  I knew it was tragic.  I knew my mother hurt.  But I had no idea to what extent.

Years later, as a mother myself, now accustomed to grief, but still not of that magnitude, I sat with my mother in the parking lot of a botanical garden.  We stared out the windshield at the glass squares of the greenhouse.  ‘A woman in my writers’ group has written a memoir about her family, Ma,’ I said.  ‘About her journey through love and loss.  She had a stillborn, too.  Much the same circumstances as yours.’  There were some eerily similar details in their stories, though my mother never got the legal vindication that this woman did.  ‘Would you read it?’

I didn’t know if I was overstepping my bounds, if I was being too forward, pushy.  Was I dredging up feelings that my mother had gladly put to rest years ago?

‘I suppose it might be good for me,’ she said.  ‘Therapeutic.’

Months later, I took my mother to the launch party for that book: Breathe: A Memoir of Motherhood, Grief, and Family Conflict by Kelly Kittel.  The day before Mother’s Day, we spent the afternoon of the launch together.  Ironically, though we were celebrating the ubiquitous holiday, I saw my mother as ‘other than mother’.  Hearing her speak to Kelly and share her story, I saw the profoundly deep wellspring of strength my mother’s been drawing from all these years.  I saw her as a woman, fighting a soul-crushing battle and winning.  I saw her as someone – like myself – who has been curled up on the floor crying, but she got up!  She went on.  And gave me the best, most important parts of herself.  All while, unbeknownst to me, she was suffering a tremendous loss.

It was hard for me to not insert comments or explanations as she spoke.  I felt the intermediary between these two women and wanted to help forge the link.  But the link between these two women had nothing to do with me.  It was in their tragedies and victories, their similar experiences with death and inextinguishable life.

I saw my mother as a distinct individual, a woman with her own suitcase of memories and maladies, a human being with a suit of armor and the soft underbelly of a mother.

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Photo by John Butler

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