When Love Hits a Wall

Sometimes it’s better just to acknowledge what we don’t understand.

I’m in Indy this week for our Law & Liberty editorial retreat. It’s been good, but after a full day of meetings I don’t quite have the juice for the essay I was planning to write. Next week school is starting, and I’m going to move into a series of more substantive political essays. But for now, I am pulling out an old piece that happens to be highly relevant to a ridiculous debate presently raging on social media. This is the “postpartum mental illness” insanity.

It began with the case of Lindsay Clancy, a postpartum mother who killed her own children. I will not be giving an opinion on that case. I haven’t read the details; I never read those stories. You could say, if you like, that I find them a bit “triggering.”

Even beyond that, I don’t pretend to understand postpartum mental illness. I have experienced it, but I don’t understand it. It’s awful in ways that go far beyond the ordinary. No pat explanation seems sufficient to capture the horror. There are unfortunately quite a few people (overwhelmingly men) dancing around online opining that “mothers mainly have this problem because they’re spoiled and selfish la la la feminism,” and I just… OK. Sure. You’ve clearly got this all figured out.

So I had four babies, and wiped out only with my fifth one. It was a difficult pregnancy, and some difficult months afterwards, but as I say in this piece, “I really thought I was fine until I definitely wasn’t.” I careened full-speed into that wall. I’m fine now; people helped me and I’m grateful. The clinical term is “postpartum OCD.” It’s a postpartum condition wherein mothers experience powerful, involuntary mental images (“intrusive thoughts” is the shrink’s term) of themselves harming their own children. It’s easily, hands-down, the worst thing I’ve ever experienced.

When Fairer Disputations asked me to write this piece, the overture was something like this: “Hey, we sort had the impression that you got into fitness in your forties and found it really helpful. Would you like to write about that as a January piece?”

I thought about it, and decided: OK, I guess I’m willing to tell this story. But, you should be warned up-front. It’s dark. When people start running in their 40s, they’ve often got some demons chasing them. That was definitely true for me.

They told me to fire ahead. This was what I wrote. It’s the most personal piece I’ve ever written, but then, what would you expect? It was the worst experience of my life.

Here’s a memory I didn’t include in the piece, not relevant to the “fitness” theme but of far greater relevance to Christendom Reborn. A week or so after It All Started, I came to the day when I habitually go to Confession. Usually this is a fairly humdrum affair, kind of a “workaday Moral Progress Report.” Obviously, there was nothing workaday about this occasion; I was in a true state of crisis. I hadn’t told anyone yet about the horror in my head, because really? These aren’t the kind of thoughts you want to speak aloud. I was frantically trying to reason or pray my way out of them. But I hadn’t remotely succeeded, and that made Confession a very awkward affair. What was I supposed to say? I felt like a moral monster. But I hadn’t actually done anything that I could confess.

I considered skipping my weekly Confession, because I wasn’t ready to vocalize the problem and wasn’t remotely capable of a competent moral analysis. However, I wanted the grace so very badly. I was desperate for it. It felt like the worst possible time to skip Confession.

So, I went. I don’t at all remember what I said. I’m sure it was terse, well-rehearsed, and utterly incomprehensible to the priest. In effect, I think I described my situation in extremely abstract terms, surely incomprehensible, but a wild shot-in-dark plea for some kind of help. It probably was not “a good confession” in the technical sense.

But the priest listened patiently. When I finished, he was silent for a moment. Then he said, very gently, “You know, Jesus loves you.”

That’s not how a confessor usually begins. It’s never happened to me before or since.

Obviously, he had discerned what I needed to hear. I think good priests are a bit like spiritual triage professionals that way; they can tell when someone is in a real state of crisis. I wasn’t crying or hyperventilating; I had successfully held things together enough to keep my private hellscape private for the past several days. But even though he had no clear sense of what my problem was, he perceived the part that mattered.

I remember turning it all over in my mind afterwards and realizing, “If I’d just told him everything, he wouldn’t have called me a monster. He wouldn’t even have yelled at me. He would still have told me that Jesus loved me, and then probably told me to get help.”

The next day I got help. I told my husband about it. Then I called my doctor. They really can help you with this problem, but whew. It really doesn’t feel that way in the moment.

What would have happened if I hadn’t had so many lifelines to reach for? How long until “intrusive thoughts” and reality started to merge? I don’t enjoy this line of reflection, so I’m going to stop there and as I say. I am not an “advocate” for any particular view on this subject. I don’t pretend to understand it, and to call the experience “humbling” would be something of a comical understatement. I do know this, though. Childbearing is hard. You effectively give your entire body over to the cause of perpetuating life and what happens after that is, to a very great extent, not up to you. People aren’t necessarily “selfish” for wiping out. Sometimes love just does that to you.

In the end, all I really have to say about any of this is: Lord, have mercy.