Woman Who Thought too Much, The

by Limburg, Joanne

  I didn’t remember reading anything about this before the birth, and nobody had told me about it either. And as they hadn’t warned me that I might become hypothyroid after the birth, they hadn’t gone on to tell me that, if I did, it would most probably affect my milk supply. That, at least, had been no fault of mine.

  Now that I knew I was ill, I became aware that I felt ill, deeply ill, down-to-the-bones ill. Early one evening I found myself standing in the middle of our living room holding our son and sobbing, ‘I can’t do this any more! I can’t do it! I can’t!’ I might have asked my mother to come up for a couple of weeks, but she was away on holiday, so we phoned a nanny agency and asked if they might send us some temporary help. Alison arrived with her nineteen-month-old daughter, Saskia; they took to my baby straight away, and he to them. They would take him off my hands for two days a week for the next year, and I would spend the last of my inherited money paying them to do it. I felt hugely relieved to be able to put my son into such a safe pair of hands – a safer pair, I felt, than mine – but the relief was shadowed with a sense of failure, and a jealousy so intense it was almost physical: ‘. . . no sooner have I given [the baby] to Alison, than I yearn for him back again, even though I don’t feel up to it, not at all. Once more he recedes from me. He was slowly anyway, as I was slowly sinking, & Chris was doing more and more . . . And [he] seems to look at me, me in particular, more & more. He’s so trusting, & so beautiful, & he smiles beautifully, showing/making two little apple cheeks. How I want to be his proper mother.’

  Compared to other new mothers, ‘I feel that I’m trying to mother in some universe parallel to the one they’re inhabiting. One with darker, denser matter. How could I ever begin to explain?’ It was ‘time to break into poetry’, now that I had two baby-free days to do it in:

  Love

  Sickness came to baffle love,

  exhaustion to unravel love.

  Some let pity overwhelm them;

  others are stirred to practical love.

  Your mother is not adequate.

  She has to buy and bottle love.

  As fast as we can spoon it in,

  you piss and puke and dribble love.

  Did I ever smile like this,

  beaming my uncritical love?

  With such unstable chemistry,

  we struggle to assemble love.

  The hypothyroidism explained my physical symptoms. I hoped it might explain all the mental goings-on as well, the prey-animal anxiety, the morbid thoughts, the way my view of my baby was obstructed always by cobwebby curtains of fear. I hoped that, as my thyroxine dose was raised and my TSH came down, I would no longer have any reason to suspect that Evil was a real presence in the world, and that there was some particular weakness in me that meant I had to struggle not to be possessed by it.

  Cognitive psychologists use the term ‘thought-action fusion’ (TAF) to refer to two kinds of beliefs which are noticeably common among obsessive patients: firstly, that one can ‘tempt fate’, and make a bad thing more likely to happen by thinking about it, and secondly, that to have a thought about doing something bad is somehow tantamount to doing it, so that the thought, whatever it is, is every bit as ‘immoral’, or ‘evil’ as the act itself. Ben, the cognitive behavioural therapist I had seen a few years earlier, had been fond of reminding me that ‘thoughts are just thoughts’: the appearance of a mental image of a lorry crushing my skull did not in any way increase the risk of my skull’s being crushed in the real world, no matter how vivid and distressing I found it. I must have forgotten his telling me this, or ceased to believe it, or perhaps never believed it in the first place, because when certain images came into my mind, say of my stamping on the baby’s neck, or dashing his brains out against the wall, or gouging out one of his beautiful blue eyes, or pushing his buggy under a bus, or pressing a pillow into his face, or holding him under the bathwater until he drowned, or throwing him out of his bedroom window, or stabbing him, or dousing him in boiling water, or any number of other terrible things, I knew with certainty that these were evil thoughts, and that I was an evil mother, capable of the most evil things.

  Nothing helped. Knowledge of my own established patterns of cognitive behaviour prior to giving birth didn’t help, and neither did my psychoanalytically informed understanding of the unavoidable violence of the human psyche, and of the effect the unprocessed emotional outbursts of an infant could have on the ‘unanalysed’ parts of its mother. If anything, my psychoanalytical leanings probably exacerbated my distress, as they made me inclined to discount – to almost overlook – my complete lack of any conscious desire to harm my child. That the images were present in my mind, meant that I harboured an unconscious ‘wish’ to carry out the actions they depicted; that they were so immediate, so vivid, had to mean that that wish was so powerful that all my defences and resistances were struggling to keep it in check. I had been taught that the ‘unconscious wish’, in the Freudian sense, is a slippery concept, something far more ambiguously and ambivalently and subtly held than the kind of wish which a fairy godmother grants in a pantomime, but that didn’t help either. My wishes were evil, as straightforwardly evil as the spurned wicked fairy’s desire that a good and beautiful baby should grow up to prick her finger on a spindle, and languish, in some kind of enchanted vegetative state, for a hundred years.

  No, they were more evil than that the wicked fairy is only doing what is expected of her, but a mother is expected above all to protect her child from harm. A mother who desires to harm her child is an unmother, an anti-mother, the mother in opposition to whom all good mothers are defined. My proper place was in the back of a Black Maria as it drove away from court, the angry crowd spitting on it and shouting into branded microphones that there went the most evil woman in Britain, that they should bring back hanging, and that if I were ever mistakenly released from prison they would do their best to hang me themselves.

  I think I knew – although of course it didn’t help – that what would make the righteous mob parents so animated was their fear of their own violent thoughts. Violent images, thoughts or impulses directed towards babies are so common that even the most bland of mainstream childcare manuals give them a token mention. As psychologists Ross and McLean put it in their paper ‘Anxiety Disorders during Pregnancy and the Postpartum Period’:

  The prevalence of such intrusive thoughts across diagnoses and in healthy community samples suggests that at subclinical levels, they may be a normal feature of new parenthood. Evolutionary theories propose that these thoughts may be adaptive in that they may cause the parents to be vigilant in protecting the infant from potential harm.

  It’s a fascinating idea that something that feels so abnormal could be not only a normal experience, but an ‘adaptive’ one. I found it very comforting too; when I read the paper, I highlighted it. I had been convinced that, even if other people had thoughts of harming the child, they could hardly be as violent, vivid or simply as numerous as mine were. In my case, the thoughts were a sign of my essential unfitness for motherhood, and I was afraid that if I confessed them to my health visitor or GP, I would lose my child. This was my own private struggle with the Dark Side, and I would have to face it alone.

  Whether or no the compulsive tendency expresses itself in thought or action the patient persists in regarding himself as evil. It is characteristic of him that he tends to reject the reassurances one offers. He is unimpressed by soothing statements that these are only symptoms. Such emollients ease for the moment, then the pain returns. Often he believes that his thoughts are of the devil. The best that he will allow is that he is bad or mad. It is as though the obsessional patient is a battleground between good and evil and that he recognises himself as such.40

  Asking for reassurance about the evil thoughts could be risky, so my chief strategies on the battleground were rumination and avoidance. The rumination wasn’t so bad; it just meant that I spent rather a lot of time completely dead to my surroundings, while I follow
ed another crucial but tangled line of thought. My son didn’t move in any direction until just before his first birthday, when he figured out how to bottom shuffle backwards, so I wasn’t putting him in any danger while I went off on my inner wanderings. It was the avoidance that made life difficult, or, at any rate, rather restricted. The responsibility of keeping my child safe had weighed heavily on me from the moment I suspected that I was pregnant with him, but while he remained inside my body, I’d had no choice but to take the lion’s share of it. Now that I was no longer carrying him, I could find ways of easing the burden.

  I could ease it by leaving the house as little as possible. As far as the baby was concerned, the ABYSS extended all the way to the front door, and I needed all the courage I could muster just to wheel him round to another mother’s house, or to the local shops, what with all the hard pavements and roads and potentially clumsy or malevolent human beings standing between the door and our destination, not to mention all the opportunities to commit acts of involuntary infanticide along the way. Wheeling him into town was one long nightmare; taking a bus into town was an impossibility as it had been during pregnancy. Changing him outside the house was out of the question, because if I didn’t throw him onto a hard floor I might fail to prevent him falling onto it. If I walked past an HGV, I felt as if we were both being pulled under it. If I even thought about pushing the buggy alongside the river, I immediately pictured him sinking into it, buggy and all.

  Inside or outside, I could get some measure of relief by sharing responsibility, or passing it over altogether. As Alison took the baby out and about with her for two days a week, I didn’t have any need to pressure myself to take him out much on the days I had him. Sometimes, I accompanied her on trips out, and then I felt a little safer. Similarly, if the baby and I went out with my mother or Chris or another, calmer new mother, I could relax a little.

  Inside the house, there were other ways to delegate. Alison had already brought up nine small children; she was an expert at introducing solids, so I let her take the lead with that task, and make sure that my child learned to pass tinned mush from the front of his tongue to the back and then swallow it down without choking to death. Chris could carry the baby up and down the stairs. Chris could bathe the baby so that I didn’t run the risk of drowning him accidentally or involuntarily but murderously. Chris could provide reassurance about whichever thoughts I felt safe enough to share with him. Chris could put the drops in the baby’s eyes when he contracted conjunctivitis. Chris could get any necessary medicines into him orally too. Chris could hold him when he had his vaccinations. Chris could easily have throttled me, and easily escaped conviction.

  I could not so easily hand over the jealousy I felt, or the sense of failure. As a consolation, I kept one task to myself, and rocked the baby to sleep every night before we took him upstairs and put him down in his cot. Sometimes, I would stand up with him, singing and rocking, for half an hour or longer: it was my substitute for what I really longed to do, which was to feed him to sleep. After a year of this, my health visitor suggested, gently, that it might be time for him to learn to go to sleep by himself. ‘It’s a ritual,’ she said, ‘a habit, and you can replace it with another one.’ We bought a plastic star that played Brahm’s lullaby and projected a light show onto his bedroom ceiling, and used that instead. It felt like a second weaning.

  When I call that first year to mind, I always get a picture of myself sitting in the living room looking at my son in his bouncy chair while he sleeps or watches a Baby Einstein video or maybe chews one of his toys. I know how inaccurate this must be, because I have the notebooks, the poems and even the short story to prove it. I also have the article which the Poetry Society commissioned while I was still in the post-natal ward, and which I wrote, quite insanely really, as soon as I was out of the hospital. Shoved into the back of a filing cabinet are the notes I made for the evening course I taught that winter, and payslips from the Open College of Arts, for which I was doing the occasional bit of distance-learning tuition. That was also the year that I joined, and then began to chair, the local maternity services liaison committee, because I hadn’t managed to put my post-natal experiences behind me, and joining a committee seemed the most positive way of dealing with them. All this work brought in next to no income, and some of it – like the teaching – I almost hated, but most of it had been offered to me, and I still had a vestigial Party Girl to placate, so I took it, and felt ill, and did some of it badly.

  I had an idea for a novel too: it would be about a woman with a new baby who was going mad. Of course it would. The woman wasn’t going to be exactly like me, though, because she would suffer from severe post-natal depression, whereas I hadn’t. Truly I hadn’t: the health visitor had administered the Edinburgh post-natal depression scale at the appropriate time, and I’d checked out just fine.

  Round about my son’s first birthday, I went to the University Library to do my research on PND. I searched through the catalogue for suitable material and ordered a few books to be brought up to the Reading Room. One of them was the second volume of a collection of essays called Motherhood and Mental Illness; it was subtitled ‘Causes and consequences’, and was edited by an R. Kumar and one I.F. Brockington. I flicked through it, and on page eleven, under the heading ‘Other disorders occurring in the postnatal period’, I found the following passage:

  Disorders of the mother-infant relationship

  Obsessive thoughts of hostility to the infant

  Mothers with an anankastic [i.e. obsessive] personality may experience intrusive and distressing thoughts about their babies, including impulses to inflict bodily harm. Button, Reivich and Kan (1972) described 42 patients with ‘obsessions of infanticide’ in a review of 605 consecutive admissions and 712 outpatient referrals to Kansas Medical Center (3.4 % of psychiatric referrals). These thoughts coexist with a normal mother–infant relationship, though they may cause distress, and may lead to some avoidance of contact with the infant.

  Then they cited a case history about a woman who had

  these thoughts – evil thoughts blaming him for things which have happened, swearing at him, e.g. ‘bloody baby.’ She was considerably distressed by the thoughts, but otherwise well. The nature of these thoughts as obsessional phenomena was explained to her, and she was advised to label them as ‘stupid irrational ideas’, not to feel ashamed of them, but rather to react with amusement at the tricks her mind was playing on her. This helped her a good deal. The thoughts worried her less and became less frequent.41

  And I thought, Oh.

  37. In the interests of fairness, I feel I should add at this point that if I could spend my life with a tube of gas and air shoved down my throat, there is almost nothing in the world that could distress me at all. Does anyone know where you can score some?

  38. Or is that Swedish? Never mind.

  39. M. Sara Rosenthal, The Thyroid Sourcebook (Lowell House, Los Angeles, 4th edition, 2000, p. 4)

  40. Arthur Guirdham, Obsession, Psychic Forces and Evil in the Causation of Disease (Neville Spearman Ltd, London, 1972)

  41. R. Kumar and I.F. Brockington, Motherhood and Mental Illness (Academic Press, London, 1982)

  Brain

  35. My brain constantly goes its own way, and I find it difficult to attend to what is happening around me.

  The Padua Inventory

  ———

  Brain: an apparatus with which we think that we think.

  Ambrose Bierce

  I’ve told the library story so many times now that it’s refined down into an image of me running then and there from the Reading Room, across the river, round the corners of a college or two and straight into the GP’s surgery, but my journal entry makes it sound almost as if I blurted the thing out by accident.

  4/8/04

  Went to Dr this morning . . . there was a letter waiting telling me that my TSH was low & my dose needed reducing. When I went today I wound up telling her about my SCARY THOUGHTS & she do
ubled my Citalopram dose & referred me to a psychiatrist with a view to longer-term CBT. Knowing one’s OCD is preferable to suspecting it. She said I’d done very well to have a baby at all considering what I was dealing with. Wldn’t’ve dared tell her if I hadn’t come across my symptoms exactly in a post-natal illness book – when I told Mum I’d feared social workers she laughed like a drain.

  The doctor didn’t laugh. She did tell me, though, that in her opinion I was not a danger to my child. The next time I saw her, my health visitor said exactly the same thing. The truth – and it’s a very important truth, which is why I’m going to risk repeating myself here – is that OCD sufferers are at a very, very low risk of carrying through what they believe to be their criminal, perverted or evil impulses. Crimes are not usually committed by the over-conscientious, and the distress that accompanies these violent intrusive thoughts is a more reliable indicator of that sufferer’s characteristic behaviour and values than the thoughts are themselves. They were not, as I had feared they were, the deepest and truest parts of me. They were obsessional thoughts, symptoms of an illness; therefore my doctor increased my dosage and spoke to a psychiatrist about them.

  She sent me a note a few days later to say that the psychiatrist had ‘agreed with our plan of increasing the citalopram for now’. He wasn’t worried about me, though, and suggested that she postpone referral for a month at least, and see how I got on with the higher dose. In the meantime, I self-medicated with books and web articles. The more I learned about OCD and other OCD ‘spectrum’ disorders, the more I found to attribute to them: the glass penguin, the fear of losing my shoes, my ruminations in the past unreal conditional tense, the AIDS fears, the difficulty finishing essays, the slow note taking, the hypochondria, the preoccupations I’d had with the shortness of my legs and the imagined unacceptability of my nose – so much. The Os in my OCD were easy to identify and I had certainly had plenty of them. It took me longer to figure out what my Cs might be. Depending on one’s point of view, I might not have had any at all; some of the writers of books and websites talked about a variety of OCD which they called ‘pure O’: obsessive thoughts, no compulsions as such. Compulsions are classically defined as rituals, mental or physical, which must be performed in a particular way in order to ward off the anxiety generated by the obsessive thought which usually precedes them. Hand washing and checking, of locks or switches, are the obvious examples, but compulsions can also take the form of touching, counting, making lists, saying or writing a certain phrase over and over again, thinking a ‘good’ thought to neutralize the ‘bad’ one, walking through gates or doorways in a certain fashion or a certain number of times – any act can become a compulsion, if it is compulsively performed. I wasn’t into washing my hands, or making lists, or counting, or touching. Instead, I responded to my obsessions with rumination and avoidance. So, did I have pure O?