It’s about here that I’m convinced that I’m losing my mind. Increasingly, the world is becoming emotionally surreal. I start to hear music, random little snippets of songs that I haven’t thought about in years. Some are commercial jingles from my childhood, some are old standards from my Bette Midler phase. The only one that sticks with me is “I just dropped in; to see what condition my condition was in,” as done by Willie Nelson. I can’t turn them off. I’m also getting weird visual disturbances. If I turn my head too quickly, it takes the images a couple of seconds to catch up.
I call my OB, who should be on the speed dial by now. She recommends a local shrink who specializes in postpartum depression. She also asks if I’m hearing voices. “No,” I say, because it’s the truth. Songs aren’t really voices, are they? But I don’t mention that I’m starting to think that I may be hearing voices by this time tomorrow, if I can’t figure out what to do.
I call the shrink, who doesn’t have an available appointment for two weeks. I take it, but don’t think I can make it another twenty-four hours without some help. I start to feel vaguely let down by my medical care. My OB can’t seem to help me in any meaningful way, other than to simply give me drugs. I can’t see the psychiatrist when my need is the greatest. I don’t know what to do, other than cry, which is the only thing I seem to be good at right now.
My doula calls, because she seems to have premonitions about these sorts of things. She sensibly tells me that I need to get someone to stay with me during the day until I am functional again. I agree, and make an appointment to meet a postpartum doula at noon the next day. My doula also suggests that I get out and take a walk, that sometimes daylight can help reset the body’s clock. But it has started to rain again. Sunshine is in short supply this summer.
I call my husband, who comes home with a roll of work-related blueprints to decipher. He’s (a) concerned and (b) doesn’t quite know what I’ll do if left alone. I don’t either. I don’t know where I am anymore, like the best parts of me left my body with the afterbirth. I am hollow.
From my journal, July 10:
“Two weeks old today. Hopefully, at 4:44 p.m. [the time you were born], you will still be sleeping—otherwise I will tell you happy birthday.
“Unfortunately, your mommy seems to have taken after her mommy’s side of the family and sunk into a deep dark hole where she can’t sleep or think or feel. I love you so much but can’t express any of it. And now I’m marching under the orders of Zoloft and sleeping pills—one of the last things I wanted to have happen. While I wouldn’t trade you for the world—this experience has been nothing like I expected. I suppose the option is to stop having expectations, but that wouldn’t be me.
“Your father, however, is a saint.
“Today we are having thunderstorms and the power just went out. The storms are soothing, somehow, and the quasi-darkness is comforting.”
I don’t sleep that night, despite the ingestion of an Ambien and some Scotch left over from my thirtieth birthday. I watch the baby’s limbs flail. I watch the cats watching the baby’s limbs flail. The ceiling fan starts to look like a giant spider, the hairy kind with big, venom-filled fangs. My mind picks easy symbols for my inner universe. Even my breakdowns are trite. I cry. I want it all to stop, the tears, the insomnia, the failure, the feeling. I want to be empty, but there is just too much garbage ever to feel new and clean. I am worthless.
The night passes, but just barely.
Scott, after he wakes up, takes one look at me and suggests we call his mother to see if she’ll come back down. He looks shaken, not like himself. Later, when pressed, he describes my appearance as “vacant.”
He absolutely has to go to work that morning, but leaves a message for his mom, who is currently at work. I promise him that I can make it until he can come home in the afternoon. I also promise that I will call my OB again and be brutally honest with her.
Before he leaves, I jump in the shower. I suddenly remember my mom’s old razor that always rested in the shower of whatever apartment we lived in. It was the old-school type, a black plastic handle with a shiny metal head. You unscrewed the bottom to put new blades in. As a toddler, I was fascinated by it, so much so that I once picked it up by the sharp end, slicing the palm of my hand in a couple of places. Even more magnetic were the small white rectangles of paper-wrapped razor blades. They were in a spring-loaded container and you could pop them out and push them back in without hurting yourself. Unless, of course, the paper tore. Then you could do some damage.
All that I have in my shower are cheap disposables. They are just barely sharp enough to remove leg stubble, much less break the skin. But there are knives in the kitchen.
I can see the blood running down my hands, like stigmata. It mixes with the shower water and drips, pinkly, off of my fingertips. I am so tired. Now I can rest.
But I can’t, not really. My wrists are whole. There is no blood. Just me, in the shower, with some Dial soap and a bath poof.
“You okay?” Scott asks, with that furrow he gets between his eyebrows when he’s thinking very hard. “You were in there a while.”
“I’m fine,” I lie. “But I don’t know what to do next.”
We call my OB and get her answering service. After I again promise that I will keep it together until he gets back, Scott leaves for work. I wait, hands clenched in my lap, and hope someone calls me back soon.
6
Crazy mothers are nothing new.
The earliest may be Margery Kempe, born in 1373 (or so). Kempe has long been ballyhooed in academic circles as the first woman to write an autobiography. Since she was illiterate, as most woman and poor men were at the time, she is technically the first woman ever to dictate an autobiography.
Kempe, the daughter of a burgess, was hailed by some as a Christian mystic/martyr who was visited by the Almighty in order to educate others about the true nature of evil. For me, at least, it’s most telling that Kempe’s first round of visions hit her just after the birth of her first child. At the time, she owned a brewery but her beer went flat because she disappointed the Lord. After her childbed madness and busted business, Kempe took to the road as a preacher, spreading the word to others that true joy would be found only after death.
Her wanderings were met with hostility. Frequently, Kempe was told to “give up this life you lead, and go and spin, and card wool, as other women do” (as quoted in Roy Porter’s book Madness). She did, in a sense, devote herself to fiber crafts and took to wearing a hair shirt while additionally shunning all sexual contact with her spouse. Eventually, they received the medieval equivalent of a divorce. He agreed to give up any rights to her body in exchange for her paying off all of his debts, which, if nothing else, proves that patterns of human behavior tend not to change.
Kempe began to have more visions and, according to Porter, “these were accompanied by the copious bouts of weeping which attended her to the end of her days…. Her weeping bouts were detested, she was called a ‘false hypocrite’ and her friends were advised to abandon her. Furthermore, she was accused of having the Devil in her and of being a ‘false Lollard,’ that is, heretic. But such trials enhanced her awareness of the divine indwelling. When she heard mention of Christ’s Passion, she would swoon in ecstasy and experience divine music.”
Eventually, Kempe made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, where she came unglued completely. Some observers believed her to be an epileptic. Others thought her possessed by evil spirits. Her fellow English travelers thought she was faking it simply to be a nuisance. Kempe was booted from their party and ran the risk of being chucked in jail for behavior unbecoming to a wife and mother. After this trial, she “married” God in a vision and announced her chastity to all but Him. She still wrote of the fleshy temptations sent to her by the Devil, but her confessors helped keep her on the righteous path.
So did God actually speak to Kempe or was she simply insane? From the scant evidence we have, I can step onto a shaky limb and say
that sounds like classic postpartum psychosis. All of her mania can be dated to the birth of her first child, she was hearing voices, and frequently suffered from crying spells. But my immediate response to people who believe that God is talking to them directly is to leap to the conclusion that they’re completely nuts. The line between madness and religious experience has always been vague, but I am probably not the most impartial judge on this matter. If you ask me, a priest, and a women’s studies PhD, you’ll get three wildly different answers.
Regardless of whether or not Kempe was truly one enchilada short of a combo plate or simply God-touched, she wasn’t the first woman to lose her mind after having a baby. But these women are hard to dig up. First, history has a tendency to ignore women in general unless they do something spectacular or globally noteworthy. While I can find a couple of dozen diaries from average men in any given century, the average woman, apart from the odd midwife or nun, kept fairly quiet, partly because she was illiterate. Their lives were in the private sphere, confined mostly to child and hearth behind closed doors. Plus, it’s hard to track someone who loses her name when she gets married and simply becomes Mrs. John Doe.
Second, and perhaps most important, madness tends to be shoved under the rug because it is so stigmatized. No one has known what to do about the insane for most of modern history. Various remedies have been imposed—from turning them loose in the countryside to eugenics to radical surgeries to asylums to chemicals and electronics—but none has ever really proven to be all that effective. And most right-thinking people were disinclined to study the mentally ill, because the condition has long been believed to be the patient’s fault, either because she didn’t live a fine, upstanding life or because she was being punished by God. The question of what to do with the insane is still a very real concern, one with no clear answers.
Third, and perhaps the aspect we talk about the least, is that most crazy people are scary to the outside observer, objects of fear and derision rather than compassion. The mentally ill are unpredictable and capable of inhuman acts. That’s part of the definition. If you have a mental illness, you have lost some control of your thought processes, emotions, or moods. As Hinkley or Dahmer or Booth proved, crazy people are capable of violence, sometimes on a massive scale. And it’s worse somehow if you’re a mother, that paragon of nurturing virtue who could never harm a hair on the head of a child, much less drown one in the tub to drive out the devils that only she sees. Here’s the one person in society who is looked on as pure and loving and she turns out to be just as human as everyone else, subject to the same perversions we all are. It’s subversive and un-American. Next we’ll find out that baseball players cheat and that apple pie is actually French. Mothers who go mad are a terrifying paradigm shift, on the order of priests who fondle young boys. Sweeping it all under the rug is less terrifying than looking the reality in the face, because this face seriously messes with our worldview.
“I reluctantly enclose application filled out for admission of my mother,” wrote a respected bank employee to the superintendent of the Wisconsin Hospital for the Insane in 1875. “Of late she has grown materially worse, so that we deem it unsafe for the female portion of the family to be left alone with her during the day and especially for the little 2 year old that is obliged to remain continually there, as she has stated several times of late that she or the children must be sacrificed. Should she destroy another us [sic] could never forgive ourselves if the state has a place provided for their comfort and possible need” (from Gerald N. Grob’s Mental Illness and American Society, 1875–1940).
The women who made it to an asylum were the lucky ones. Most were left to their own devices with disastrous results. A Philadelphia woman, Marie Noe, was believed to be the most unlucky mother alive, a title bestowed on her by Life magazine in 1963. Starting in 1949, Noe had ten kids, each of whom died. Their deaths were chalked up to SIDS, a condition that we still don’t know all that much about. But we do know that an adult can suffocate a child with relative ease and without detection. All of her babies died when Noe was the only one in the house with them. At the time, no one raised an eyebrow, but years later, the case ignited the investigatory fires of Jamie Talan and Richard Firstman, whose 1997 book The Death of Innocents: A True Story of Murder, Medicine, and High-Stake Science caused the Noe case to be reopened. In 1999, Noe confessed to killing eight of her ten kids. The now 70-year old Noe struck a plea bargain and was sentenced to twenty years’ probation. With this case and with so many like it, we may never know whether the mother is profoundly cursed by the baby gods or smothered her own kids in a postpartum haze. But it does make one wonder what the real statistics may be.
Not all mothers who lose their minds will kill their kids. Most won’t, in fact. About 80 percent of new mothers suffer from what is called the baby blues, mild periods of weeping and emotional instability that clears up during the first two postpartum weeks. It isn’t fun, of course, but it isn’t debilitating. Next on the scale is postpartum depression, which gets worse after the first two weeks and affects up to 20 percent of new mothers, one in every five. It is characterized by the classic clinical depression symptoms like insomnia, diminished interest in almost every activity, anxiety, excessive guilt, panic attacks, and suicidal thoughts.
With each passing year, these depressed mothers are also more likely to get the kind of help that they need, because postpartum depression has become more recognized. It’s still shameful, of course, but thanks to high-profile confessions from luminaries such as Brooke Shields and Marie Osmond, the condition is reluctantly being accepted as a real medical emergency rather than a character flaw.
But the most debilitating form of postpartum mental illness is postpartum psychosis. It grabs all the headlines because it is unusual and, if left untreated, gruesome. Andrea Yates, the Houston mom who drowned her kids, is the classic example of psychosis. Less than 1 percent will develop this illness, but its symptoms are hard to deny. It is marked by hallucinations, delusions (frequently, these involve religious imagery), and disordered thought. This manifestation of mental illness is a medical emergency. It won’t vanish on its own. It is not the result of a weak character or moral flaw. It can’t just be walked off. Psychosis is as serious as a stroke and, finally, decent treatments exist for it that do work.
Sadly, no such treatments existed in West Virginia during the early 1900s. Crazy mothers had no place to go and would frequently vanish when the psychological burdens became too overwhelming. One such woman was my great-grandmother Elizabeth Flowers Hender-shot Cain, who abandoned her three kids—one of whom was Nell, my grandmother—under mysterious circumstances. We’ve never known much about Elizabeth. We know that she had Nell, the middle child, in 1912, which would have made Elizabeth sixteen years old then. The first child, Ruth, must have been born when Elizabeth was thirteen or fourteen, which boggles my mind. At thirteen, I was still playing with Barbies.
The only picture that anyone can find of Elizabeth shows a big-eyed woman in an even bigger flowered hat. A tall blond man wearing a suit, a striped dress shirt, and a tie stands behind her. There are two little girls—maybe ages five and eight—in the foreground. They have on white dresses, white tights, white hair bows, and black boots. One of the little girls looks like Nell, and by extension, then, also looks like my mother, my daughter, and me. Judging by the clothes, I’d pin the year somewhere in the late 1910s or early 1920s, which would be about right. Elizabeth would have been in her mid-twenties, then.
But here’s the real kick in the head. I can’t promise you that any of this is true. The picture is undated and unlabeled. My mother found it in a box with nine dozen other snapshots, which were discovered after my grandfather died a few years ago. The people in this picture could be almost anyone, despite the fact that one of them looks like a relation. And, importantly, the youngest kid, a boy, is missing. He may simply have not been alive when the photo was snapped, in which case my dates are probably off. Or it may be that this
photo is of someone my granddad knew at the dairy or in Colorado or is something he bought at a thrift store for a nickel because he liked the lady’s hat. It’s all a big mystery.
While every life has meaning to someone, Elizabeth wasn’t the kind of woman who made much of a mark on the larger world. Given that no one in my immediate family even thought about this great-grandmother until a decade ago, after my cousin Julie had her first child and her first bipolar episode, we have made remarkable progress discovering information about her. The little information we have scraped together at this late date is all we’re ever going to get.
No one even knows where Elizabeth is buried, or what she did before she died, or where she spent most of her life. My mom and the sisters knew only that she had died in 1955 or ’56, and that information was only gleaned by remembering how distraught Nell had been when she received a letter from home that mentioned that her mother had died. No one ever talked about Elizabeth before then or, truth be told, much after that. She never really existed in their minds until they were much older and found the silences suspicious.
Nonetheless, dry facts about Elizabeth’s death were easy to find, once I found the right person to ask. She died on January 9, 1956, and had just celebrated her fifty-ninth birthday. She died in a house on Third Street, which was near the flood wall in downtown Parkersburg. Today, it’s the site of a car dealership, but, then, it was probably the seediest area this tiny town had. Her official place of residence was with her sister, Carrie Smart, of Columbia Avenue. Elizabeth’s occupation was housewife, but her state of “conjugal relations” was divorced. The principal cause of death was listed as “chronic alcoholism,” which very well may have been the case. Family rumors allege that she drank to combat the depressions that routinely beset her. Given how many of her descendants wrestle those demons, it’s an easy rumor to believe. But not an easy one to prove.
Hillbilly Gothic Page 10