Happy Mother’s Day, and Don’t Forget National Mental Health Month
Surprised to see those two together in the same headline? Have you heard about the movie Tully, in which Marlo, a mom with postpartum depression is rescued by nanny named Tully—who turns out to be part of her postpartum psychosis? Motherhood can be crazy making. And so—c’mon, admit it—can mothers. If you are unequivocally thrilled to share brunch and a day having pumpkin facials and mudbaths with your mom, could I please rent out your brain for a day? I would love to know how that feels.
I’m really talking to those who have fraught relationships with Mom. And I was born the day before Mother’s Day to a mom with bipolar disorder, which makes me uniquely qualified to put these two May events in the same essay. (My sister, my grandmother and I also have/had depression.)
But here’s the thing about whatever your mom does that sets your teeth on edge. She’s got a backstory, and another behind that one, and yet another inside a hidden closet in that one, and we’re still not done. You will most likely never know everything that made her who she is. On Mother’s Day, at least, you need to cut her all the slack you possibly can.
I just turned 60, and I’m still figuring out my mother, dead now for six years. We always maintained a reasonably loving relationship, but one thing I wasn’t able to forgive her for was the way she blatantly favored me over my younger sister.
Here’s what I know of my mother’s life, and when I learned things that changed the picture:
She was an only child, gifted pianist, valedictorian of her high school class, married my dad at 27, had me at 28, earned three master’s degrees.
- When I was 12, she was hospitalized with her first manic attack (I believed).
- At 24, I learned she’d had a husband before my dad…and found him in bed with another man. Within two years she divorced him, married my dad, had me.
- At 57, I heard from my sister that Mom blamed herself for the miscarriage she had (a boy, six months) when I was 18 months old. She hadn’t wanted another baby so soon, and became deeply depressed.
- In my 30s, I found out that Mom was really institutionalized for the first time when she was 31—and I was only three. She was first diagnosed as schizophrenic, but when medication for that didn’t work, they treated her for bipolar disorder. But how? This was 1961, and lithium wasn’t in wide use until years later. Electroshock therapy? My dad farmed me out to his cousin’s family while she was in the hospital. Why don’t I have any cognitive memory of this? Was it too traumatic? And how did I react to my mother when she came home?
A brief but important digression: I just watched a Charlottesville Tedx event on how telling a story changes the storyteller. Revise, revise, revise, and eventually you’ll understand that what you thought was the most godawful moment in your life was really the best thing that ever happened to you. Watch it, but first put away any small axes or other sharp axes, or I swear this guy will have you hacking at your kneecaps with them:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wgeh4xhSA2Q&feature=youtu.be
Just last summer, a guy called from Sedalia, Missouri—my mom’s home town—looking for old photos of her grandparents’ home, which he and his wife had just bought. He—Chuck—had grown up across the street from this house on Broadway Avenue, which according to him was THE street when they built there in the 1930s. My great-grandfather owned a pharmacy, and did a brisk business in medicinal whiskey during prohibition; it was a very nice house, although not a mansion, and had its own tennis courts.
The local daily paper covered the family’s comings and goings: their dinner parties, their three sons’ tennis gatherings, and later, my mother’s piano recitals. She was valedictorian of her high school class, and her grandparents gave her a Steinway grand piano for graduation.
By the time we visited years later, my great-grandmother had moved to a ranch style house, and Broadway Avenue was past its heyday. Mom would point out the house, but I never understood what she was trying to tell me about who she’d been. Not until Chuck called.
So here’s what befell my mother before she gave birth to my sister in 1964: she was brilliant, talented, prominent, privileged; went to a top music school; married and moved to Europe for what looked like an adventurous life. Then boom. It all went to hell. A shameful divorce (her husband was from the same small town; her family kept his secret and told no one her reason for leaving him), a terrible remarriage, a pregnancy lost, her presumption of sanity gone.
(Her grandmother would disinherit her, possibly because she disapproved of divorce.)
Well, no wonder she had a hard time bonding with the baby she had three years later. At that point she probably felt like no child had a chance around her. Optimism? What’s that?
There are a lot of elephants I’m not mentioning, but here’s one I will: pregnancies in 1957, 1959, 1963. Birth control for married women didn’t become legal until 1965. Motherhood is like riding a rollercoaster blindfolded—there’s so much you can’t see coming, much less plan for.
Awhile ago I heard a story on public radio, about two elderly brothers. Their mother had left their father when they were children and taken the eldest with her, leaving the other behind. The younger boy always believed his mom loved the older brother more. After decades, his son got the two of them together; turns out their mother could only support one and thought the older one was in much greater danger from his father.
I told my sister Barbara this and said, “Maybe there’s some other story here about Mom that we just don’t know.”
Happy Mother’s Day, Barbara. Here it is.
I only wish Mom had had the chance to tell her story over, and over, and over again, until it took on another shape. I wish I’d known the right questions, and had the courage to ask them.