“I feel like something bad is going
to happen.”
“Don't say that, sweetie.” My mom
would reply.
I would be perplexed. It was a feeling
as though I knew what would happen next. A tumbly falling down
feeling in my belly, like talking at the front of the class and
peeing your pants and losing your new expensive winter coat the first
day you take it to school. I wasn't sure if she didn't want me to say
it because she felt it too, or because she didn't like what it meant.
That I was broken. That I didn't know how to be happy; when everyone
else was staying up late at slumber parties, I would fearfully creep
off to sleep in a corner of the room, because not sleeping held an
unmistakable fear of the devil, death, and horrible things that would
happen to my family if I didn't close my eyes and fall asleep right
then.
I think about these childhood anxieties
a lot more now that I have children, and (not-so coincidentally) have
been diagnosed with mental illness. I don't mean my kids have made me
crazy, not clinically anyhow. But they made me seek out help, because
I was scared when I felt differently about them.
I fear this legacy that I may have
passed on to them. It's a thought that has only recently occurred to
me, and like any parent I wonder to myself. What can I do to prevent
it? And barring that, what can I do to prepare them? And perhaps most
unhelpfully, what the fuck have I done?
I started to suspect I was suffering
from mental illness in my early university years in Montreal, but
part of me felt like my sadness was just me being romantic about my
life. It had been a hard few years. My father was in the depths of
substance abuse, my relationship with my mother was fractured, my
ex-boyfriend had his first manic-depressive episode, and I was on my
own for the first time ever.
Montreal is cold in winter. So cold
that you can stay inside, huddled over your computer's cpu and no one
notices that you haven't been outside in a while. I lived on
chocolate soy milk and pasta. I was trying to be a vegetarian,
probably so I could tell someone in a conversation and feel important
and progressive, but that conversation never happened. I didn't talk
to anyone. I went to my classes and I sat in the back. I didn't brush
my hair. My clothes were old, and unwashed.
I hated myself and every single word
that came out of my mouth.
When I look at it objectively, nothing
was that bad. I was in a world-class city with lots of things to do.
I was thinner than I am now, and by all rights fairly charismatic. I
track this now as one of my first depressive episodes. Maybe it was
situational, but it was also the first of many future incidents that
looked and felt similar.
It wasn't until I was pregnant with my
second child that I sought help.
I was about 8 months pregnant with my
unexpected baby girl, and everything was going wrong. My husband and
I fought constantly. My son had just broken his leg and was learning
to walk agian. His temperament was difficult, as he was
simultaneously adjusting to going to preschool for the first time. I
was tired and sore, and having trouble walking. As I didn't know how
to drive, this left me at home for most of the day. I started taking
long naps. And sleeping in. And going to bed early. I started
avoiding visits with family. I started staying upstairs in my bedroom
while life went on along, in my view, perfectly fine without me.
Dinners came and went. I stopped being hungry.
And then the baby kicked. And I hated
it.
The feeling shocked me. When my son had
kicked in my belly, I had always felt this twinge of happiness and
pride. But this feeling. Annoyance? It wasn't right, and I didn't
like it. So, I felt like I should tell my doctor at one of my
frequent, end of pregnancy doctor's appointments. She sent me to a
psychiatrist immediately, who diagnosed me with severe antenatal
depression. She said I was resilient, though. She said I would make
it through, because I had overcome worse. I wasn't really sure what
she meant.
At first I thought maybe it was just
the hormones. Women with a history of depression are more likely to
suffer from pregnancy related mental illness, but some women without
any history at all are struck, and I counted myself among their
numbers. It was temporary. I was ok. Just like swollen feet and
peeing all the time, this too would pass.
But an event like that does not come
and go without rumination. It effected the whole family. We are
talkers, and we talked about it. We thought about it and we talked
some more. And as I came out of it, able to look up again as I walked
down the street thanks to a dose of fluoxetine, I started to think
about the feelings, the experience of my first 'diagnosed'
depression.
And I realized that it wasn't new at
all. It was a pattern, and it had been systematically effecting the
pattern of my life for years.
I had to ask myself, what does that
mean for me as a mom? Or even just as a person who is part of a
family? Who am I to even be a mother, if I can't keep my brain
together and I am at risk of falling into that pit again, regardless
of my knowledge of my responsibilities?
It struck a fear into me that I have to
admit hasn't gone away. Now, my daughter is one year old and I feel
that darkness creeping in again. I'm not ignoring it this time,
though. I'm not calling myself a romantic, or berating my self pity.
I'm paying attention when news articles make me sadder than they
should, when I'm mad just because I'm married and a mom and someone
needs me to get them a cup of milk. Not just mad, but resentful. Like
life is too fucking cruel and too hard to carry on living. When I
feel that way, I know something is wrong. I have hope for a life
where I can see it coming so clearly that I can head it off before it
effects us too deeply as a family.
I don't want to be the one who teaches
my kids that this is normal.
But maybe, I do.
I'd be lying to myself if I said that
they were going to escape from my legacy of depression. It's such a
scary thought, that at one point they'll be dealing with what appears
to be an insurmountable bleakness inside of them. All I can do is
show them that it isn't a bad thing, not judge myself too harshly,
and explain what's going on as they become old enough to understand.
I don't want to create a self-fulfilling prophesy: “mommy is
depressed and you will be too.” but I also don't want them to feel
that uncomfortable feeling that I did, where I wasn't sure whether my
mom felt that same darkness too.
Because if they feel that way, I want
them to know they aren't feeling it alone.
And that eventually, they'll come out
the other side.
