Inconsolable by Marrit Ingman
#51 in my 2007 book challenge was Marrit Ingman’s Inconsolable: How I Threw my Mental Health out with the Diapers.
To borrow her phrase, reading this book made me wonder if Marrit Ingman had been reading my mail.
A good friend, and post-partum depression survivor, lent it to me in the wake of my own struggle with PPD after the birth of Guppy, now 21 months old. Ingman is smart, funny, and often brutally honest about the often ugly underbelly of new motherhood. From a birth that deviated from plan to a rash-y, colic-y infant, Ingman’s experience was so physically and emotionally exhausting that I can’t imagine anyone going through it and NOT becoming depressed. Shifting hormones, sleep deprivation, and the bewilderment of breastfeeding are just a few of the circumstances that make new motherhood less than idyllic.
Ingman details the exhaustion, the ambivalence, the recurring regrets, the suicidal thoughts, and the waves of anger that were all part of her experience. I empathized, I laughed, and I cringed at various points. The book sometimes felt a little disjointed; it’s more a collection of essays than a linear memoir. But the insights into the struggle, and the importance of surviving, are present throughout.
It is taboo for mothers to confess their anger, their confusion, their frustration, their resentment…Looking back now from a place of relative sanity, I see maternal anger everywhere, bubbling through the veneer of politesse, reaching out from inside the platitudinous language we turn to when we are confounded: “I thought I was going to lose my mind.”
I kept taking the Paxil. I started writing and here I am. I woke up to a rash and a screaming kid this morning at 3:30. It’s more manageable most days. You could say it’s better.
I’d discovered from my own experience socializing with other mothers that we could talk about just about anything other than mental illness. We could eat braised puppy and defecate on each other before the topic of PPD would come up.
You have become the person you sneered at when you were young and single and knew everything. You are That Mother.
“You’re very judgmental, you know,” The Good Therapist had pointed out one time. “Do you realize how critical you are of others? You think you’re smarter than everyone else.”
In the end, she reminds us of something I’ve written about many times. Mothers don’t need judgment, especially from other mothers; we need help. When you feel that snarky comment coming on, ask if there’s anything you can do, instead.
Mothers of the world, we’ve got to have each other’s backs. Without working together, we literally cannot survive. Because we are divided–into “working” and “stay-at-home” parents, into “natural” or “attachment” parents and “mainstream” parents–we remain marginalized as a group. We just haven’t noticed because we’re too busy shooting each other down, trying to glean little nuggets of self-satisfaction from an enterprise that is still considered less significant than paid work