Tracy Thompson - The Ghost in the House: Motherhood, Raising Children, and Struggling with Depression

CHAPTER ONE
What Is Maternal Depression?

CHAPTER TWO
Motherhood: The High-Stress Occupation

CHAPTER THREE
Whats Wrong with Me?: When Maternal Depression Starts with a Bundle of Joy

CHAPTER FOUR
The Way It Is: Depression During the Child-Rearing Years

CHAPTER FIVE
Rats, Monkeys, and Mothersor, Will My Children Inherit My Depressive Genes?

CHAPTER SIX
Dont Look Now, but Your Kids Are Stealing Your Coping Skills

CHAPTER SEVEN
Coping

CHAPTER EIGHT
How the Struggle with Depression Can Make You a Better Mother

Motherhood and depression are two countries with a long common border. The terrain is chilly and inhospitable, and when mothers speak of it at all, it is usually in guarded terms, or in euphemisms. I remember the mysterious nervous breakdowns my mothers friends sometimes had during my childhood, and the mothers little helpers pills so many women seemed to need in order to make it through the day, and I remember the mothers of friends whose daily martini hour started promptly at five. Today, casual drug use is not politically correct anymore, so mothers are more apt to say that they are always tired, or always irritable, or time-starved, or stressed out, or perpetually premenstrualanything, any phrase or word, except depressed. Depression is a subject that has come out of the closet, except when it applies to motherhood. Somehow, juxtaposing depression and motherhood to raise the possibility that there are some things about the work of raising children that may be stressful, or even conducive to illnessseems bad manners. Motherhood is supposed to make women happy, period.

Maternal depression is a subject I approach from three perspectives: as a person who has suffered from depression, as a journalist with a long interest in exploring the emotional xv and scientific territory of mood disorders, andmost important, for my purposes hereas a mother.

My own experience with depression began at the age of roughly thirteen. Any number of things might have triggered it, since theres evidence of depression on both sides of my family, but as it happened, it was a car accident and the scars it left on my face that sent me into the hole. The first time wasnt terrible, and I got over it, but there was a next time, and a time after that, and each time was a little bit worse than the one before. I spent the next twenty years trying not to admit there was a problem, trying to outrun it, looking for psychic wound dressings in the form of relationships or workaholism or drugs. I could not admit to myself that I had developed a mental illness until I heard the click of the lock on the door to the psychiatric ward at Georgetown University Hospital in February 1990. I was on the wrong side of that door, very much against my willan acutely suicidal single woman of thirty-four whose normal facade had finally cracked wide open.

Several years later, I wrote a memoir of my experience of coming to terms with this illness. I wrote it as a person who had managed to fairly effectively conceal my problem from myself and others, out of shame, for many years. I was trying to say: This illness is not what you think. You can be dying and still work a fifty-hour week. The book was later translated into three languages and anthologized, which told me that it had helped a lot of people put a name to their own problemone that perhaps they had, as I had, stereotyped as a narrow set of symptoms, or as the kind of thing that happened only to tortured geniuses or street people. After that, I thought, Im done with this subject now; I can write about other things.

And I did. But what eventually brought me back was a life change I had thought of as completely unrelated: becoming a mother. Before I was a mother, depression was merely an illness, something I had learned to manage the way people with high blood pressure or diabetes learn to manage their conditions. I didnt always manage it effectively, but its impact on my life was confined to me and my husband, and there were long periods of remission when I felt fine. At its worst, depression could derail my work, but between 1990 and 1996, that happened only twice: once when I was hospitalized, and another two-week period four years later. If anything, work was a useful distraction during times of feeling bad. It helped hold me together.

But becoming a mother is a profound transformation. It blurs the boundary between self and child, this new being so recently of your body and, for a while, so utterly dependent on it. And even as that dependence decreased and my child grew, and she was joined by a sibling, it began to dawn on me that something else had blurred: the relationship between my illness and my work. Because motherhood was work, and I was a mother; my new work was now me. Children do not willingly settle for a piece of you; they want you, the whole deal, including those parts of yourself that you think of as ugly or which you would give anything to hide. My new job was not something I could use to distract myself during times of depression. Now my depression had a direct and daily impact on my childrenmay have begun affecting them even before they were bornand this had potentially profound consequences.

At the same time, motherhood brought me a new closeness with my own motherwho, as it happened, suffered a debilitating stroke the year before my first child was born. In the process of closing my mothers house and moving her to an assisted living facility, I went through piles of letters, pictures, boxes of old schoolwork. Memories that I had long ago stored away came to the surface, and elements of my family history that I had not known or had seemed unimportant began to take on new meaning. As pieces of my mothers life began coming into focus, I began to really see her struggle for the first time, and to understand how much my life had been shaped by it. My perception of my own illness began to change. The family myth was wrong: I was not the unstable or wild one of the family, but part of something that began to look very much like a pattern. I saw it in my mother; I heard it in the wistful words of one of my mothers old friends, who told me, Ruth was never the same after my sister and I were born. I found it in the descriptions of daily life written by my mothers sister when they were both new mothers fifty years ago. I recognized it in my fathers mother, who had spent the better part of my fathers childhood secluded in her bedroom after her youngest child was killed in a freak household accident. This was in the 1930s, the era of eugenics, when people with mental illness could find themselves institutionalized or sterilized or simply unemployable. As in many families, depression in my family had been hiding in plain view all along.

And I remembered how, as children do, I had picked up on things adults thought I did not know: by reading a tone of voice, by sensing emotional distance, by becoming the victim of emotions my childish narcissism made me think I had caused, by inventing stories so that these things would make sense. I saw this with a kind of double visionas child, as mother. And I realized my own children were probably doing the same things.

If I wanted to break this generational pattern, I realized, I had to know what I was dealing with. Eventually, I began to think of what I was looking at as a kind of depression that nobody had adequately described. I began to call it maternal depression.