Category Archives: Maternal Health Month 2014

A personal daily look throughout the month of May 2014 focusing on maternal mental health

Identity, Maternal Health Month, Maternal Health Month 2014, may is maternal mental health month, Mental Illness, motherhood

Hide and Seek

 

Jason Good – 365
April 9
Tip: Always be the seeker in Hide & Seek. It’s gives you 30 seconds of peace.

 

Come, now. We’ve all done it. Or at least wanted to. We’ve all paused for a moment before seeking, enjoying that glorious moment of silence, relishing the fact that we are free to roam about the house with no shadow in our steps.

And then we hear the giggle, the irrepressible bubble that cannot be held by hands, cannot be stayed. The insistent pssst, or even the outright, “In here, Mama.” They cannot stand to stay hidden, cannot bear to be apart from us. After they give us a turn at hiding, they will crawl right back into the spot we just vacated, so dear is their desire to be like us, learn from us, stay close to us.

Other than the tempting tricks we can play during this child’s game, there are serious questions and consequences it can raise for adults. In our role as parents, will we choose to hide our mental illnesses? Will we seek to be completely open and honest with our families, including our children? At the very least, we must seek solutions to live a healthy, fulfilled life. But will we pop the pill in secret and stuff the rest of our struggle down our throats with it instead of voicing it, breathing it?

There is the great possibility of two sides to a person with mental illness. Stigma makes me not want to write that because I fear untrained minds will go straight to schizophrenia, but that’s not what I mean. Light and dark. Public and private. Hidden and sussed out. The very same reason I didn’t want to allude to two sides is what may keep sufferers suffering in silence. It may be to keep a modicum of positivity in their lives – rather than dwelling on the difficulties. This and a fierce sense of protection for their children, I think, drive the decisions that most mentally-ill parents make. While I don’t consider myself the best at looking on the bright side, I know I do not want my children to know I suffer from depression and anxiety.

Yet, I resent the times I must plaster on a smile. I regret that I must function in spite of my foul mood. I revile the perfect, perky person I must be at all times for my children when I’m hurting.

There must be a sweet spot, somewhere between ‘Ready or not, here I come’ and ‘A-ha’, in that glorious moment of silence, where mom can hear herself think and child is about to unleash a cascade of laughter. Where child and mother are happy and true to themselves. Where hiding is only temporary in certain situations. And seeking is rewarded with sharing love and validation.

 

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Identity, Maternal Health Month, Maternal Health Month 2014, motherhood

A Thread of a Different Color

I am an only child. I was usually more comfortable around adults than other children, used to the gentle progressions of conversation, safe in the shadow of my mother. My extended family was small; there were no scads of younger cousins to follow, entertain, and torture. I wasn’t used to hitching a child on my hip from a young age. When I did babysit, it was for short stints, while the mother busied herself in other parts of the house or ran to the store quickly. I was not one of those girls who had planned out the exact size and shape of her family, fixing the outcome of games of MASH. I figured the fates would sort that all out for me. I didn’t goo and gaa over pudgy, pinched faces at the grocery store. I didn’t swoon when a teacher brought a baby to visit a classroom. I was relatively unimpressed. They were little people. We all were once. Even when I was pregnant and attended a family function (on my husband’s side) where extended relatives tried to pass off babies, telling me I should practice, I declined, saying I’d be getting plenty of that soon enough. I didn’t want to hold other people’s babies; I wanted to hold my baby.

And when I held my own child, it was a different experience. Sure, I still had misgivings about my performance, about baby’s well being– as all new mothers who are finding their way do – but there was no doubt I was totally devoted to the cause. This was my baby, flesh of my flesh, bone of my bones. I didn’t have to worry about breaking someone else’s child. She was all mine, totally my responsibility. I decided how to raise her and why; what to do with her and when – and most importantly, I was totally comfortable with her.

The idea of a certain mold all mothers are meant to fit into is where trouble begins. Because of the vision of motherhood society had shown me, I grew up doubting that I had the skill set and temperament to be a mother. If I had stuck with that vision and hadn’t tried motherhood, I’d have missed out on a truly life-giving, life-altering process. And the world would’ve missed out on a truly amazing kid (and two subsequent others).

This brought all this to mind.

 

1871 by Joe Cunningham

1871 by Joe Cunningham

 

Joe Cunningham is not only counterculture because he is a male quilter, but also the content of his quilts. It’s modern art on muslin, mind boggling batiks. The piece above looks to me like a full-scale photograph or an etching – and yet it’s tiny stitches that form the image. If Joe Cunningham had listened to society’s prerequisites for quilters, the art world would’ve missed his cotton canvases. Joe Cunningham’s quilts wrap my argument up in a nice, neat package, as well, because they turn a predominantly female practice, done as part of homemaking duties, on its ear.

There is room to function and flourish outside the confines of stereotypes. I can swaddle my child just as well as the “perfect” mother – even if I didn’t make the quilt myself. Each and every type of mother should craft her distinct square to add to the quilt of our calling. And our catalog should be as diverse as Joe Cunningham’s portfolio.

It is a fallacy to think that original design can only be achieved after years of training. 
— Inspiration of Embroidery, Constance Howard, 1966

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Maternal Health Month, Maternal Health Month 2014, motherhood, Perspective

It’s a $%#@ vacation

“There were constant battles . . . between those who had chosen to have children and those who had chosen not to – all ostensibly for the sake of our publication, but more accurately as a way to work out personal differences under the cloak of business discussions.  Our boss was happily childless (“When I see children, I just want to put them in cement,” she once admitted), and she was unimpressed with the fact that mothers needed to return to their families earlier rather than later each evening.  Her right-hand woman also had no children.  They didn’t like to do extra work to make up for the women who went on maternity leave, and they didn’t appreciate having sacrificed portions of their personal lives to the office when others hadn’t.

“Well, what does the woman who chooses not to have kids do?  asked the boss.  “She should take a maternity leave to fulfill herself.”

A new mother grunted from her position at the table, her breasts sore from pumping milk into bottles, her eyes swollen from nights awake.  “Right,” she said, “it’s a fucking vacation.”

— from Marcus of Umbria: What an Italian Dog Taught an American Girl about Love by Justine van der Leun

 

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Depression, Maternal Health Month, Maternal Health Month 2014, Mental Health, postpartum depression

Advanced Screenings

 

They didn’t ask me to fill out the maternal mood questionnaire when I arrived for my annual physical today. I guess I’m no longer in the danger zone of postpartum. I no longer have a baby. My children are older. I’m more experienced. Everything should be easy-peasy at this point.

Or maybe they didn’t ask because my doctor knows. My chart already says ‘depressive disorder’. She just refilled my script for a low-dose of antidepressant. There’s no point in screening because we’re post-diagnosis.

She asked how I was feeling, how I was faring. A shrug of the shoulders. An approximation of one on my lips. Hunky-dory, doc. Some days are worse than others. I’m not cured, if that’s what you mean. I don’t want to run screaming from the house with my hair on fire – and haven’t for a while – but I still tend toward blah.

Maybe I’m expecting too much. I mentioned that I still have down days, but perhaps that’s the normal up and down of life. Yes, she said, you shouldn’t feel numb; you’ll have high points and low points. The lows seem so miserable, though. I know everyone has days when they don’t want to get off the couch, but my reasons seem so much more melancholy. A hollow near my heart, scooped out of the space where my joy once was. It’s not non-existent, but I haven’t noticed yet a day when the balloon inflates fully to fill that space.

I felt cheated somehow in not being ‘screened’. That it doesn’t matter since I’m beyond the threat of postpartum? That I’ve been given my happy pill so I should just shut up and take it? That I’ve been asked the same questions before and still don’t have any definitive answers?

But I suppose the screening isn’t perfect anyhow. A mother I know posted this status update after one of her trips to the doctor’s office.

At my physical I had to answer depression screening questions. One question was: “Do you feel like you’re failing your family or letting them down?” I laughed! Instead of circling the sometimes, often, or usually, I wrote in “Of course I do – I’m a working mother!”

No one questionnaire is going to get at the heart of each and every mother’s difficulties. I suppose it’s a step in the right direction that someone, anyone is asking – even if it’s a sheet of paper on a clipboard. But it should only be a beginning. Precisely because that question was laughable to that mom in its ironic understatement, we need to illustrate and represent all facets of a mother’s struggle – and give her the tools to do so – in order to help her when she needs it.

Image links to an online screening tool via Kent University (not specific to maternal mood disorders)

Click for an online screening tool via Kent State University (not specific to maternal mood disorders)

 

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Maternal Health Month, Maternal Health Month 2014, Mental Health, Mental Illness, motherhood

May is Maternal Health Month

 

May is actually Mental Health Month. If you were hanging around these parts at this time last year, you’d know that all too well. Every day of May, I posted something germane to that topic: reflecting on my own struggles and successes, reviewing symptoms and warning signs, offering hopefully helpful resources. While I got increasingly more depressed the more posts about my own depression I logged, it was a valuable exercise. So much so, that I’ve decided to do a similar one this year.

Since the plot line of my mentally-ill life spiked with the birth of my third daughter, I decided to tighten my focus onto maternal mental health. In no way am I discounting any of the other myriad aspects of mental illness and/or health, but those surrounding mothering and the female hormonal system are an animal in and of themselves – a big, nasty, brutish, spiky-haired one, may I add.

Colloquialism has us turning into fierce mama bears when our children are threatened, but what of the threats that come from inside us?

This month, I hope to explore that and perhaps lay some of that hair back down.

Join the pack.

There are so many of us out there, even if it feels each of us is trapped in a dark cave all alone.

A general banner for Mental Health Month, but I chose the image of this woman alone on the beach because very often, our family is fine, we're the one (feeling like we're) struggling all alone; that there is something we must fix within ourselves before we can connect with the family.

A general banner for Mental Health Month, but I chose the image of this woman alone on the beach because very often, our family is fine; we’re the ones (feeling like we’re) struggling all alone; that there is something we must fix within ourselves before we can connect with the family.

 

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