I was sitting in my gynecologist’s office, waiting to get my IUD removed so my husband and I can have a baby, when the woman across from me began telling a nurse about her daughter who killed herself the previous year.
“Her first boyfriend broke up with her,” the other patient said. “She didn’t think she’d get anyone else.”
“Last year? You’re in good shape,” said the nurse. “I’d still be a mess.”
“Not mentally, I’m not,” she replied.
It was just the three of us in the small waiting room. The other patient turned a page in the magazine that she picked up from a side table. I slinked down in my chair and hid behind my cell phone, checking my email over and over again to avoid making eye contact. I didn’t want to disturb their conversation. I’ve been a part of these kinds of discussions before and I know that the polite thing to do is to try to make myself unobtrusive.
The other patient went on. Her daughter overdosed on sleeping pills. Before taking them, she called her ex-boyfriend 14 times, trying to get through so she could tell him that she wouldn’t do it if he called her back.
“She was beautiful, too,” her mother said. “Smart. Nice sense of humor.”
This is a lesson that I never forget: That not all pregnancies end with happy lives, that some beautiful babies grow up to be troubled adults. The leaves on my family tree, with its academic accomplishments and professional successes, mask that the effects of depression, domestic violence, and substance abuse have riddled many of the branches.
One of my paternal great-grandfathers fell to his death from the top of a silo at the age of 50, a likely suicide that his Oklahoma town generously deemed an accident. My grandmother, who said she was afraid that taking medication for her mental disorder would change her personality, once stood over my mother with a knife as she slept, contemplating murdering her in her bed.
My own childhood was marred by domestic violence and witnessing alcoholism. For years, I didn’t wear jewelry on my wrists because it triggered memories of them being squeezed until they were black and blue—my first experience of abuse when I was 5 years old. I still don’t wear a watch and rarely wear bracelets.
Researchers have found that people with parents or siblings with depression are up to three times more likely to have depression than the general population, likely due to some combination of genetic and environmental factors. Children of alcoholics are up to four times more likely to become alcohol dependent than those with parents who aren’t alcoholics. About 30 percent of people who grew up with abuse go on to abuse their own children.
For those of us who come from troubled families, those statistics can be daunting. I don’t believe in genetic destiny, but by God, I’m afraid it for my kids and myself.
In 2013, I took a genetic test, which said that I, too, carry genetic markers associated with alcohol dependence. When I showed the results to my husband, I said only, “No shit.” I had suspected it since middle school.
The other patient was called into a clinical room before me, and I was summoned shortly thereafter. The nurse instructed me to put on the scratchy pink paper gown. After she took my medical history, she told me to wait for the doctor, who appeared about 15 minutes later. He’s an older man—a father of three grown daughters—and his hands and bald head are dappled with age spots.
“Now, I tell all my patients this,” he began, pulling on the powdery medical gloves. “Don’t worry if you get pregnant and think, ‘ugh, what have I done?’ A lot of women feel that and the husband’s all excited, and she’s wondering if something’s wrong with her.”
I nodded.
“I’ve already experienced a little of that.”
“It’s completely normal.”
The removal process took only a few seconds.
“Cough,” the doctor ordered from the end of the table.
I worked up a fake cough and felt slight pressure in my side. Moments later, the doctor announced that he was done.
“Do you want to see it?” He asked mischievously.
I laughed. He had anticipated my morbid curiosity.
“Kind of!” I said.
He held up the IUD, and it looked like a small, weary cross.
My therapist once told me that I can’t change what’s in my genes or history, but I’m generally mentally healthy and can control my actions.
“You’re an adult,” he said. “You get to choose.”
Similarly, my children may be predisposed to depression, suicidal ideation, or substance abuse. They may not. The Mendelian shuffle is unpredictable. My husband and I can’t dictate our children’s genes or actions, but we can make healthy decisions that create safe environments and set good examples for them. We are helpless, we are powerful.
So, I choose where I can. I’m choosing constantly. I try to circumvent situations that are likely to trigger my weaknesses. I go to therapy to manage my anxieties when I’m confronted with unavoidable issues. Aware of my heighted risk for alcohol dependence, I have always tightly controlled my alcohol intake, and I’ll always have to. There are some seeds I must never allow to take root.
And my husband chooses with me. Over our five years as a couple, we’ve learned each other’s vulnerabilities and how to treat them gently. The first and only time he yelled at me, I replied, “You can’t talk to me like that. It’s too scary for me.” Neither of us has yelled since then. Our life together is peaceful. We know that every loving word or act we share is a step toward hope.
As I left my doctor’s office and walked to the metro, I dialed my husband at work. He had asked me to call him after the appointment and let him know how it went.
“IUD’s out,” I told him when he picked up the phone. “It took four seconds. Couldn’t have been easier.”
“How do you feel?” He asked.
“Good,” I said.
And I did. I do.
Tags: dreams, family, health, kids, mental illness, virgie townsend
I do sometimes worry. We’re both mentally ill, with alcoholic parents. He’s not into alcoholic himself, but his relationship with alcohol is not healthy, either.
But I want children. I think we’d be good parents. I didn’t inherit my father’s alcoholism, I’m in therapy, I’m getting better. He is not his father, either. Ultimately, having a mental illness doesn’t make a person incapable or useless or not a happy, healthy person, it’s just a thing that needs to be taken care of and if our kids have it, they will be, however they need.
But it worries me, still.
I’m bi-polar and mental illness runs in my family, though I am in therapy and take my medication. My husband and I were not trying to have a baby, it just happened. While I love my son with every fiber of my being, part of me still feels guilty that he was born into such a nasty gene pool. I worry that he is going to have the same struggles that I have had, and all I can do is try to stay stable and keep my eye on him.
This is all painfully familiar to me. Thank you for sharing it and best wishes as you grow your family.
Well, this is very resonant. I’ve taken to apologizing to my fetus for all the various physical and psychological land mines we may or may not have planted in his/her way. Sorry, little fetus. We’ll help you as much as we can. At least we’re not afraid of therapy, and know when to call in outside resources.
this is really beautiful – thank you for sharing!
There’s a fair amount of mental illness and alcoholism on both sides of my family, so sometimes I feel it’s just as well that I have zero desire for children and probably never will. I would never judge someone else for having children in a family like mine; my relatives are almost to a one good, funny, incredibly smart people who happen to live with schizophrenia and/or depression and/or anxiety and/or bipolar disorder and/or alcoholism, among other things. I love them and do not regret that any of them–any of us–exist. I just regret that so many people in our family have had such a hard time of things.
One time, out to dinner a, the feller and I are enjoying a nice fancy dinner at the bar counter. We’re at the corner of the bar and they seat three people in the seats around it. It seems like a couple and a friend. Guy, two ladies. The ladies talk for a bit. Then the friend gets up to take a call and while that happens the couple progresses rapidly into a fight about whether or not their kid needs ADD medicine.
At which point the wife says, in the bitterest cruelest tones ever, “She’s not going to jump off a bridge like your crazy sister did.”
And not quietly. Sometimes people talk about stuff in public that boggles my mind.
“At which point the wife says, in the bitterest cruelest tones ever, “She’s not going to jump off a bridge like your crazy sister did.”
You know what, this is probably the kid I would feel saddest/most afraid for. Mental illness comes in all shapes and forms and degrees of severity. None of them (unless we’re talking about sociopathy, I guess, or something similar) make you a bad person. Hell, it often makes you a better, more considerate and sympathetic person *exactly* because life has forced you to think more about certain things, or because you’ve suffered (or have seen others suffer). Yes, they might inherit something that would make their lives harder, but it won’t stop them from becoming wonderful human beings. With a bit of luck – even happy human beings.
Cruelty, however (and aimed at the person you’re supposed to love in a deeper way than most other people in your life, too) is something that will most certainly harm a child growing surrounded by it, regardless of whether s/he inherits it or not.
I guess what I wanted to say is that there are far more dangerous things to being a good person (and raising a good and happy person). But probably didn’t say it right…
Yeeeah, I agree with you. There are support systems for overcoming most obstacles of genetic predisposition, but a parent (or spouse) who lashes out at what could easily be the most sensitive heartache in a person’s history is a terrible thing to overcome. How sad.
Agree. I remember a friend of mine saying that one of the most important things for a healthy marriage/partnership is that you don’t take advantage of your knowledge of your partner’s weaknesses and vulnerabilities to score points in a fight. You don’t betray their trust that way. (And they don’t betray yours.)
“one of the most important things for a healthy marriage/partnership is that you don’t take advantage of your knowledge of your partner’s weaknesses and vulnerabilities to score points in a fight.”
You know, I’ve always seen this a rule of thumb or something – no knowledge of someone’s weaknesses and vulnerabilities may be used against them in any shape or form. Doesn’t even have to be one’s significant other. Frankly, it’s always been an unwritten rule for me – if someone confides/I discover something, a weakness, etc., I never ever use it against them or even tell it to someone else. Even if the person who confided it is someone I cannot stand. You just never ever hit a person where it hurts the most (pretty much the same as you do not kick a person when they’re down).
Also, I kinda find this beneath me. I know it’s a pretty selfish and arrogant reason, but hey, unlike a lot of marriages, I actually do have to live with myself until death do us part and I’m plenty to take as it is 😉
A member of my family (come to think of it, more than one), when fighting would tell exactly what they knew for a fact would hurt the most. The way I figure, unless you really hate each other (and usually that’s not the case), the anger will go away but the hurt your words caused would stay. And no amount of temporary anger is worth it.
Man, I’m terrified that when I have a kid I’m going to either have one with all my crazy passed on, or have a boy.
Beautiful piece. And with your own kids you do choose. Every day you can consciously decide to make their childhood different from yours. That’s not to say you won’t mess them up in different ways (and I’m not advocating getting into the head space of trying to make everything perfect for them) but your past can act as a foil instead of a cycle.
Woof. This hits home.
To the people who, like the author, are scared of passing on their genetic tendency to depression, addiction, etc. I know you’re worried about the likelihood and the following anecdotal story won’t change statistics but…
I have a tendency to depression. No member of my family had (as far as I know) ever experienced clinical depression and after a certain period, my parents who were frankly a bit clueless about mental illness, started to get annoyed with me for mooching around feeling sorry for myself without much discernible reason. It got worse after a while and I tried to kill myself. I am now a lot better, quite happy and have never had such a profound depressive attack since.
Though my boyfriend had a happy childhood thanks to a marvellous mother, he had a difficult time with his father who was addicted to alcohol and various drugs. Many members of his family have gone through depression. My boyfriend never has however, nor has he ever been addicted to anything. He is the most stable, mentally healthy, self-controlled person I know. But despite never having experienced it himself, growing up being exposed to many people who did suffer these things made him intensely understanding and empathetic.
This is a bit long but basically what I’m trying to say is that maybe your tendencies, especially combined with your love and education from experience, will not lead to children who become mentally ill, but to children who are understanding and compassionate about those who do.
This made me tear up in a serious way. This is what I’m going to strive for as a parent- thank you.
I’m really glad that it helped. I bet you’ll be great parents! And congratulations on your pregnancy!
This is my fondest hope. Thank you for writing this.
I hear a lot of anxiety and I think a successish story might help?
My parents both had abusive childhoods and were raised by alcoholics; they fell in love when they were quite young and have done a lot of work to overcome all that shit. They struggle with depression and anxiety and paranoia, sometimes they self-medicate and sometimes they spend a lot of time in therapy.
But they are still very in love after 40 plus years of cohabitation and marriage; they raised two children who definitely have a genetic tendency towards depression and anxiety but also have a rock-solid sense of self and the ability to reach out for help. They worked very hard to take care of us and show us how much we are loved; we are almost too self-confident as a result. My life and my mental health is better than theirs because they did such a good job raising me.
I do believe in the Captain Awkward advice that if you contact someone and they do not contact you back, you should not contact them again because from that point on you are the one being inappropriate about boundaries.
But oh my goodness I have experienced the breakup where it comes from out of nowhere and the other person will not talk to you about it.
And that is a hard kind of cruel. So I have a lot of sympathy for the young woman who called her ex-boyfriend 14 times.
Thank you for writing this and for articulating this so beautifully. I am just one small branch in a big ole tree of varieties of mental illness, and my wonderful, kind, smart, funny boyfriend’s father died at an early age, and it’s so hard to not feel like we could be doing our future children a disservice somehow. But we’re happy together and stable and warm and full of love and know all the warning signs of when things start to go awry with brain weasels, That’s a hand we should be pretty happy to deal a kid, I hope.
“brain weasels” I love this
I wish I could remember where I first heard it, but it’s such the perfect description, especially for anxiety.
I’m certain being aware of our limitations, vulnerabilities and fears makes us more thoughtful human beings and, in turn, much better equipped to be good parents. What a strong person and story. I am proud of you in countless ways, my dearest friend!
Taking a stand against alcohol is so spectacular and brave, especially when you did not have parents who could do the same for you. That yen can manifest itself as other demons- shopping, gambling…mine was work addiction, chocolate, caffeine. My uncle was a hoarder. The external thing that soothes the internal pain. Perhaps more vigilance will be required of you and your kids, especially that urge to act without thinking, as it's likely tied to the destructive patterns you experienced.
A friend had parents who broke the chain of alcohol addiction. She grew up a whole and kindhearted person, but is grateful, somehow knowing what abyss her parents kept her away from.
This hits so close to home for me right now, damn. Mr. Betsaroo and I have been talking about trying to conceive soon, and to a greater or lesser degree, this is what we’re both so afraid of. (My desire for kids is currently outweighing the fear; his isn’t, yet.)
But if I look at both our family histories honestly, while I see some danger signs for our kids, I also see hope. I see things improving, incrementally, from one generation to the next. His mother was badly abused by her parents, both physically and emotionally. She had severe mental illness when he was growing up, including several hospitalizations. But she never laid a hand on him or his brother. That was a line she wouldn’t allow herself to cross. She would rave and scream and threaten to commit suicide, but she wouldn’t physically harm them.
And now my Mr. has some serious, serious mental shit of his own, partly genetic (I think), partly baggage from a childhood that involved a lot of unpredictable screaming and long stretches of having mom in a mental institution. BUT. He never screams. He never takes out his depression and anxiety on me. He is getting good treatment, although his depression is severe enough that I don’t think he’ll ever be rid of it; he’ll just manage it. He never drinks. He is as loving as anyone could hope for to me and our silly cat.
Similarly, my mother’s mother was hospitalized for mental illness when my mom was a child. They never had an easy relationship. But my mom and I are super close; I feel like she was a close to a perfect mother as anyone could be. I have mild-to-moderate depression that is well controlled with therapy and medication.
None of this is anything close to a guarantee. A doctor once told me bluntly that if we have kids, we’d better make sure that they learn excellent self-care and stress management techniques, because they are going to pick up on our neurotic anxiety. (Ouch. Sorry, kids.) The vagaries of genetics don’t always run in straight lines; it’s entirely possible that my husband’s uncle’s schizophrenia could make an appearance, god forbid. Or that they could get my father’s family’s tendency to medicate with alcohol. All of these things scare me.
But I’ve also seen that it can get better. And I know that both the Mr and I, if nothing else, will be loving, caring parents. And we will do the best we can. I don’t know if that will be good enough. But I, selfishly, want to try.
This hits so close to home for me right now, damn. Mr. Betsaroo and I have been talking about trying to conceive soon, and to a greater or lesser degree, this is what we're both so afraid of. (My desire for kids is currently outweighing the fear; his isn't, yet.)
But if I look at both our family histories honestly, while I see some danger signs for our kids, I also see hope. I see things improving, incrementally, from one generation to the next. His mother was badly abused by her parents, both physically and emotionally. She had severe mental illness when he was growing up, including several hospitalizations. But she never laid a hand on him or his brother. That was a line she wouldn't allow herself to cross. She would rave and scream and threaten to commit suicide, but she wouldn't physically harm them.
And now my Mr. has some serious, serious mental shit of his own, partly genetic (I think), partly baggage from a childhood that involved a lot of unpredictable screaming and long stretches of having mom in a mental institution. BUT. He never screams. He never takes out his depression and anxiety on me. He is getting good treatment, although his depression is severe enough that I don't think he'll ever be rid of it; he'll just manage it. He never drinks. He is as loving as anyone could hope for to me and our silly cat.
Similarly, my mother's mother was hospitalized for mental illness when my mom was a child. They never had an easy relationship. But my mom and I are super close; I feel like she was a close to a perfect mother as anyone could be. I have mild-to-moderate depression that is well controlled with therapy and medication.
None of this is anything close to a guarantee. A doctor once told me bluntly that if we have kids, we'd better make sure that they learn excellent self-care and stress management techniques, because they are going to pick up on our neurotic anxiety. (Ouch. Sorry, kids.) The vagaries of genetics don't always run in straight lines; it's entirely possible that my husband's uncle's schizophrenia could make an appearance, god forbid. Or that they could get my father's family's tendency to medicate with alcohol. All of these things scare me.
But I've also seen that it can get better. And I know that both the Mr and I, if nothing else, will be loving, caring parents. And we will do the best we can. I don't know if that will be good enough. But I, selfishly, want to try.
This is my fondest hope. Thank you for writing this.
Agree. I remember a friend of mine saying that one of the most important things for a healthy marriage/partnership is that you don't take advantage of your knowledge of your partner's weaknesses and vulnerabilities to score points in a fight. You don't betray their trust that way. (And they don't betray yours.)
"brain weasels" I love this
When I was eight years old my mom sat me down and told me that both her and my father had mental illness in their families. She explained to me what depression (the most likely to afflict me) felt like and the symptoms in kid-friendly language. She told me that if I ever felt that way, or anything else like it, I could tell her and she would help me. She’d check in with me in a gentle way about how I was reacting to things and how I felt about life. And sure enough, puberty hit not too long after, and the feelings she described came along with them. I talked to her, and with my doctors, and began the dance of treating anxiety and depression.
Now when I think about having kids, I think about how I wouldn’t wish the struggles I’ve faced on anyone. I also think about the fact that both my of my parents’ struggles have impacted me. But then I remember that loving and concerned conversation that my mom had with a preteen girl who had no clue, and realize that preventative measures and a good support system can do absolutely amazing things. So for all of you worrying, my best advice: schedule an awkward but necessary conversation in for about nine years after conception.
Thank you for writing this, it is really good. I believe a huge part of not being an abusive parent is recognising your tendencies towards it and working on them. I know for my emotionally abusive parents denial is a huge part of their make-up. I think you will be great parents, and as someone wrote above your empathy and understanding of situations like these will help you raise kids who are compassionate.
Thanks Nicole and Mallory for publishing so many pieces on mental health. I find them so very helpful.