Ordinary Insanity Read online

  ALSO BY SARAH MENKEDICK

  Homing Instincts

  Wild River Blues

  Copyright © 2020 by Sarah Menkedick

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

  Pantheon Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Name: Menkedick, Sarah, author.

  Title: Ordinary insanity: fear and the silent crisis of motherhood in America / Sarah Menkedick.

  Description: First edition. New York: Pantheon Books, 2020. Includes index.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019036726 (print). LCCN 2019036727 (ebook). ISBN 9781524747770 (hardcover). ISBN 9781524747787 (ebook).

  Subjects: LCSH: Mothers—Psychology. Motherhood—Psychological aspects. Postpartum psychiatric disorders.

  Classification: LCC HQ759.M465 2020 (print) | LCC HQ759 (ebook) | DDC 155.6/463—dc23

  LC record available at lccn.loc.gov/​2019036726

  LC ebook record available at lccn.loc.gov/​2019036727

  Ebook ISBN 9781524747787

  www.pantheonbooks.com

  Cover photograph by Lobro78/iStock/Getty Images

  Cover design by Janet Hansen

  ep_prh_5.5.0_c0_r0

  For Jorge

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Sarah Menkedick

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Introduction

  APRIL

  1 The Mother’s Brain

  2 Postpartum Mood Disorders

  JAMIE

  3 The Risk Society

  4 The Risks Not Taken

  WHITNEY

  5 The White Advantage

  6 Reproductive Rights

  SAMANTHA

  7 A Woman’s Role

  8 Institutionalized

  JACLYN

  9 Psychoanalysis

  10 Maternalism and Momism

  11 Empowerment

  MARNA

  12 Welfare

  13 Solidarity

  SONIA

  14 The Fruitful Darkness

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  About the Author

  Introduction

  Only one person warned me about what my life might look like after giving birth. Carlos—or Charly, as everybody called him—had the build and the face of an old tugboat. He wore little pageboy caps and often smoked a pipe. Charly, with his artiste’s mustache curled up at the ends, was the type to quote Borges on the street at seven a.m. when you ran into him hungover. Years after my husband Jorge and I left Oaxaca, where we’d first met Charly, he married and had a daughter. When we returned for a visit a few months into my pregnancy, we bumped into him at a café. He offered congratulations, then he told us: “You’ll go into some really dark places. Seriously. You’ll have to confront the darkest parts of yourself.” We nodded, and held that moment up as quintessentially Charly, a splash of artistic gravitas over huevos rancheros. Yet that was without a doubt the most humanizing and important insight anyone shared with me before my daughter’s birth.

  * * *

  —

  My fear had already begun by then, but like many women, I couldn’t separate it out from the set of “normal,” culturally and medically and socially solicited behaviors appropriate to new motherhood. I couldn’t draw a line where my fear crossed over into the darker territory of illness. Pregnant women in the United States live in a universe of risk divorced from everyone else’s reality; they operate on a dramatically reduced spectrum of human possibility, in which their behaviors, attitudes, and identities are carefully proscribed and charged with dangerous potential. Who wouldn’t want to protect their unborn child from exhaust? From the smell of gasoline? From plasticizers in shampoo and bodywash and hand lotion? From pesticides? From the radiation of airplanes? From the toxins in cat poop? Was there ever any reason to say: I’m not going to worry about this? To answer the question why risk it? with because I want to live a meaningful life? When women become new mothers, they can talk about how tired they are, about the insane costs and waiting lists of day cares, about their partner’s failure to cooperate in the ways they expected. What they do not talk about is their fear. They do not say, Every time I pick up my baby I see her crushed skull on the tile. They will not say, I don’t wear anything with buttons in case my baby grabs one and chokes.

  Fear—the debilitating and constant and I-know-it’s-crazy-but-I-can’t-stop kind of fear, fear that walls off the world and imprisons the self in a frantic scramble for control, fear that can never be satiated and that mimics care and love and intelligence so precisely it’s impossible to recognize as an impostor—is the last major taboo of American motherhood. Fear has become the way American mothers police, educate, and define themselves. It is the ritual with which they commemorate their transition to motherhood. It is tightly baked into the historical strata beneath their everyday lives. It is built into their very brains. But they don’t talk about it.

  When I began researching this book, I thought anxiety was a growing and underdiagnosed problem affecting a sizeable percentage of American mothers, myself included. Yet as I began talking to others, I found that I was in the middle of an epidemic of fear. Some women are unable to function because of it, some grapple with it as a familiar daily pressure, and others experience it as a milder subterranean hum. But, cumulatively, fear is having a devastating, corrosive effect on maternal well-being in the United States today.

  My life became a map showing the viral proliferation of disease, with red lines and dots expanding too far for me to trace. A conservative cousin in the suburbs of Cincinnati; a close friend in Seattle; a former colleague and now PhD student in California. On a plane, an older woman from West Virginia told me her daughter suffered from anxiety so extreme that she wouldn’t let her child go to birthday parties at other kids’ houses. “What is going on with your generation?” the woman asked me.

  Online, in a closed Facebook group I’d been invited to join, I discovered that the wife of one of my daughter’s preschool teachers was suffering from severe postpartum anxiety. Meanwhile, out in daily life in Pittsburgh, I would spot women from the support group I’d attended briefly: there was one in my daughter’s toddler music class; one at Target; one at the big summer concert series for families, dancing with her daughter and eating ice cream. All of these women throughout the city and the United States go about their daily lives, nodding at one another in the grocery store, all the while dogged by hidden and secret and constant worry.

  * * *

  —————

  This book is the culmination of several years of research, interviews, thinking, and personal struggle. It is built around the stories of women to whom I am forever grateful for spending untold hours with me on the phone or in person, guiding me over and over through their experiences so that I could convey them as accurately and vividly as possible. Per their request, I have changed several of their names and the names of their children.

  I spoke to neurobiologists about how the maternal brain changes throughout pregnancy and after birth, and here I argue that as a mother is building her infant she herself is also being remade and rewired, though very little attention has been paid to the science of he
r transformation. Interviewing psychologists, therapists, and academics, I discovered that the way “postpartum depression” (PPD) is defined and diagnosed is largely erroneous, and that the term itself does not begin to describe the struggles faced by the majority of new mothers: in particular, the fact that fear—not melancholia or apathy—will be their biggest tormentor, while simultaneously masquerading as good, smart, socially sanctioned parenting. I plunged into how risk during pregnancy and postpartum becomes a kind of manic obsession, and how the constant pursuit of zero risk to babies has created a toxic—and dangerous—culture for mothers. Researching the history of motherhood in the United States, I began to piece together the story of how motherhood shifted from a source of public, civic authority and power to a private identity and capitalist prize. I also discovered the role psychoanalysis has played in creating our modern obsession with the perfectly attuned, perfectly attached mother.

  Delving into the work of female writers and historians, I learned the myriad ways male experts and leaders throughout history have attempted to co-opt and control women’s reproductive power, from claiming that the fetus was actually fully formed in sperm to burning witches at the stake.

  Interviewing black midwives, mental health providers, and mothers, I was shocked to discover not only the significant body of research demonstrating how systemic racism impacts the health outcomes of black mothers and babies, but also the largely lost history of black midwifery. The latter is an illustrative example of how the power of women has been usurped by a myopic, medicalized, and often counterproductive model of care obsessed with certain risks and ignorant of others. I was immensely humbled by how much I did not know about the history of black motherhood in the United States, including the scope of the forced sterilization of women of color, the damaging and persistent stereotypes assigned to black mothers, and the way feminism and women’s movements have tended to neglect reproductive justice for all mothers in favor of reproductive choice for white women.

  Finally, I explored how the lack of community and ritual in American life impacts mothers, and how a transition that may very well be the most consuming and transformative of a woman’s life is largely unmarked and ignored by society, which focuses instead on the development of the perfect baby. I considered how central grief is to the experience of becoming a mother, and I found that women’s stories—more than therapists, medicine, or other medical interventions—are central to healing mothers, and to remaking and reclaiming motherhood.

  In the process of writing this book, I was consistently astounded by how little I knew about these psychological, neurobiological, historical, and cultural underpinnings of motherhood. Motherhood is relegated to the children’s section of bookstores and considered a topic for how-tos and pastel homages to stereotype, with a handful of notable exceptions. As I got deeper into the research and my relationships with the women whose stories are told here, I recognized motherhood as a deeply frightening, potent source of power—a recognition that came five years into my experience of motherhood, largely because I’d been so conditioned to assume that motherhood was more of a dull hindrance or a cute aside than a world-shattering awakening. Becoming a mother is one of the few experiences in life that really remakes a woman, that dramatically unsettles her center of gravity, and there is opportunity here: to connect, collaborate, elucidate new visions, and change the status quo. Mother’s stories are a missing piece in our culture, an ache we can’t pinpoint, a void papered over with platitudes or warnings about danger and risk, a lack and ossified desire felt early in the experience of becoming a mother. Yet stories of motherhood are elemental as bone and teeth.

  This is a book about women: their lives, loves, brains, history, struggle, triumph, pain, and healing. And yes, men can and damn well should read it, too. This is a book about building connections between women. It’s about taking back motherhood by recognizing many of the historical, cultural, social, biological, and psychological machinations behind it, and the way in which its salient contemporary emotion is no longer love, but fear.

  This past summer, I was at the pool with the mother of one of my daughter’s preschool classmates watching our girls kick and splash, when out of nowhere she said to me, “I’m terrified of the pool. Actually, I’m terrified of everything.” I wrote this book in response to the urgency and confusion of that suffering, to this sensation that all of us are clinging so hard to an untenable and unhealthy fantasy. We are in desperate need of new stories about motherhood, which claim ownership of its science, history, culture, and future.

  Bell hooks writes, “False notions of love teach us that it is the place where we will feel no pain, where we will be in a state of constant bliss.” We have labored for too long under these false notions. Through a detailed journey into the dark side of motherhood—into all that mothers do not say and might not acknowledge; into the veiled elements of this profoundly unsettling, transformative experience—this book aims to reshape the contemporary understanding of motherhood and create a path to a different kind of care, vision, and connection.

  * * *

  —————

  FOR ME, IT BEGAN WITH MOUSE POOP. We lived in a nineteenth-century cabin, so mouse poop should not have been an anomaly. I’d brushed it aside before, but then one day anxiety lit it up. Like a virtuoso author of magical realism, anxiety infuses everyday objects with great power. Suddenly the mouse poop glowed with threat and I couldn’t unsee it. I turned to the contemporary wizard of Google to learn my fate: was it innocuous, or could it kill my baby? It could kill my baby. There was a vanishingly small but devastating chance that mouse poop could transmit congenital CMV, one of the many conditions that barely arouse a cough in an adult woman but can destroy the brain of a fetus. The Google hive of experts warned against coming into contact with it.

  This is when I first felt that hot tingling of horror. It was like swallowing a spoonful of cayenne pepper and then feeling it shiver through the veins, pickle the stomach, sear the heart. I went on a cleaning frenzy that lasted for the next nine months. I stored bottles of Seventh Generation Disinfecting Multi-Surface Cleaner as if they were the sole line of defense between me and a looming invasion. I coated every surface in a layer of sticky, mint-reeking gunk.

  Telling the story of my anxious episodes is a bit like an alcoholic recounting blackouts: they all follow the same pattern, becoming increasingly disturbing and severe, monotonous in their arc but gruesomely compelling in their details. Thinking always of my baby, I was afraid of the mouse droppings, glyphosate in Quaker Oats, the toxins given off by our new mattress, the microwave, fracking chemicals in the air, fracking chemicals in the water, preservatives in granola, synthetic fabrics. That’s just a small selection. Meanwhile I ate peanut butter pie piled with whipped cream. I drove on sinuous country roads laced with ice. I cried a lot. I isolated myself from the world. I took risks, even big risks, but I did not see them as risks because I was fixated on toxins that I imagined would be poisonous to my baby’s body. This is the nature of anxiety: it is not about actual threat, about reducing via rational measures a set of real risks, but about the personal horror show playing in an individual psyche, crafted by individual values and priorities. It is incredibly partial and irrational, almost comically so: iced tea might permanently damage your baby, it says, though it utters nary a peep when you enter the crosswalk at a yellow light. It fits itself so tidily into the unique dimensions of a mental blind spot that its absurdity is undetectable.

  I figured throughout my pregnancy that after the birth, when the inscrutable womb would finally crack open and reveal—I hoped, I prayed—a healthy baby, my anxiety would go away. I imagined that the baby and I would travel, we’d eat at truck stops, we’d have no idea of the Air Quality Index on any given day.

  Meanwhile, anxiety was rewiring my brain. Anxiety was remaking my relationship to the world so that by the time my baby was born it had become the dominant and singular
fact of my life. My former, pre-pregnancy self was like a land from which I’d been exiled, whose customs and beliefs I couldn’t imagine I’d ever unthinkingly accepted. Even if I wanted to go back, the bridge to that place had been washed away, and I was left staring at the torrent that had stranded me on the far side.

  There was a brief reprieve in the newborn stage, when my daughter was breastfeeding and the day was a surreal sequence of tasks that I performed, disembodied by fatigue and awe, but then it ramped right back up. Established, fed, groomed, coddled, my anxiety had become very skilled at attaching itself to almost anything. Windowsills. Dog treats. Keys. The beaded eyes of stuffed animals. The horror struck my system, seared it, faded, again and again. It became normal. In between and around it, I was mostly happy.

  It took nine months after the birth of my child for me to finally sense the anxiety as something more than typical worry, or even excessive typical worry. There came a tipping point. It would be the first of many: I would tip again and again, further and further down, until finally I hit bottom, and got help.

  Jorge and I took the baby on a trip to San Francisco and stayed with friends in Berkeley. Clean, crunchy, organic Berkeley, where I thought, with palpable excitement and relief on the plane, we would be cocooned in the very best of American hippie liberal privilege. Our friends lived in a renovated house they’d bought for an astronomical sum. It was California impeccable: bright, airy, clean, contemporary with vintage touches. There was a new, separate bungalow out back in a garden of fruit trees. If I needed an Eden into which to escape, this was surely it. But my euphoria lasted less than twenty-four hours. I worried the deck, which had been varnished, had traces of lead on it. I bought a package of lead test strips at a nearby Home Depot and began testing, and on the back of their garage door, one came up red. I wouldn’t do laundry in the garage. Wouldn’t go inside it. Wouldn’t touch the handle of its door. Wouldn’t touch any bike or object that had been in it or near it. From the garage emanated invisible waves of contamination that rendered every surface suspect: the grass, the deck, even the floors inside the house, where I tried my best not to let the baby crawl. There was no point in time in that house when all the ligaments of my body were not drawn tight with tension over whether she would make one catastrophic move.