A couple of days ago, I thought, I should add my memoir to the Kindle Unlimited thingee on Amazon. So I did. Then I discovered that if an author adds her book to Kindle Unlimited, she is allowed to make her book free for Kindle download for up five days.
How could I resist?
So as my 2020 Mother’s Day gift from me to you, my memoir is available as a Kindle download on Amazon for FREE from Sunday, May 10 until Thursday, May 14, 2020. Get your copy now! If you enjoy the book, please consider leaving a review. It helps other people who might need the book find it.
Having made the book free for Mother’s Day, I initially thought I would post about it on Instagram and Facebook. But then I thought, I could make a Mother’s Day podcast episode.
And that is why I am now typing the show notes for Episode 82! (If you have never listened to the show, it’s called Adventures with Postpartum Depression and is available on iTunes and all those other fun places that play podcasts.)
We have been sheltering-at-home for eight weeks. Eight weeks! It’s crazy and surreal but a few good things have emerged from the experience. For example, blogging. My intuition has been urging me to blog for years, and for years, I have delayed, insisting that I did not have the time. Well, enter the pandemic, and I have less time than ever but here I am, blogging. It helps me process this experience and dig into my feelings and I do believe this is a practice I will continue even when the pandemic is just a memory.
Now that we have settled in for the long haul (summer camps are being cancelled, the 2020-21 school year is very Iffy), I have also been forced to reckon with some ideas I have about motherhood. I am realizing that even though I recovered from postpartum depression, I am still carrying around an idea that motherhood = martyrdom.
This is an idea that I will be exploring in my journal. As I hash out my ideas, I’ll blog about them here as well.
But Glennon Doyle really got me thinking about this in her amazing new memoir Untamed. She writes:
Mothers have martyred themselves in their children’s names since the beginning of time. We have lived as if she who disappears the most, loves the most. We have been conditioned to prove our love by slowly ceasing to exist.
Untamed pg. 128
Wow. I could just talk about that for hours and hours. And a few paragraphs later:
What if love is not the process of disappearing for the beloved but of emerging for the beloved? What if a mother’s responsibility is teaching her children that love does not lock the lover away but frees her? What if a responsible mother is not one who shows her children how to slowly die but how to stay wildly alive until the day she dies? What if the call of motherhood is not to be a martyr but to be a model?
Untamed, pg. 128
I think I had postpartum depression because my hormones went beserk and pushed my preexisting anxiety into the realm of mental illness. BUT. I am starting to see that I also had postpartum depression because I had internalized a martyrdom standard for motherhood that annihilated my sense of self when I gave birth to my first child. How could I be the person I had been for thirty-four years when I had to now sacrifice everything to prove my love for this new person?
It feels like such a relief to finally say and write the thoughts that have been rattling around my head.
I also think that for me (we are all different!), another piece of the PPD Puzzle was a sort of “crisis of intuition.” I did not trust myself. When it came to Pippa, I wanted to trust all the parenting experts. Anyone but me. But I could not follow all of the experts’ advice because there are so many conflicting opinions. So in part, PPD was my body’s protest against the denial of my motherly intuition.
I am still thinking these things through and expect I will keep writing about them, and keep recording podcast episodes, as I dive deeper into my thoughts about PPD and motherhood.
For those of you who listened to Episode 82 and are currently suffering from a maternal mood disorder, I strongly recommend that you start with Postpartum Support International in your search for help.
I hope you have a lovely Mother’s Day, wherever and whenever you are. But if you don’t, that’s okay. Do not put too much pressure on yourself to have the perfect Mother’s Day. You have to do whatever works for you.