Sugar and Spice and Everything Nice

Lately I have been wondering how my grandmother's generation and prior dealt with the challenges of motherhood. Becoming a parent is hands down the hardest job I have ever had, this coming from a middle school teacher. Just when I feel ridiculously frustrated or worried, I meet the stranger who looks at my daughters and tells me, "I remember those days. It wasn't easy."

The older sister modeling tummy time for the younger sister.

Eleven weeks postpartum with baby number two and a two year old, I am finding the fluctuation in hormone levels and the overwhelming shift of introducing a new person to the family also brings about postpartum depression and anxiety. When our first child was born, I powered through the symptoms. You tell yourself at first that you are merely sleep deprived and later stressed out from working full-time and then some on top of trying to keep a household together. Last time around I learned that when you fail to nip it in the bud, it can develop into clinical depression and anxiety, which is where I found myself last spring. The doctor I saw about a little over a year ago told me anyone who worked full-time, had a part-time job on the side, with an infant and a new puppy (that my husband agreed to train with all the enthusiasm of a twelve year old boy that has no idea what he just signed up for) would be sitting in that same chair. Enter new baby, and any progress I made in the past year on alleviating symptoms of anxiety and depression, while juggling full-time teaching and homemaker responsibilities less one part-time job (because no sane person keeps going at the same pace when overstretched) has quickly vanished.

But is this postpartum thing just a phenomenon of the added pressure women in my generation have to do it all? It turns out postpartum depression is not a modern ailment. Prior to World War II, this condition was known as insanity of lactation. Curiously enough, many women in the 19th century were afflicted with something called puerperal insanity. It came in three forms ranging from melancholic to manic: pregnancy, parturition, and lactation. In other words, women could show signs of mental illness from the beginning of pregnancy through nursing infants two years after birth (Williamson). The rate of diagnosis varied, but across the board it would seem some cases diagnosed were legitimate while some were likely other causes misdiagnosed as the generically used term of puerperal insanity.

For certain, the standards by which women were judged were not the same. To be specific, most commonly diagnosed was insanity of parturition. Typical symptoms of puerperal insanity were things like a woman "letting herself go", neglect of personal hygiene, and "indifference or hostility to children and/or husbands and women's tendency towards obscene expressions" (Theriot 74). Mild symptoms often reported within a few days after labor were "an intolerance of husband or child, a willful disregard of the doctor's directions, a peevish irritability of temper toward everybody, accompanied by restlessness, sleeplessness, and constipation" (Williamson). Severe symptoms of the manic form of this condition could range from behaviors like "incessant talking, sometimes coherent and sometimes not; an abnormal state of excitement, so that the patient would not sit or lie quietly; inability to sleep, with some patients having little or no sleep for weeks; refusal of food or medicine, so that many patients were fed by force; aversion to the child and/or the husband, sometimes expressed in homicidal attempts; a general meanness toward caretakers; and obscenity in language and sometimes behavior" (Theriot 73). Treatment typically consisted of "the removal of any discoverable cause, absolute rest of body and mind, freedom from the exhausting influences of talkative friends, weaning the baby and its removal form its mother's sight and hearing" (Williamson). If symptoms did not improve, usually a more severe case was diagnosed.

While we have a better understanding of the physical aspects of childbirth and any associated mental illnesses now, there is a mystery to the brain that modern medicine has yet to crack. Since psychology functions by defining what is abnormal, I am forever grateful that I am judged by 21st century standards. On any given day in the past few hazy, sleep-deprived months there has been neglect of personal hygiene, neglect of household duties, and you can only imagine my level of patience for family members on those really tired days. If we were basing a diagnosis off of 19th century standards, I am sure my husband would have grounds to have me committed. Thankfully, the modern day mom gets a free pass because motherhood is hard. Having a newborn is hard.

Yet the real symptoms of concern are the gut-wrenching feelings of panic involved with any social engagement including family, deep feelings of sadness, crying more than usual, and the inability to fall back asleep some nights despite being exhausted. Add to that the anxiety over knowing at some point in the near future a full-time job is waiting for me to take on even more responsibility after a twelve week maternity leave, pondering if it is really worth almost half of my monthly salary to rush my daughters off to a daycare where there could be issues, and knowing that my family cannot really afford to lose my income.

Which leaves me with the toughest decision I have ever had to make, tougher than I thought it would be. The pangs of guilt for not being there for your child when she gets hurt at daycare or having to walk away when she cries as you drop her off in the morning because she does not want you to leave her with a stranger are tough for a mom to take. Walking away from quite possibly the best teaching job I will ever have is not easy either. Yet there comes a time when you have to make the right decision for your family and what you are comfortable with in how you would like to raise your kids, but more importantly for you. For me, it would seem scaling back and taking care of me first for once is the right fit. And we are going on blind faith that it is the right decision.

Sources:
“Health | Infant-Killing and the Victorian Mother.” BBC News, BBC, 15 June 2003, news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/2985632.stm.

Loudon, I. “Puerperal Insanity in the 19th Century.” Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, vol. 81, Feb. 1968, pp. 76–79., ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1291468/pdf/jrsocmed00165-0018.pdf

Theroit, Nancy. “Diagnosing Unnatural Motherhood: Nineteenth-Century Physicians and 'Puerperal Insanity'.” American Studies, vol. 30, no. 2, 1989, pp. 69–88., journals.ku.edu/index.php/amerstud/article/viewFile/2472/2431

Williamson, A P. “Puerperal Insanity.” Transactions of the World's Congress of Homoeopathic Physicians and Surgeons, held under the auspices of the World's Congress Auxiliary of the World's Columbian Exposition, in Chicago, Ill., May 29 to June 3, 1893. archive.org/details/transactionsofwo00inte