Depressed Mom Quotes

You know all that sympathy that you feel for an abused child who suffers without a good mom or dad to love and care for them? Well, they don't stay children forever. No one magically becomes an adult the day they turn eighteen. Some people grow up sooner, many grow up later. Some never really do. But just remember that some people in this world are older versions of those same kids we cry for.

Me: “I refuse to attend Support Group.” Mom: “One of the symptoms of depression is disinterest in activities.” Me: “Please just let me watch America’s Next Top Model. It’s an activity.” Mom: “Television is a passivity.” Me: “Ugh, Mom, please.” Mom: “Hazel, you’re a teenager. You’re not a little kid anymore. You need to make friends, get out of the house, and live your life.” Me: “If you want me to be a teenager, don’t send me to Support Group. Buy me a fake ID so I can go to clubs, drink vodka, and take pot.” Mom: “You don’t take pot, for starters.” Me: “See, that’s the kind of thing I’d know if you got me a fake ID.” Mom: “You’re going to Support Group.” Me: “UGGGGGGGGGGGGG.” Mom: “Hazel, you deserve a life.

mom says where did anxiety come from? anxiety is the cousin visiting from out of town depression felt obliged to bring to the party. mom, i am the party. only, i am a party i don't want to be at.

But Mom’s been depressed ever since her last boyfriend turned out to be a Republican.

mom still doesn't understand. mom, can't you see? neither do i.

In all of your living, don't forget to live.

But depression wasn't the word. This was a plunge encompassing sorrow and revulsion far beyond the personal: a sick, drenching nausea at all humanity and human endeavor from the dawn of time. The writhing loathsomeness of the biological order. Old age, sickness, death. No escape for anyone. Even the beautiful ones were like soft fruit about to spoil. And yet somehow people still kept fucking and breeding and popping out new fodder for the grave, producing more and more new beings to suffer like this was some kind of redemptive, or good, or even somehow morally admirable thing: dragging more innocent creatures into the lose-lose game. Squirming babies and plodding, complacent, hormone-drugged moms. Oh, isn't he cute? Awww. Kids shouting and skidding in the playground with no idea what future Hells await them: boring jobs and ruinous mortgages and bad marriages and hair loss and hip replacements and lonely cups of coffee in an empty house and a colostomy bag at the hospital. Most people seemed satisfied with the thin decorative glaze and the artful stage lighting that sometimes, made the bedrock atrocity of the human predicament look somewhat more mysterious or less abhorrent. People gambled and golfed and planted gardens and traded stocks and had sex and bought new cars and practiced yoga and worked and prayed and redecorated their homes and got worked up over the news and fussed over their children and gossiped about their neighbors and pored over restaurant reviews and founded charitable organizations and supported political candidates and attended the U.S. Open and dined and travelled and distracted themselves with all kinds of gadgets and devices, flooding themselves incessantly with information and texts and communication and entertainment from every direction to try to make themselves forget it: where we were, what we were. But in a strong light there was no good spin you could put on it. It was rotten from top to bottom.

He tried to kill himself in grade ten, when a kid who still had his mom and dad had the audacity to tell him ‘Get over it’. As if depression is something that can be remedied by any of the contents in a first aid-kit.

mom, i am lonely. i think i learnt it when dad left; how to turn the anger into lonely, the lonely into busy.

It was the exact opposite for me. At first all I wanted was sex with her, but soon I wanted more. More sex, yes, in unusual places, and all different kinds. But that wasn’t all. I wanted her to fill the empty spaces left by a father who never once praised me, ‘friends’ who used me, an ice princess mom who raised me with glass kisses.

I also understood why my mom wasn’t into processing her feelings, and how she was taught to just get over tragedy. To survive, she had to believe things like depression and allergies were a choice.

when i see a candle, i see the flesh of a church. the flicker of life sparks a memory younger than noon; i am standing beside her open casket, it is the moment i realize every person i ever come to know will someday die, besides, mom, i'm not afraid of the dark, perhaps that is part of the problem.

Imagine saying to someone, “I have a kidney problem, and I’m having a lot of bad days lately.” Nothing but sympathy, right? “What’s wrong?” “My mom had that!” “Text me a pic of the ultrasound!” Then pretend to say, “I have severe depression and anxiety, and I’m having a lot of bad days lately.” They just look at you like you’re broken, right? Unfixable. Inherently flawed. Maybe not someone they want to hang around as much? Yeah, society sucks.

But mom's been depressed ever since her last boyfriend turned out to be a Republican.

I became a student of my own depressed experience, trying to unthread its causes. What was the root of all this despair? Was it psychological? (Was it Mom and Dad's fault?( Was it just temporal, a 'bad time' in my life? (When the divorce ends will the depression end with it?) Was it genetic? (Melancholy, called by many names, has run through my family for generations, along with its sad bride, Alcoholism.) Was it cultural? (Is this just the fallout of postfeminist American career girl trying to find balance in an increasingly stressful alienting urban world?) Was it astrological? (Am I so sad because I'm a thin-skinned Cancer whose major signs are all ruled by unstable Gemini?) Was it artistic? (Don't creative people always suffer from depression because we're so supersensitive and special?) Was it evolutionary? (Do I carry in me the residual panic that comes after millennia of my species' attempting to survive a brutal world?) Was it karmic? (Are all these spasms of grief just the consequences of bad behavior in previous lifetimes, the last obstacles before liberation?) Was it hormonal? Dietary? Philosophical? Seasonal? Environmental? Was I tapping into a universal yearning for God? Did I have a chemical imbalance? Or did I just need to get laid?

Researchers have found that infants of depressed moms have a harder time regulating their sleep; they sleep an average of ninety-seven fewer minutes a night than infants of nondepressed moms and have more nighttime awakenings.

You cry in your room. I cry in my room. Mom cries in Mom's room. And in the morning everyone pretends like they never cried once in their life.

I’m not saying it’s okay. It happens mostly when she’s depressed, and if her mom is any indication, depression is going to be a lifelong thing for her. I’m simply saying that Autumn’s base motivations are defensive, not cruel.

Yes,” Mom said. “People may want to kill themselves. But no one wants to be depressed, or in pain, or lonely, or hurt.

I worry about this new America. People can’t go around laughing all the time. Eventually, everyone will come around to that realization. Mom doesn’t get it. She says, if you frown too long on the outside, eventually you’ll grow a frown on the inside. How could this apply to me? And who cares?

Sometimes, in the stillness of my room, my mom’s voice came to me, repeating things she’d said for months. Like, “My skin is melting off my face, isn’t it?” And, “My whole body feels dead from the crap they’re pouring into me. Do I look green to you?” And, “When I’m naked, I can see my heart beating.

Ah, clever clogs, but it will have happened in one of my alternative lives. You know--the lives hot-shot scientists tell us we are living at the same time as this one we know about. Which being so, how do you know that what happens in one of your alternative lives doesn't sometimes leak through into your consciousness in this life, and make you sad that you aren't living that particular alternative life instead of this one? Don't you sometimes feel depressed for no reason you can think of? I do. And maybe that's why. We've had a leak from an alternative life and want that life now. Like wanting an ice cream when you were little, which you knew was in the freezer, but your mom wouldn't let you have it.

Many psychologists whom I spoke with think the erosion of the extended family is a root cause for the high rates of postpartum depression in the U.S., as well as the rising epidemic of anxiety and depression among children and teenagers. Moms, dads, and kids are simply lonely.

Perhaps people felt there was nothing more they could do, you know? After all, how can someone be helped who doesn’t see the need? A Christian counselor I saw for a while described such situations as, “a White Elephant everyone can see but no one wants to deal with; everyone hopes the problem will just go away on its own.” Just like with my mom. Back then it seemed women were almost expected to go a little loopy sometimes. After all we’re the ones with raging hormones that get out of whack – by our periods, PMS or pregnancy and childbirth – and cause craziness and bizarre behavior. And because of those uncontrollable hormones, women are also more emotional and predisposed to depression. These are things my mom was actually told by her parents, her family, her husbands and friends... even her doctor. Eventually, she made herself believe that her erratic behavior stemmed from PMS, not mania or alcohol.

No, it really isn't, but trust me, getting divorced and having to start over is the least in life that isn't fair. I had to watch the parents of a way too young girl realize that their daughter died for no other reason than people can't figure out how to be nice to each other. It isn't that hard, just be nice and people might not have to suffer needlessly, but that isn't the world we live in, so young girls die. That isn't fair, Mom. People falling out of love is vicious and it sucks, but there are far worse things you could be going through. I know that sounds harsh but it's very true.

On a whim, I told Mom once about seeing the world as a series of grays, and she told me I was depressed. This didn’t feel like that. This emptiness was different.

Mom, for example, is Procter and Gamble’s perfect repeat customer. Renovation contractors send her personalized Christmas cards. She lives for the Sunday edition of our local newspaper. She thumbs through the “Modern Home” section. She mopes through the rest of the day, unhappy with all her outdated things.

I was in the fifth grade the first time I thought about turning thirty. My best friend Darcy and I came across a perpetual calendar in the back of the phone book, where you could look up any date in the future, and by using this little grid, determine what the day of the week would be. So we located our birthdays in the following year, mine in May and hers in September. I got Wednesday, a school night. She got a Friday. A small victory, but typical. Darcy was always the lucky one. Her skin tanned more quickly, her hair feathered more easily, and she didn't need braces. Her moonwalk was superior, as were her cart-wheels and her front handsprings (I couldn't handspring at all). She had a better sticker collection. More Michael Jackson pins. Forenze sweaters in turquoise, red, and peach (my mother allowed me none- said they were too trendy and expensive). And a pair of fifty-dollar Guess jeans with zippers at the ankles (ditto). Darcy had double-pierced ears and a sibling- even if it was just a brother, it was better than being an only child as I was. But at least I was a few months older and she would never quite catch up. That's when I decided to check out my thirtieth birthday- in a year so far away that it sounded like science fiction. It fell on a Sunday, which meant that my dashing husband and I would secure a responsible baby-sitter for our two (possibly three) children on that Saturday evening, dine at a fancy French restaurant with cloth napkins, and stay out past midnight, so technically we would be celebrating on my actual birthday. I would have just won a big case- somehow proven that an innocent man didn't do it. And my husband would toast me: "To Rachel, my beautiful wife, the mother of my chidren and the finest lawyer in Indy." I shared my fantasy with Darcy as we discovered that her thirtieth birthday fell on a Monday. Bummer for her. I watched her purse her lips as she processed this information. "You know, Rachel, who cares what day of the week we turn thirty?" she said, shrugging a smooth, olive shoulder. "We'll be old by then. Birthdays don't matter when you get that old." I thought of my parents, who were in their thirties, and their lackluster approach to their own birthdays. My dad had just given my mom a toaster for her birthday because ours broke the week before. The new one toasted four slices at a time instead of just two. It wasn't much of a gift. But my mom had seemed pleased enough with her new appliance; nowhere did I detect the disappointment that I felt when my Christmas stash didn't quite meet expectations. So Darcy was probably right. Fun stuff like birthdays wouldn't matter as much by the time we reached thirty. The next time I really thought about being thirty was our senior year in high school, when Darcy and I started watching ths show Thirty Something together. It wasn't our favorite- we preferred cheerful sit-coms like Who's the Boss? and Growing Pains- but we watched it anyway. My big problem with Thirty Something was the whiny characters and their depressing issues that they seemed to bring upon themselves. I remember thinking that they should grow up, suck it up. Stop pondering the meaning of life and start making grocery lists. That was back when I thought my teenage years were dragging and my twenties would surealy last forever. Then I reached my twenties. And the early twenties did seem to last forever. When I heard acquaintances a few years older lament the end of their youth, I felt smug, not yet in the danger zone myself. I had plenty of time..

I hadn't thought about Mom as much as I probably should have lately. It was a relief not to have all those emotional waves rolling through me at the mere vision of her face in my mind. Letting go of all the negative thoughts was like blowing out a giant gulp of air that I'd been holding in for what seemed like eternity.

Before yoga, my life was filled with regret about choices I'd made in the past, and fears about choices I'd make in the future. Yoga teaches us how to be present in the present. Once you learn how to live in the now, you realize that the past is a memory and the future doesn't exist. Yoga will help anyone facing anxiety issues, separation and attachment issues (moms, I'm talking to you here!), or serious illnesses such as cancer and depression. It's a practice that slims your body while expanding your heart.

I'm afraid people will see me pretending to be normal.

I took on my depression like it was the fight of my life, wich of course, it was. I became a student of my own depressed experience, trying to unthread its causes. What was the root of all this dispair? Was it psychological? (Mom and Dad's fault?) Was it just temporal, a "bad time" in my life? (When the divorce ends, will the depression end with it?) Was it genetic? (Melancholy, called by many names, has run through my family for generations, along with its sad bride, Alcholisme.) Was it cultural? (Is this just the fallout of a postfeminist American career girl trying to find balance in an increasingly stressful and alienating urban world?) Was it astrological? (Am I so sad because I'm a thin-skinned cancer whose major signs are all ruled by unstable Gemini?) Was it artistic? (Don't creative people always suffer from depression because we're so supersensitive and special?) Was it evolutionary? (Do I carry in me the residual panic that come after millennia of my species' attempting to survive a brutal world?) Was it Karmic? (Are all these spasms of grief just the consequences of bad behavior in previous lifetimes, the last obstacles before liberation?) Was it hormonal? Dietary? Philosophical? Seasonal? Environmental? Did I have a chemical imbalance? Or did I just need to get laid?

Apparently, as long as I continue to feed my children, there’s nothing wrong with me. A functional mom is one who can change a diaper and remember bedtimes. I’m not falling apart, so I’m fine.

The next morning I told Mom I couldn't go to school again. She asked what was wrong. I told her, “The same thing that’s always wrong.” “You’re sick?” “I'm sad.” “About Dad?” “About everything.” She sat down on the bed next to me, even though I knew she was in a hurry. “What's everything?” I started counting on my fingers: “The meat and dairy products in our refrigerator, fistfights, car accidents, Larry–” “Who's Larry?” “The homeless guy in front of the Museum of Natural History who always says ‘I promise it’s for food’ after he asks for money.” She turned around and I zipped her dress while I kept counting. “How you don’t know who Larry is, even though you probably see him all the time, how Buckminster just sleeps and eats and goes to the bathroom and has no ‘raison d’etre’, the short ugly guy with no neck who takes tickets at the IMAX theater, how the sun is going to explode one day, how every birthday I always get at least one thing I already have, poor people who get fat because they eat junk food because it’s cheaper…” That was when I ran out of fingers, but my list was just getting started, and I wanted it to be long, because I knew she wouldn't leave while I was still going. “…domesticated animals, how I have a domesticated animal, nightmares, Microsoft Windows, old people who sit around all day because no one remembers to spend time with them and they’re embarrassed to ask people to spend time with them, secrets, dial phones, how Chinese waitresses smile even when there’s nothing funny or happy, and also how Chinese people own Mexican restaurants but Mexican people never own Chinese restaurants, mirrors, tape decks, my unpopularity in school, Grandma’s coupons, storage facilities, people who don’t know what the Internet is, bad handwriting, beautiful songs, how there won’t be humans in fifty years–” “Who said there won't be humans in fifty years?” I asked her, “Are you an optimist or a pessimist?” She looked at her watch and said, “I'm optimistic.” “Then I have some bed news for you, because humans are going to destroy each other as soon as it becomes easy enough to, which will be very soon.” “Why do beautiful songs make you sad?” “Because they aren't true.” “Never?” “Nothing is beautiful and true.

It’s not a real place, not a real thing. Mom made up the Gray Space, the place of anti-art, antifeeling, the cold dark place that felt like death. It was just her zany way of describing the place she went when she felt most depressed, when making music at all became impossible. It isn’t real.

I guess there are different kinds of depression. There’s the kind that just crushes you for no reason, what Mom calls the clinical kind. But this isn’t that. This is the other kind, the kind that comes because the things that have happened to you are actually just unbelievably, heartbreakingly sad.

I love to have you near me, Pete. You are such a joy to me. I love it when you talk to me and tell me how it is for you. I want to hear everything you have to say. I want to be the one person you can always come to whenever you need help. You can come to me when you are hurting, when you just want company, or when you want to play. You are always welcome. You are a delight to my eyes, and I always enjoy having you around. You are a good boy, very special and absolutely worthy of love, respect, and all good things. I am so proud of you and so glad that you are alive. I will help you in any way that I can. I want to be the loving mom and dad you were so unfairly deprived of, and that you so much deserve. And I want you to know that I have an especially loving place in my heart for you when you are scared or sad or mad or ashamed. You can always come to me and tell me about such feelings, and I will be with you and try to soothe you until those feelings run their natural course. I want to become your best friend and I will always try to protect you from unfairness and humiliation. I will also seek friends for you who genuinely like you and who are truly on your side. We will only befriend people who are fair, who treat us with equality and respect, and who listen to us as much as we listen to them. I want to help you learn that it really is good to have needs and desires. It’s wonderful that you have feelings. It’s healthy to be mad and sad and scared and depressed at times. It’s natural to make mistakes. And it’s okay to feel good too, and even to have more fun than mom and dad did.

When Dad was in the middle of a description of the hotel’s laundry facility, I interrupted. “Why haven’t you told me today, like you do every day, that Mom’s going to be better soon?” He looked up then. His gaze locked with mine and held a promise that no matter what he said or didn’t say, he and I would ride this out together. “I haven’t told you that today, Meg, because I don’t know.

Witnessing all of those hardworking female street vendors in Vietnam also made me understand why my mom felt so passionate about me and my sisters working. While we were in Vietnam together, she explained that the country had a history of always being in wartime, so women were expected to rise to the occasion of making money for the family. Vietnamese women were always ready to take over roles traditionally filled by men, Like A League of Their Own (but where everyone is Marla Hooch). I also understood why my mom wasn't into processing her feelings, and how she was taught to just get over tragedy. To survive, she had to believe things like depression and allergies were a choice. In a culture entrenched in wartime, those who chose to be unhappy or to refuse gluten didn't last long.

Depressed beyond what I'd previously thought possible, I stripped, showered, and slipped on a fresh pair of jeans and a tee shirt and headed for my mom's, trying to figure out why a bank would charge twenty dollars for insufficient funds when they know you don't have it.

Today I: smoke/am overweight/have a shitty attitude/am depressed because: my mom died of cancer/my uncle put his thumb up my butt/my dad hit me with a razor strop” seems kind of overly deterministic to Randy; it seems to reflect a kind of lazy or half-witted surrender to bald teleology.

I was so happy when I found out the wounds you’d inflicted weren’t serious, that you had stopped.” “Yes, I stopped. Barry, all of you, see what I did as this suicide attempt. But I didn’t want to die. I only wanted my mom to hear me. To come find me. To see that I was sad. To help me, I guess. I just didn’t have it in me to tell her what I needed. And fine, I get now that she couldn’t read my mind.” He wiped his eyes again. “But I didn’t get it then. I’m so mad at myself. What was wrong with me that I couldn’t just tell her? That I didn’t have the capacity to ask her for anything.

If there’s an eighth wonder of the world, I would suggest lavender. Not only is it beautiful to the eye and heavenly to the nose, it also is said to have antiseptic and anti-inflammatory properties and research suggests it may be useful in treating anxiety, insomnia, and depression. And it’s a wonderful addition to—ta-da—COOKIES! Mom always kept a large wooden wine barrel filled with lavender next to the back porch so she could grab a handful of lavender flowers whenever the mood struck her. She made lavender sachets to hang in the closets and added lavender to her rose potpourri. We regularly had lavender lemonade or lavender muffins and often some lavender flowers were identifiable in a lamb stew or as a garnish for steaks. All part of our Mediterranean lifestyle.

She could still be. She could still be a mom and a wife, and there were still things she could be from bed. She could still find joy in her children. She could study and learn.

Often, women's symptoms are brushed off as the result of depression, anxiety, or the all-purpose favorite: stress. Sometimes, they are attributed to women's normal physiological states and cycles: to menstrual cramps, menopause, or even being a new mom. Sometimes, other aspects of their identity seem to take center stage: fat women report that any ailment is blamed on their weight; trans women find that all their symptoms are attributed to hormone therapy; black women are stereotyped as addicts looking for prescription drugs, their reports of pain doubted entirely. Whatever the particular attribution, there is often the same current of distrust: the sense that women are not very accurate judges of when something is really, truly wrong in their bodies.

But depression wasn’t the word. This was a plunge encompassing sorrow and revulsion far beyond the personal: a sick, drenching nausea at all humanity and human endeavor from the dawn of time. The writhing loathsomeness of the biological order. Old age, sickness, death. No escape for anyone. Even the beautiful ones were like soft fruit about to spoil. And yet somehow people still kept fucking and breeding and popping out new fodder for the grave, producing more and more new beings to suffer like this was some kind of redemptive, or good, or even somehow morally admirable thing: dragging more innocent creatures into the lose-lose game. Squirming babies and plodding, complacent, hormone-drugged moms. Oh, isn’t he cute? Awww. Kids shouting and skidding in the playground with no idea what future Hells awaited them: boring jobs and ruinous mortgages and bad marriages and hair loss and hip replacements and lonely cups of coffee in an empty house and a colostomy bag at the hospital. Most people seemed satisfied with the thin decorative glaze and the artful stage lighting that, sometimes, made the bedrock atrocity of the human predicament look somewhat more mysterious or less abhorrent.

Two years later, my daughter, Alice, was born. I was inconsolable for the first two weeks. “Postpartum depression,” my husband explained to friends. But it wasn’t new-mom blues. It was old-mom blues. Holding my newborn daughter, I got it. I got the love that guts you, the sense of responsibility that narrows the world to a pair of needy eyes. At thirty-nine, I understood my mother’s love for me for the first time.

Thank you, Daylight Savings Time, for making people wax on about the wonder of an extra hour of sleep, only to serve as an especially depressing reminder to parents that kids don’t care about farmers and harvests and extra hours of daylight. I enjoy my kids standing at my bedside at 4:30 a.m. like creepy, wide-awake Children of the Corn. Naptimes are also jacked, so there’s that. With all due respect-ish, A Tired Mom.

What's the story behind the song? Jane texts back a minute later. She addresses and signs it the ways she usually does. august is so used to it that her eyes have started skipping right over the introduction and sign off. I don't remember much. I listened to it in an apartment I had when I was 20. I used to think it was one of the most romantic songs I ever heard. Really? The lyrics are kind of depressing. No, you gotta listen to the bridge. It's all about loving someone so much you can't stand the idea of losing them, even if it hurts, that all the hard stuff is worth it if you can get through together. August pulls it up, lets it spin past the first two verses, into the line: You will remember, when this is blown over . . . Okay, she types, thinking of Wes and how determined he is not to let Isaiah hand him his heart, of Myla holding Niko's hand as he talks to things she can't see, of her mom and a whole life spent searching, of herself, of Jane, of hours on the train - all the things they put themselves through for love. Okay, I get it.

In the 1980s, the American researcher Roger Ulrich discovered that simply having a room with a view of a natural environment rather than a brick wall helped patients at a Philadelphia hospital recover more quickly from gallbladder surgery. They also reported being less depressed and having less pain. Other studies have shown that being immersed in nature can lower blood pressure, reduce stress, and lessen ADHD symptoms.

I first used LSD in my freshman year of high school at a homecoming football game. A friend had taken it too, knew more about it than me, and when asked, told me to just stare at certain things. The friend pointed at a rail that had some paint chipped off it and said "Just look at that... it's trippy." I looked at the rail with some paint chipped off. Nothing happened. I was in front of the school after the game was over and must have been high because two friends were in front of me crying. I asked them why they were crying and they said because I had taken acid. "Are you going to tell my parents?" I asked. "I don't know," they said. I was afraid. On the way home someone in the car started screaming. We found an albino praying mantis in the car, stopped and let it out. In a friend's room, later, I was lying on the bed and seeing in the corners nets of colors beating. A Nirvana poster was surrounded by color and moving slightly. After this incident there are no memories of taking LSD until senior year of high school. No one paid enough attention to notice I wasn't getting dressed in the morning, just taking acid and going to school in my pajamas. I would walk in the hallways staring forward with a neutral facial expression. I was terribly depressed. My mom eventually found out.

Autumn has her flaws. She’s offhandedly arrogant about her looks. She lacks tenacity or drive for anything that isn’t reading or writing. When she’s in a bad mood, you must tread carefully. She can, in the blink of an eye, casually strike with a few cruel words that get right to the heart of your insecurities. But she almost always apologizes quickly. She’ll flinch after the words leave her mouth and tell you she’s sorry. I’m not saying it’s okay. It happens mostly when she’s depressed, and if her mom is any indication, depression is going to be a lifelong thing for her. I’m simply saying that Autumn’s base motivations are defensive, not cruel.

I doubt it's possible to have a baby and not imagine what you want for it. If I were to ever fall pregnant, I would wonder what the sex of the baby is. Celebrations that center expectations around gender depress me, though. I don't think I am what someone would envision if they cut into a cake and saw pink. If I saw photos of my mom, teary-eyed at the thought of me being a girl, I would feel even more guilty for being born the way I am.

I tell each of them whatever it is I think they want to hear because it is the only way to guarantee that either of them will love me. Insofar as a truth existed for me, it changed depending on whether I was with my mom or my dad.

I may not be the best mom. I may not even get back to being the average mother I once claimed to be. But I'm here. I'm getting back up. I'm not leaving. And I'm the mom God ordained for these fours souls, and therefore I am their best mom.

My mom was sitting at the kitchen table. She’d set her coffee down, making a noise that made me look her way. I’d begun to notice her less and less often, like her colors were fading and blending in with walls. She was shrinking. Or maybe her sphere of influence in the family was shrinking. My dad glanced at her, too, and then wrote something on a napkin. He slid it across the counter to me—Don’t worry. Come home in one piece. Have fun and act like a sixteen-year-old for a change.

As for ideas about God, my mom said something about it being a helpful idea to those who believed. My dad said that God was everywhere—and, yes, that included my ear—and that God, along with Mom and Dad, had "made" me. Ew, like a threesome with a polyamorous zealot.

mom, i am lonely. i think i learnt it when dad left; how to turn the anger into lonely, the lonely into busy. when i tell you i've been super busy lately, i mean i've been falling asleep watching sportscenter on the couch to avoid confronting the empy side of my bed.

The realities of motherhood are often obscured by a halo of illusions. The future mother tends to fantasize about love and happiness and overlooks the other aspects of child-rearing: the exhaustion, frustration, loneliness, and even depression, with its attendant state of guilt.

A scream starts in my gut—I can feel the cut, smell the dirt, leaves in my hair. I don’t remember passing out. David says I hit my head on the edge of the table on my way down. The nurse calls my mom because I need stitches. The doctor stares into the back of my eyes with a bright light. Can she read the thoughts hidden there? If she can, what will she do? Call the cops? Send me to the nuthouse? Do I want her to? I just want to sleep. The whole point of not talking about it, of silencing the memory, is to make it go away. It won’t. I’ll need brain surgery to cut it out of my head.

I guess there are different kinds of depression. There's the kind that just crushes you for no reason, what Mom calls the clinical kind. But this isn't that. This is the other kind, the kind that comes because the things that have happened to you are actually just unbelievingly, heartbreakingly sad.

A boy who cares too little about the future and frets too much about the past: nothing could depress a mother more…The boy with the most handsome face, the saddest eyes, and the wildest heart…His mom knows, because she married a man who looked just the same, and nothing but trouble lies ahead for men like that.

If you asked me, I’d tell you I’m a fundamentally happy person, someone whose heart is capable of big leaps in the air. Which is a weird thing to say, actually, considering how much of my life I’ve spent depressed. It’s not just that so many shitty things have happened to me, it’s that for the longest time I didn’t know how to make my life better. Finally, as if I were someone discovering a secret door in a secret garden, the future revealed itself to me. But now that I’m here, I still feel the weight of the past. Sometimes it’s like my legs have been bound with anchor chains, and I’ve been thrown off a ship into the cruel ocean, and all I can do is sink. I guess there are different kinds of depression. There’s the kind that just crushes you for no reason, what Mom calls the clinical kind. But this isn’t that. This is the other kind, the kind that comes because the things that have happened to you are actually just unbelievably, heartbreakingly sad.

what happens when a baby doesn’t get those positive, nurturing responses? Say, if a mom is on her own with no help, or depressed, or in a violent relationship? She may really want to be a loving, responsive parent, but is that possible under those circumstances? Dr. Perry: This is one of the central problems in our society; we have too many parents caring for children with inadequate supports. The result is what you would expect. An overwhelmed, exhausted, dysregulated parent will have a hard time regulating a child consistently and predictably. This can impact the child in two really important ways. First, it affects the development of the child’s stress-response systems (see Figure 3). If the hungry, cold, scared infant is inconsistently responded to—and regulated—by the overwhelmed caregiver, this creates an inconsistent, prolonged, and unpredictable activation of the child’s stress-response systems. The result is a sensitization of these important systems.

Postpartum depression,” my husband explained to friends. But it wasn’t new-mom blues. It was old-mom blues. Holding my newborn daughter, I got it. I got the love that guts you, the sense of responsibility that narrows the world to a pair of needy eyes. At thirty-nine, I understood my mother’s love for me for the first time.

What's wrong with me? I lose my footing, in here.' He touched his head. 'When a neuro-typical looses their footing, they yell or escape to the TV, or maybe the doctor throws them on depression meds. But when I slip, I fall all the way through. I feel the ground give way and I'm gone. It's a crack -- a crack in what's real, and beneath there I'm stuck. Then, I guess I become someone else. Mom says I still know my name, but I walk a different world. The shrink calls it DID -- Dissociative Identity Disorder -- with a little added autism to spice up my other personality. I suppose he's right, but only I know how it feels to slip through the cracks. Then the monster shows up.

Imagine saying to someone, “I have a kidney problem, and I’m having a lot of bad days lately.” Nothing but sympathy, right? “What’s wrong?” “My mom had that!” “Text me a pic of the ultrasound!” Then pretend to say, “I have severe depression and anxiety, and I’m having a lot of bad days lately.” They just look at you like you’re broken, right? Unfixable. Inherently flawed. Maybe not someone they want to hang around as much? Yeah, society sucks. My mental problems made me feel ashamed. I felt like I had to hide them until I could “work through it” on my own. Which I never did, because I didn’t know how. And I didn’t feel brave enough to make fixing my mind a priority because I didn’t think anyone would understand.

It’s not just that so many shitty things have happened to me, it’s that for the longest time I didn’t know how to make my life better. Finally, as if I were someone discovering a secret door in a secret garden, the future revealed itself to me. But now that I’m here, I still feel the weight of the past. Sometimes it’s like my legs have been bound with anchor chains, and I’ve been thrown off a ship into the cruel ocean, and all I can do is sink. I guess there are different kinds of depression. There’s the kind that just crushes you for no reason, what Mom calls the clinical kind. But this isn’t that. This is the other kind, the kind that comes because the things that have happened to you are actually just unbelievably, heartbreakingly sad.

Kache did not know how to rewind his life, how to undo the one thing that had undone him. His world was indeed flat, and he'd fallen off the edge and landed stretched out on a sofa, on pause, while the television pictures moved and the voices instructed him on everything he needed to know about everything--except how to bring his mom and his dad and Denny back from the dead.

Today I: smoke/am overweight/have a shitty attitude/am depressed because: my mom died of cancer/my uncle put his thumb up my butt/my dad hit me with a razor strop” seems kind of overly deterministic to Randy; it seems to reflect a kind of lazy or half-witted surrender to bald teleology. Basically, if everyone has a vested interest in believing that they understand everything, or even that people are capable in principle of understanding it (either because believing this dampens their insecurities about the unpredictable world, or makes them feel more intelligent than others, or both) then you have an environment in which dopey, reductionist, simple-minded, pat, glib-thinking can circulate, like wheelbarrows filled with inflated currency in the marketplaces of Jakarta.

Do you ever get tired of being so funny? It's a nice little smoke screen, but I know you. Confident people do stuff. They get stuff done. They make things, even if it's just making money. You know what you're making?" "It doesn't matter." "You're making our couch sag. That's about it. You're making your mom sad because you're not trying. You're making your siblings miserable because you're acting like you're miserable." "I am. I'm depressed and on a bunch of drugs. I want to take more of them every day just to feel different." "This isn't depression and that's not their fault. But I don't want to fight. I think what we're about to do is going to give you a way to make some progress." "There's nothing important about lifting weights." "There's nothing insignificant about progress. Let's just give it a try.

At the time, I was still so shrunken into myself I couldn't quite believe what was happening. I'd never dreamed that Mom and I could ever do anything as fun as gorging on an entire cake until our bellies ached. We weren't being hysterical, or depressed. We'd just thought of something nice to do, and done it together. That kind of thing had felt wrong in Meguro, but the new apartment somehow made it possible.

Say you're bored. Or you can't sleep. Maybe your mom is yelling at you, or the boy/ girl you like doesn't like you back in the same way, or you're too fat to even consider going to prom. Or the closet person to you since you were babies in the cradle together has killed herself. The usual stuff. Dread not. Don't be depressed. Be a junkie! You can't count on people to nurture you through the trauma that is existence. But you already knew that. Start by drawing the shades in your bedroom. Welcome the darkness. Lift the pill from your nightstand, clutch the water glass in your hand. Offer your divine thanks in advance. Be greedy-swallow the pill whole rather than spit it in half to spread the wealth for a later date. Dilution is wasteful. Savor the wholesome wholeness. Now lay down in bed. Close your eyes. Wait. Just a little longer.

If your boundaries have been injured, you may find that when you are in conflict with someone, you shut down without even being aware of it. This isolates us from love, and keeps us from taking in safe people. Kate had been quite controlled by her overprotective mother. She’d always been warned that she was sickly, would get hit by cars, and didn’t know how to care for herself well. So she fulfilled all those prophecies. Having no sense of strong boundaries, Kate had great difficulty taking risks and connecting with people. The only safe people were at her home. Finally, however, with a supportive church group, Kate set limits on her time with her mom, made friends in her singles’ group, and stayed connected to her new spiritual family. People who have trouble with boundaries may exhibit the following symptoms: blaming others, codependency, depression, difficulties with being alone, disorganization and lack of direction, extreme dependency, feelings of being let down, feelings of obligation, generalized anxiety, identity confusion, impulsiveness, inability to say no, isolation, masochism, overresponsibility and guilt, panic, passive-aggressive behavior, procrastination and inability to follow through, resentment, substance abuse and eating disorders, thought problems and obsessive-compulsive problems, underresponsibility, and victim mentality.

In attunement, it is the infant who leads and the mother who follows. “Where their roles differ is in the timing of their responses,” writes John Bowlby, one of the century’s great psychiatric researchers. The infant initiates the interaction or withdraws from it according to his own rhythms, Bowlby found, while the “mother regulates her behaviour so that it meshes with his... Thus she lets him call the tune and by a skillful interweaving of her own responses with his creates a dialogue.” The tense or depressed mothering adult will not be able to accompany the infant into relaxed, happy spaces. He may also not fully pick up signs of the infant’s emotional distress, or may not be able to respond to them as effectively as he would wish. The ADD child’s difficulty reading social cues likely originates from her relationship cues not being read by the nurturing adult, who was distracted by stress. In the attunement interaction, not only does the mother follow the child, but she also permits the child to temporarily interrupt contact. When the interaction reaches a certain stage of intensity for the infant, he will look away to avoid an uncomfortably high level of arousal. Another interaction will then begin. A mother who is anxious may react with alarm when the infant breaks off contact, may try to stimulate him, to draw him back into the interaction. Then the infant’s nervous system is not allowed to “cool down,” and the attunement relationship is hampered. Infants whose caregivers were too stressed, for whatever reason, to give them the necessary attunement contact will grow up with a chronic tendency to feel alone with their emotions, to have a sense — rightly or wrongly — that no one can share how they feel, that no one can “understand.” Attunement is the quintessential component of a larger process, called attachment. Attachment is simply our need to be close to somebody. It represents the absolute need of the utterly and helplessly vulnerable human infant for secure closeness with at least one nourishing, protective and constantly available parenting figure. Essential for survival, the drive for attachment is part of the very nature of warm-blooded animals in infancy, especially. of mammals. In human beings, attachment is a driving force of behavior for longer than in any other animal. For most of us it is present throughout our lives, although we may transfer our attachment need from one person — our parent — to another — say, a spouse or even a child. We may also attempt to satisfy the lack of the human contact we crave by various other means, such as addictions, for example, or perhaps fanatical religiosity or the virtual reality of the Internet. Much of popular culture, from novels to movies to rock or country music, expresses nothing but the joys or the sorrows flowing from satisfactions or disappointments in our attachment relationships. Most parents extend to their children some mixture of loving and hurtful behavior, of wise parenting and unskillful, clumsy parenting. The proportions vary from family to family, from parent to parent. Those ADD children whose needs for warm parental contact are most frustrated grow up to be adults with the most severe cases of ADD. Already at only a few months of age, an infant will register by facial expression his dejection at the mother’s unconscious emotional withdrawal, despite the mother’s continued physical presence. “(The infant) takes delight in Mommy’s attention,” writes Stanley Greenspan, “and knows when that source of delight is missing. If Mom becomes preoccupied or distracted while playing with the baby, sadness or dismay settles in on the little face.

hope any new mothers reading this who are having a hard time will get help early and will channel their feelings into something more healing than white marble floors. Because I now know that I was displaying just about every symptom of perinatal depression: sadness, anxiety, fatigue. Once the babies were born, I added on my confusion and obsession about the babies’ safety, which was ratcheting up the more media attention was on us. Being a new mom is challenging enough without trying to do everything under a microscope.

Men who share caregiving duties are happier. They have better relationships. They have happier children. When fathers take on at least 40 percent of the childcare responsibilities, they are at lower risk for depression and drug abuse, and their kids have higher test scores, stronger self-esteem, and fewer behavioral problems. And, according to MenCare, stay-at-home dads show the same brain-hormone changes as stay-at-home moms, which suggests that the idea that mothers are biologically more suited to taking care of kids isn’t necessarily true.

She’s a single mother with three daughters, but it’s this seventeen-year-old boy who worries her more than anything. A boy who cares too little about the future and frets too much about the past: nothing could depress a mother more. Her little Benjamin, the fighter with whom it’s far too easy for the girls of Beartown to fall in love. The boy with the most handsome face, the saddest eyes, and the wildest heart they’ve ever seen. His mom knows, because she married a man who looked just the same, and nothing but trouble lies ahead for men like that. *

Almost worse than the sorrow of missing her was the fact that Mom's death had revealed everything to be meaningless. So much of what I'd thought was true had turned out to be an illusion. I saw people around me living by these illusions— that love and safety could be counted on, that life had meaning and the future could be controlled— and I did not feel that I could ever again share their suspended disbelief. I was swimming against a strong, cold current: I could see them there, playing on a sunny beach, but I couldn't rejoin them. Continuing the struggle seemed not only incredibly painful but, even worse, pointless.

Unfortunately, there wasn’t the same conversation about mental health back then that there is now. I hope any new mothers reading this who are having a hard time will get help early and will channel their feelings into something more healing than white marble floors. Because I now know that I was displaying just about every symptom of perinatal depression: sadness, anxiety, fatigue. Once the babies were born, I added on my confusion and obsession about the babies’ safety, which was ratcheting up the more media attention was on us. Being a new mom is challenging enough without trying to do everything under a microscope.

revelation of warm possibility. Organizers had filled the Dodd Gym with seven hundred people. Before Kennedy spoke, six-year-old Ellen Anich crossed the stage, carrying a bouquet of flowers she had brought to present to the candidate’s wife, Jackie Kennedy. That six-year-old girl was now sixty-eight when I tracked her down for a conversation. “A bunch of grayheads sitting around the table thought it would be cute to have a little girl deliver the flowers. My uncle, Tom Anich, was active in Democratic politics,” Ellen explained, “so I was chosen. We had no money. Everything I wore belonged to a rich girl across the street. That day, I practiced handing things over…. But when Kennedy reached down to accept the flowers in his wife’s absence, I held back, confused since they were meant for his wife.” Kennedy explained that his wife was pregnant and resting. “My mom’s going to have a baby, too,” young Ellen announced. “I promise if you give them to me, I will make sure she gets them,” Kennedy assured her—so finally, she surrendered the roses. The crowd roared with good-natured laughter, sending the night in a positive direction. The high spirits continued as Kennedy spoke of a Democratic bill Eisenhower had vetoed, the Area Redevelopment Bill. He pledged that he would work for its passage so that Ashland and other depressed communities throughout the country would receive the aid they deserved from their government. On September 24, 1963, Kennedy returned to Ashland, this time as president of the United States. The harbor had not been cleaned up and the grave economic situation had not improved. As president he had passed and signed the Area Redevelopment Bill, but its modest funds had not filtered down to Ashland.

The banishing of a leper seems harsh, unnecessary. The Ancient East hasn’t been the only culture to isolate their wounded, however. We may not build colonies or cover our mouths in their presence, but we certainly build walls and duck our eyes. And a person needn’t have leprosy to feel quarantined. One of my sadder memories involves my fourth-grade friend Jerry.1He and a half-dozen of us were an ever-present, inseparable fixture on the playground. One day I called his house to see if we could play. The phone was answered by a cursing, drunken voice telling me Jerry could not come over that day or any day. I told my friends what had happened. One of them explained that Jerry’s father was an alcoholic. I don’t know if I knew what the word meant, but I learned quickly. Jerry, the second baseman; Jerry, the kid with the red bike; Jerry, my friend on the corner was now “Jerry, the son of a drunk.” Kids can be hard, and for some reason we were hard on Jerry. He was infected. Like the leper, he suffered from a condition he didn’t create. Like the leper, he was put outside the village. The divorced know this feeling. So do the handicapped. The unemployed have felt it, as have the less educated. Some shun unmarried moms. We keep our distance from the depressed and avoid the terminally ill. We have neighborhoods for immigrants, convalescent homes for the elderly, schools for the simple, centers for the addicted, and prisons for the criminals. The rest simply try to get away from it all. Only God knows how many Jerrys are in voluntary exile—individuals living quiet, lonely lives infected by their fear of rejection and their memories of the last time they tried. They choose not to be touched at all rather than risk being hurt again.

Only an hour in, and already the first temptation: the warmth of my blankets and bed, my pillows and the fake-fur throw Hannah's mom left here after a weekend visit. They're all saying, Climb in. No one will know if you stay in bed all day. No one will know if you wear the same sweatpants for the entire month, if you eat every meal in front of television shows and use t-shirts as napkins. Go ahead and listen to that same song on repeat until its sound turns to nothing and you sleep the winter away. I only have Mabel's visit to get through, and then all this could be mine. I could scroll through Twitter until my vision blurs and then collapse on my bed like an Oscar Wilde character. I could score myself a bottle of whiskey and let it make me glow, let all the room's edges go soft, let the memories out of their cages. Maybe I would hear him sing again, if all else went quiet.

The neighborhood’s only cheerful sound I usually sleep through: the morning coos of toddlers. A troop of them, round-faced and multilayered, walk to some daycare hidden even farther in the rat’s nest of streets behind me, each clutching a section of a long piece of rope trailed by a grown-up. They march, penguin-style, past my house every morning, but I have not once seen them return. For all I know, they troddle around the entire world and return in time to pass my window again in the morning. Whatever the story, I am attached to them. There are three girls and a boy, all with a fondness for bright red jackets—and when I don’t seen them, when I oversleep, I actually feel blue. Bluer. That’d be the word my mom would use, not something as dramatic as depressed. I’ve had the blues for twenty-four years. I couldn't get up, even when I heard the kids make their sleepy duckwalk past my house. I pictured them in big rubber rainboots, clomping along, leaving rounded footprints in the March muck, and I still couldn't move.

I have one priority in life and it’s not making millions as it once was. I have all the money I could ever want, too much, India claims. I’m business driven but it’s my girl who is the most important part of my life. My whole life. It’s that very reason I’m reluctant to bring any shift in our happy bubble. We both work hard. We play hard together. That woman is my equal in every aspect of life. She thrills me, and intrigues me. I’ve loved peeling back India’s layers. She’s vulnerable is my mean girl and I love the place we’ve gotten to where she trusts me with all her sad, unsure moments. She will grieve for her brother for the rest of her life. She’ll always worry about her mom becoming manic depressive again. She’ll forever be a woman who puts everyone else before her own needs. But what’s different in India’s life is she now has me who makes sure she’s first. In everything. It’s going to kill me to see the happiness drop from her eyes. She’ll go into fix it mode and when she can’t, she’ll get angry and stressed.

But depression wasn’t the word. This was a plunge encompassing sorrow and revulsion far beyond the personal: a sick, drenching nausea at all humanity and human endeavor from the dawn of time. The writhing loathsomeness of the biological order. Old age, sickness, death. No escape for anyone. Even the beautiful ones were like soft fruit about to spoil. And yet somehow people still kept fucking and breeding and popping out new fodder for the grave, producing more and more new beings to suffer like this was some kind of redemptive, or good, or even somehow morally admirable thing: dragging more innocent creatures into the lose-lose game. Squirming babies and plodding, complacent, hormone-drugged moms. Oh, isn’t he cute? Awww. Kids shouting and skidding in the playground with no idea what future Hells awaited them: boring jobs and ruinous mortgages and bad marriages and hair loss and hip replacements and lonely cups of coffee in an empty house and a colostomy bag at the hospital. Most people seemed satisfied with the thin decorative glaze and the artful stage lighting that, sometimes, made the bedrock atrocity of the human predicament look somewhat more mysterious or less abhorrent. People gambled and golfed and planted gardens and traded stocks and had sex and bought new cars and practiced yoga and worked and prayed and redecorated their homes and got worked up over the news and fussed over their children and gossiped about their neighbors and pored over restaurant reviews and founded charitable organizations and supported political candidates and attended the U.S. Open and dined and travelled and distracted themselves with all kinds of gadgets and devices, flooding themselves incessantly with information and texts and communication and entertainment from every direction to try to make themselves forget it: where we were, what we were. But in a strong light there was no good spin you could put on it. It was rotten top to bottom. Putting your time in at the office; dutifully spawning your two point five; smiling politely at your retirement party; then chewing on your bedsheet and choking on your canned peaches at the nursing home. It was better never to have been born—never to have wanted anything, never to have hoped for anything.

The expert opinion recommends against spanking for three reasons. One is that spanking has harmful side effects down the line, including aggression, delinquency, a deficit in empathy, and depression. The cause-and-effect theory, in which spanking teaches children that violence is a way to solve problems, is debatable. Equally likely explanations for the correlation between spanking and violence are that innately violent parents have innately violent children, and that cultures and neighborhoods that tolerate spanking also tolerate other kinds of violence.177 The second reason not to spank a child is that spanking is not particularly effective in reducing misbehavior compared to explaining the infraction to the child and using nonviolent measures like scolding and time-outs. Pain and humiliation distract children from pondering what they did wrong, and if the only reason they have to behave is to avoid these penalties, then as soon as Mom’s and Dad’s backs are turned they can be as naughty as they like. But perhaps the most compelling reason to avoid spanking is symbolic. Here is Straus’s third reason why children should never, ever be spanked: “Spanking contradicts the ideal of nonviolence in the family and society.

Okay,like I could write about being new to this school and feeling really self-conscious already, you know, 'cause I'm new and haven't really gotten my growth spurt yet...in any capacity." This gets a few chuckles and I plow forward. "Then,at this meeting, maybe some cool, hot jock is sitting next to me and asks me to stand up, only to have the entire classroom staring at me as I say, 'But I am standing up!' Except,you know, funnier." A few kids giggle and the big guy next to me grunts, "Pretty funny." I smile over at my new comrade and smack his massive shoulder like we're old friends.I'm going to have to get his name. "I mean, obviously it'd be better than that. But I just think it'd be good comif relief," I add, doing what my dad calls laying it on thick. "And we could put it near the pet obits to balance out all the high-school-is-depressing-enough vibes!" Now the laughs are easy and everyone's smiling, and I feel myself loosen up a bit. Just like Mom and Dad with cheerleading, these folks are cracking under my spell, and I start really amping up the drama. "And I know I couldn't use 'Traumarama' as a title since Seventeen already does, but I'm thinking 'Trauma and Drama-Terrible Tales of Teenagedom,' or something like that, with some real-life gossip mixed in.

Mom, your love is a mystery: How can you do it all? Mother is such a simple word, But to me there’s meaning seldom heard. For everything I am today, My mother’s love showed me the way. You are the Thunder and I am Lightning And I Love the Way You, Know Who You are to me Cause Mom You are a firework My Moon in times of darkness My Sun in times of my happy hours My pillow in times of sorrow And My strength In Times Of Great Depression How Can You Do It All? My World, My Forever What will I Have Been Without Such Pure Love Like The Moon In Someone’s Sky You Show Me The Way to life With your loving and slivering light you shine like and angel And I Thank heaven for the grace of having such a mother Which paths are wise and life is true You are my sunshine I’ll love my mother all my days, For enriching my life in so many ways. She set me straight and then set me free, And that’s what the word "mother" means to me. Mom, I wish I had words engraved in the clouds to tell How much you mean to me. I am the person I am today, Because you let me be. Your unconditional love Made me happy, strong, and secure. In all the world, there is no mother Better than my own. You're the best and wisest person, Mom I have ever known. Like the stars talks with no words your wisdom Enlightened me And Forever the angels will sing hallelujah For they Woe to have someone like you

Even what passes as heterosexual intimacy is often resented by straight women who find themselves doing the emotional heavy lifting for men who have no close friends and won’t go to therapy. Men are less likely than women to discuss mental health with friends and family, to seek out psychotherapy, or to recognize they are depressed—a pattern so common as to be termed “normative male alexithymia” by psychologists.51 For straight men in relationships, all of these needs get aimed at women partners. In 2016, the writer Erin Rodgers coined the term “emotional gold digger” to describe straight men’s reliance on women partners to “play best friend, lover, career advisor, stylist, social secretary, emotional cheerleader, mom.”52 Elaborating on this dynamic and the emotional burnout it produces in straight women, Melanie Hamlett further explains that the concept of the emotional gold digger “has gained more traction recently as women, feeling increasingly burdened by unpaid emotional labor, have wised up to the toll of toxic masculinity, which keeps men isolated and incapable of leaning on each other. . . . While [women] read countless self-help books, listen to podcasts, seek out career advisors, turn to female friends for advice and support, or spend a small fortune on therapists to deal with old wounds and current problems, the men in their lives simply rely on them.

How lonely am I ? I am 21 year old. I wake up get ready for college. I go to the Car stop where I have a bunch of accquaintances whom I go to college with. If I'm unfortunately late to the stop, I miss the Car . But the accquaintances rarely halt the car for me. I have to phone and ask them to halt the car. In the car I don't sit beside anyone because the people I like don't like me and vice versa. I get down at college. Attend all the boring classes. I want to skip a class and enjoy with friends but I rarely do so because I don't have friends and the ones I have don't hang out with me. I often look at people around and wonder how everyone has friends and are cared for. And also wonder why I am never cared for and why I am not a priority to anyone. I reach home and rest for few minutes before my mom knocks on my door. I expect her to ask about my day. But she never does. Sometimes I blurt it out because I want to talk to people. I have a different relationship with my dad. He thinks I don't respect him and that I am an arrogant and self centered brat. I am tired of explaining him that I'm not. I am just opinionated. I gave up. Neither my parents nor my sis or bro ask me about my life and rarely share theirs. I do have a best friend who always messages and phones when she has something to say. That would mostly be about his girlfriend . But at times even though I try not to message him of my life. I do. I message him about how lonely I am. I always wanted a guy or a girl best friend. But he or she rarely talk to me. The girl who talk are extremely repulsive or very creepy. And I have a girl who made me believe that I was special for her.She was the only person who made me feel that way. I knew and still know that she is just toying with me. Yet I hope that's not true. I want to be happy and experience things like every normal person. But it seems impossible. And I am tired of being lonely. I once messaged a popular quoran. I complimented him answers and he replied. When I asked him if I can message him and asked him to be my friend he saw the message and chose not to reply. A reply, even a rejection is better than getting ignored. A humble request to people on Quora. For those who advertise to message them regarding any issue should stop doing that if they can't even reply. And for those who follow them. Don't blindly believe people on Quora or IRL Everyone has a mask. I feel very depressed at times and I want to consult a doctor. But I am not financially independent. My family doesn't take me seriously when I tell them I want to visit a doctor. And this is my lonely life. I just wish I had some body who cared for me and to stand by me. I don't know if that is possible. I stared to hate myself. If this continues on maybe I'll be drowning in the river of self hate and depreciation. Still I have hope. Hope is the only thing I have. I want my life to change. If you read the complete answer then, THANKS for your patience. People don't have that these days.

What’s perhaps strange to say is that I’m not sure I would have gotten there without the period of enforced stillness and the steadiness I found inside of knitting. I’d had to go small in order to think big again. Shaken by the enormity of everything that was happening, I’d needed my hands to reintroduce me to what was good, simple, and accomplishable. And that turned out to be a lot. I now knit while talking to my mom on the phone, during Zoom meetings with my team from the office, and on summer afternoons when friends come to sit on our back patio. Knitting has made watching the evening news a little less stressful. It has made certain hours of the day less lonely, and it’s helped me think more reasonably about the future. I’m not here to tell you that knitting is a cure for anything. It won’t end racism or demolish a virus or vanquish depression. It won’t create a just world or slow climate change or heal anything big that’s broken. It’s too small for that. It’s so small that it hardly seems to matter. And this is part of my point. I’ve come to understand that sometimes the big stuff becomes easier to handle when you deliberately put something small alongside it. When everything starts to feel big and therefore scary and insurmountable, when I hit a point of feeling or thinking or seeing too much, I’ve learned to make the choice to go toward the small. On days when my brain apprehends nothing but monolithic catastrophe and doom, when I feel paralyzed by not-enoughness and my agitation begins to stir, I pick up the knitting needles and give my hands a chance to take over, to quietly click us out of that hard place. In knitting, when you create the first stitch of a new project, you cast on. When an item is finished, you bind off. Both of these actions, I’ve found, are incredibly satisfying—the bookends of something manageable and finite. They give me a sense of completion in a world that will always and forever feel chaotic and incomplete.

But depression wasn’t the word. This was a plunge encompassing sorrow and revulsion far beyond the personal: a sick, drenching nausea at all humanity and human endeavor from the dawn of time. The writhing loathsomeness of the biological order. Old age, sickness, death. No escape for anyone. Even the beautiful ones were like soft fruit about to spoil. And yet somehow people still kept fucking and breeding and popping out new fodder for the grave, producing more and more new beings to suffer like this was some kind of redemptive, or good, or even somehow morally admirable thing: dragging more innocent creatures into the lose-lose game. Squirming babies and plodding, complacent, hormone-drugged moms. Oh, isn’t he cute? Awww. Kids shouting and skidding in the playground with no idea what future Hells awaited them: boring jobs and ruinous mortgages and bad marriages and hair loss and hip replacements and lonely cups of coffee in an empty house and a colostomy bag at the hospital. Most people seemed satisfied with the thin decorative glaze and the artful stage lighting that, sometimes, made the bedrock atrocity of the human predicament look somewhat more mysterious or less abhorrent. People gambled and golfed and planted gardens and traded stocks and had sex and bought new cars and practiced yoga and worked and prayed and redecorated their homes and got worked up over the news and fussed over their children and gossiped about their neighbors and pored over restaurant reviews and founded charitable organizations and supported political candidates and attended the U.S. Open and dined and travelled and distracted themselves with all kinds of gadgets and devices, flooding themselves incessantly with information and texts and communication and entertainment from every direction to try to make themselves forget it: where we were, what we were. But in a strong light there was no good spin you could put on it. It was rotten top to bottom. Putting your time in at the office; dutifully spawning your two point five; smiling politely at your retirement party; then chewing on your bedsheet and choking on your canned peaches at the nursing home. It was better never to have been born—never to have wanted anything, never to have hoped for anything. And all this mental thrashing and tossing was mixed up with recurring images, or half-dreams, of Popchik lying weak and thin on one side with his ribs going up and down—I’d forgotten him somewhere, left him alone and forgotten to feed him, he was dying—over and over, even when he was in the room with me, head-snaps where I started up guiltily, where is Popchik; and this in turn was mixed up with head-snapping flashes of the bundled pillowcase, locked away in its steel coffin.

The PEOPLE, SCHOOL, EVERYONE, and EVERYTHING is so FAKE AND GAY.' 'I shrieked, at the top of my voice fingers outspread and frozen in fear, unlike ever before in my young life; being the gentle, sweet, and shy girl that I am.' 'Besides always too timid to have a voice, to stand up for me, and forced not to, by masters.' Amidst my thoughts racing ridiculously, 'I feel that it is all just another way for the 'SOCIETY' to make me feel inferior, they think, they are so 'SUPERIOR' to me, and who I am to them.' 'Nonetheless, every day of my life, I have felt like I have been drowning in a pool, with weights attached to my ankles.' 'Like, of course, there is no way for me to escape the chains that are holding me down.' 'The one and only person, that holds the key to my freedom: WILL NEVER LET ME GO! It's like there is within me, and has been deep inside me!' 'I now live in this small dull town for too damn long. It is an UNSYMPATHETIC, obscure, lonely, totally depressed, and depressing place, for any teenage girl to be, most definitely if you're a girl like me.' 'All these streets surrounding me are covered with filth, and born in the hills of middle western Pennsylvania mentalities of slow-talking and deep heritages, and beliefs, that don't operate me as a soul lost and lingering within the streets and halls.' 'My old town was ultimately left behind when the municipality neighboring made the alterations to the main roads; just to save five minutes of commuting, through this countryside village. Now my town sits on one side of that highway.' 'Just like a dead carcass to the rest of the world, which rushes by. What is sullen about this is that it is a historic town, with some immeasurable old monuments, and landmarks.' 'However, the others I see downright neglect what is here, just like me, it seems. Other than me, no one cares. Yet I care about all the little things.' 'I am so attached to all these trivial things as if they are a part of me. It disheartens me to see anything go away from me.' 'It's a community where the litter blows and bisects the road, like the tumble-wheats of the yore of times past.' 'Furthermore, if you do not look where you are going, you will fall in our trip, in one of the many potholes or heaved up bumps in the pavement, or have an evacuated structure masonry descending on your head.' 'Merely one foolproof way of simplifying the appearance of this ghost town.' 'There are still some reminders of the glory days when you glance around.' 'Like the town clock, that is evaporated black that has chipped enamel; it seems that it is always missing a few light bulbs.' 'The timepiece only has time pointing hands on the one side, and it nevermore shows the right time of day.' 'The same can be assumed for the neon signs on the mom-and-pop shops, which flicker at night as if they're in agonizing PAIN.' 'Why? To me is a question that is asked frequently.' 'It is all over negligence!' 'I get the sense and feeling most of the time, as they must prepare when looking around here at night.' 'The streetlamps do not all work, as they should. The glass in them is cracked.' 'The parking meters are always jammed, or just completely broken off their posts altogether.' 'The same can be said, for the town sign that titles this area. It is not even here anymore, as it should be now moved to the town square or shortage of a park.

Tonight, Mom painted a portrait of our family, and through her eyes I saw people I’d never imagined—a drunken, unfaithful husband and a depressed, overwhelmingly unhappy wife. How is it that I saw none of this? Are children so sublimely oblivious to their own world? She was right to hide this truth from me. Even now, I wish I didn’t know it. Sometimes, knowing where we come from hurts more than we can stand.

I’d like to think that I am somewhat self-aware. I’ve got some blind spots, that’s obvious, but all in all, I feel like I’ve got a pretty clear view of reality. More often than not, I know when, and why, I’m making a bad decision. Most of us do—and by us, I mean broke people. Take smoking, for example. If Mom didn’t smoke away ten bucks a day, we never would’ve had to rent out the guest cottage to Freddy in the first place, right? Mom knows that, she’s done the math a million times. But there’s more to consider. For starters, she’s perpetually tired. She’s been working fifty-hour weeks for as long as I can remember. And there’s a good chance she’s clinically depressed. Smoking gets her through that second shift. It relaxes her when the pressure is mounting. It gives her something to look forward to during her break and after work, and before work, and when she wakes up in the morning. It makes her heart beat faster. At ten bucks a day, that’s a bargain.

I tried to go to group counseling, but the lady said they were full and so when I tried a 1-on-1 with a counselor, they didn’t respond to my calls. I tried so many times. It’s already so embarrassing asking for help. And you have to pick up my calls, too. Please, mom. When you don’t pick up the phone, my head goes all over the place and I think you’re dead.

It is like another five years of my life have passed, and it is as if I blacked out, because I cannot remember them, and I do not know why, yet maybe I do? I was there but my mind was elsewhere. I think about the past and relieve it while reliving it instead of being the mom, which I need and needed to be. I do not know where I was, where I have been, I was lost in my own body! Spinning- spinning- spinning around to the point of insanity, or so it seemed. Maybe my depression got the best of me? Maybe I was healing myself from the past; maybe, I do not know anything, and yet know it all. In those five years she became a teenager, when did that happen? She has hips and a chest. Plus, she wears more make-up than I do? When…! How…! What? Where have I been? Yeah, Jaylynn is a young lady, and I can see she is having the same dreadful existence in her life as I did when I was a young woman. Yes, I do see that, sad to say. It is interesting to watch children grow up in front of your eyes, I never knew how difficult, letting go could be. I remember when Jaylynn started to read. I remember when she went through the change to become a woman and we had that talk, little did I know she did not need it.

When your mother emerges from her depression and suddenly seems interested in your days and acts the way you see other kids’ moms acting, you don’t dare feel joy because you know from experience that it will all go away. And it does. Every single time.

You living with Vera now?” “Yeah, so keep your fucking hands off her.” “She’s like a sister to me,” he said, taking another long drag. “Plus, I got a girl.” “You got a girl?” I snorted. “Who is dumb enough to date you?” “Why don’t you ask your fucking mom? She’ll tell you how good I give it.” “My mom wouldn’t fuck you. You don’t have any money.” João chuckled. “That’s fucking depressing.

I've heard that this sometimes happens to parents-especially if you have trauma from your childhood. When your kids get to be the age you were when you were dealing with something rough, you relive it emotionally. Unfortunately, there wasn't the same conversation about mental health back then that there is now. I hope any new mothers reading this who are having a hard time will get help early and will channel their feelings into something more healing than white marble floors. Because I now know that I was displaying just about every symptom of perinatal depression: sadness, anxiety, fatigue. Once the babies were born, I added on my confusion and obsession about the babies' safety, which was ratcheting up the more media attention was on us. Being a new mom is challenging enough without trying to do everything under a microscope.

That’s depressing. I need a drink. “Mom, let me call you back,” I say and hang up to call my sister, Nina, who’s dating Kevin, one of the Axe-wearing guys.

When your mother emerges from her depression and suddenly seems interested in your days and acts the way you see other kids’ moms acting, you don’t dare feel joy because you know from experience that it will all go away. And it does. Every single time. Better to expect nothing too stable.

I didn't like hearing myself through Dad. It was only when Dad ordered Mom to stop crying that I understood we were bullies. We ordered her to be happy as if we knew what it meant to be happy. As if a person was not happy because they simply forgot to write it on their to-do list. We knew from experience that nothing we said or did would work, but we couldn't help ourselves; it was our job as the slightly happier people to make her happier. We were like corrupt policemen at the dinner table. We applied blunt force. We did not listen very well, and often spoke in commands. Go outside. Get a job. Do some gardening. Take a walk. Try harder. Don't give up. Don't be depressed. Stop crying. Which was exactly the kind of instruction that made a crying person cry harder.

This could be my life if I let it. I could make all kinds of plans and take care of myself. I could apologize to my mom, let her know that I've been depressed since I lost my boyfriend and my job and all my fake friends during a time when I probably should have been medicated (but not blaming her or anything), but that I'm trying to work on it.

Gray draws a straight line from the decline in children’s freedom to play and embrace risk to the dramatic rise in childhood mental disorders like anxiety and depression that has occurred since the 1950s.

Watching Carrie Fisher on what seems to be her last work, the British sitcom " Catastrophe" playing a crazy old mom makes me wonder how many talents are taken for granted just because they have aged. Just to quote her again, as if "they are disobedient kids" treated with so little respect and honor. In a culture that venerates the youth and degenerates everything that is somewhat "out of date" we can only wonder how the future will be. If the same ones that diminishes the old will themselves be older too. If they are lucky enough to reach a certain age and age well.

The only and last words she remembered her mother told her before she became mute was, “You have to remember Pollyanna. In Naraka, you can never ever trust anyone. “She sighed. One of those long sighs that would make her cough till she puked blood. Polly could recall the revolting rotten smell of blood, “no one is your friend here. Do you understand? No one” Umber blood dripping from the corner of her lips, “They might be nice to you only for the lake. This lake is like your life. You have to protect it. This is the only way you can live a long life” she spit the blood and mucus in a piece of filthy cloth. “But mom. Why should we live a long life when it’s a very bad time to live and many bad people want to kill us?” “Because your innocent dreams still have colors and power and we have to keep them that way

To: KitFrom: MomSubject: The Five Stages of Everything Sucks It’s the middle of the night. Just stumbled across this attached article re the five stages of grief: 1. Denial 2. Anger 3. Bargaining 4. Depression 5. Acceptance Of course BACON should totally be number one on this list. Also, I’ve decided I’m skipping over the first three steps and heading straight for DEPRESSION. You with me? To: MomFrom: KitSubject: Re: The Five Stages of Everything Sucks You should really text like a normal person. Who emails anymore? Things this list is missing: Chocolate. Netflix binges. Pajamas. As for depression, already beat you to it. Sure am #livingmybestlife

Holding on to the depression I’ve had since my mom died has been hard; it’s made me feel heavy. But right now, standing in front of the angel, I feel weightless.

Your sister tells you You're stinky as hell Because you don't shower Your mom tells you You're only good Being a disappointment Your brother thinks You're only gloomy Because you don't care They don't know It takes forever to heal, Sometimes, When the wound is deep It takes you forever to get up, Forever to walk, Forever plus one to decide If it's worth it if you eat, And what to eat And how to pick the dishes From the kitchen's cabinet, And that it takes a strength Of walking a marathon To wash them right after They don't know You stopped being you You stopped looking in a mirror That doesn't recognize you To search for a reflection The physics laws have no Dominance when it's your brain That's shut down Fragments of reality getting Forgotten in a dense black hole In your neurons Because for you, Time has frozen, And it's the only physics law That works For you All of them don't know That a corpse doesn’t shower A corpse doesn't hear her mom's tears A corpse doesn't care A corpse is living in darkness Because she's buried since a long Long time A corpse ceases to exist It just is And everyone knows it just is, It's just there Even If it's a breathing one

​But, I also knew that I couldn’t not to anything. Being a stay-at-home mom is a job in itself, but there is a creative dimension in my brain, that when not used, will bring me to depression. I need to be doing something else, too.

I have two sons. Jude is five, with dark, curly hair. He looks just like his mom. Moses is two, with bright eyes and a wide smile. I love watching my boys play together. They are never anxious. Never depressed. But every once in a while, they wake up in the middle of the night scared. Sometimes it’s a bad dream. Other times it’s a monster in the closet (that turns out to be a blanket). You know the drill. When they wake up crying, all they need to calm down is a minute or two in my arms. Once they feel that security—that safety, the fact that dad is present—they are fine. The implications are obvious. Jesus calls us to have faith like a child. I wonder if that means we need to trust God like my sons trust me. To climb up into his arms, take a deep breath, and know we are safe, as long as we are with him. I sleep much better these days. It still takes me a while to fall asleep at times. Like my boys, I still wake up with fears, concerns, thoughts that are out of control. My heart still picks up pace. My mind begins to race. But I’m learning to call out to God, to remember my place, and to take my thoughts captive. I’m learning to take a deep breath, to dwell on his scriptures, and to learn from my boys. After all, when was the last time you met a stressed-out five year old? I don’t think they exist. When was the last time you met a stressed-out child of God? They are all over the place.

Her sister tells her she’s depressed. ‘Worrying that you’re turning into Mom is like the textbook definition of depression. The depression textbooks all have pictures of our mom in them. Quit that fucking job, already. I don’t understand why you don’t.

never complicate my Daniel Fasts. I keep it simple. Twenty-one days without meat or sweets.  I have fruits, vegetables and water. I was sure this Daniel Fast was going to help me:             Gain control of my emotions. In order to walk by faith, I had to walk in the spirit not the flesh. Just because my life was in chaos, didn’t mean I had to give in to it. There was no way I could walk in the flesh and experience victory.            Rely more on the Holy Spirit for answers and fulfillment than on human logic and comfort food. The Holy Spirit is always with us and He knows the answers to all of the questions that we have.            Detox my body from all of the processed food and sugars that weren’t healthy for me anyway. Our bodies are temples and my temple needed cleansing that would in turn help increase my energy and ward of feelings of depression.

Thank you, Daylight Savings Time, for making people wax on about the wonder of an extra hour of sleep, only to serve as an especially depressing reminder to parents that kids don’t care about farmers and harvests and extra hours of daylight. I enjoy my kids standing at my bedside at 4:30 a.m. like creepy, wide-awake Children of the Corn. Naptimes are also jacked, so there’s that. With all due respect-ish, A Tired Mom. Thank you, Obvious

Be kind to everyone at all times. Practice acts of kindness even if the situation does not necessarily call for it. Help an elderly cross the street, do the household chores for your mom, give offerings to the church, or buy food for the street children. Whatever the situation is, whenever and wherever you are, it is never wrong to be kind.The more you give the more you will receive back. You’ll just have to trust me on this one until you see for yourself.

Priscilla has made it a mission to disabuse the students who still come to L’Abri of the Schaeffer mythology. She makes no secret of her nervous breakdowns, her dependence on Prozac, her depression and anxiety attacks, her alcohol-related struggles. She will tell anyone who asks that being a Schaeffer child—and the pressure from Mom to be part of the ministry and, above all, from strangers to live up to their “Schaeffer expectations”—didn’t help. When I called her to ask if she would allow me to write about her problems, and she gave me the okay, she also said “Mom drove me crazy, but in fairness I would have suffered from stress and depression anywhere. I would push too hard in L’Abri, then crash. If I had been doing something else just as intense, it would have happened, too.” Susan

We held our breaths for a month and a half until we got word from the Red Cross that he was alive and a prisoner of war. The Red Cross went to prisoners of war and they did a lovely thing, they recorded them saying or singing things and they sent those recordings to their loved ones back home. Lenny loved to sing so he recorded a song called “Miss You.” My mother would put that little cardboard record on every night and cry. Every single night! Finally I said, “Mom, maybe just hold the record? Maybe don’t put it on so much? I mean he’s alive, but it’s depressing hearing him sing every night!” Even though we loved him dearly, truth is he was slightly off-key. —

Mom now takes pills to wake up in the morning. She takes pills to help her sleep at night. She takes pills to calm her nerves and pills for her depression. She takes pills to lower her blood pressure and stop her heartburn and deal with her allergies. I think the pharmacy hired my mother because she’s their best customer. She knows her drugs. The pharmacist always jokes that my mom should be filling the prescriptions instead of ringing people up at the register.

Wendy and Mom were both extremely depressed, and if there was anything that depression gave you, I learned, it was the freedom of not giving a shit.

You don’t know it, but these are the last moments of the brief courtship you get to have with yourself as a female human being in 1990s America, a courtship in which you do not “love yourself” or “hate yourself” (because those terms would not have made sense to you) but instead have a profound sense of satisfaction with the world around you and your apparent role in it. Then something happens to you. It’s not a single-event trauma. Your parents do not get divorced. No one dies. You are not abused. And yet. Something happens to you. And because you cannot trace what happens to you to a single, traumatic event, you struggle to explain it, struggle for years to admit that anything happened to you at all. But it did. It’s obvious, visible in your face, your posture. A friend in middle school tells you that her mom has asked her, “What happened to Jessica?” What happened to you? It’s a big fish of a question, large and slippery. When you are twelve years old, a book titled Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls becomes a national best-seller. The author, Mary Pipher, writes, “Something dramatic happens to girls in early adolescence. Just as planes and ships disappear mysteriously into the Bermuda Triangle, so do the selves of girls go down in droves.” Pipher argues that while adolescence has always been a difficult transition for boys and girls alike, there is something in the cultural air of the early 1990s that has spawned an epidemic of depression, self-mutilation, and eating disorders.

I don't think my friends back then even knew the extent of my sadness and depression. They didn't know how all-consuming my mom's Alzheimer's was for me. It wasn't like she was getting noticeably worse by the day. It wasn't like something bad or scary was happening to her every day. She had never been in the hospital because of her Alzheimer's. It wasn't like she was going to die tomorrow. But, I thought about her Alzheimer's all day, every single day.

Upon your seeing a dirty kitchen, your inner voice may say something like, “I am such a hot mess,” but challenge yourself to think of something else it could mean. “I cooked my family dinner three nights in a row” is a true statement. If care tasks are morally neutral, then having not showered or brushed your hair in three weeks does not mean “I am disgusting” but instead simply means “I am having a hard time right now.” Let me tell you what the mess in my home means. It means I’m alive. Dirty dishes mean I’ve fed myself. Scattered hobby supplies mean I am creative. Scattered toys and mess mean I am a fun mom. The stacked boxes in the hall mean I was thoughtful enough to order what we need. The clothes strewn on the floor mean I had a full day. And occasionally mess means I’m struggling with depression or stress. But those aren’t moral failings either—and neither is that moldy coffee cup I keep not taking to the kitchen.

this is more than an intellectual process. Repetition compulsion is a formidable beast. For Charlotte, stability and its attendant joy isn’t to be trusted; it makes her feel queasy, anxious. When you’re a child and your father is loving and playful, then disappears for a while, and later comes back and acts as if nothing happened—and does this repeatedly—you learn that joy is fickle. When your mother emerges from her depression and suddenly seems interested in your days and acts the way you see other kids’ moms acting, you don’t dare feel joy because you know from experience that it will all go away. And it does. Every single time. Better to expect nothing too stable.

It actually felt kinda nice to have my mom grab my hand, but she was crazy if she thought I was going to talk to her.

Judy Parsons: It’s so rewarding when people come up and tell me what joy watching those reruns brings to them. A former neighbor told me that the only time they saw their daughter, who has many health issues, laugh and smile is when she watches the show. She said, “As long as she’s concentrating on that, you can tell that her body just relaxes and she enjoys it.” I even had a doctor tell me that he recommends The Big Bang Theory to his patients who are suffering from depression because “everybody needs laughter.” I mean, what a joy to hear that. I have gotten Christmas cards from people in Germany just thanking me for being his mom.

My mother reminds me of her painting palette. Her vibrant moods are swirls of color. She is witty, kooky orange one minute and reckless, sexy red the next. She is shades of sunshine and sunflower petals, and she is a circle of black, burrowing in a deep hole of depression and sadness. My mom is sincerely flawed and beautiful, making it hard not to fall in love with her.

I asked him if work was part of the reason he left us. He says he left because he was depressed and anxious and mistakenly believed he could run away from those problems. It sounds like a stock answer, Mom. Like what his media-relations person told him to say. I asked him the same question again. Because he left EVERYTHING in his world behind but work. He must really love his job, right? He said that his identity as a man was all caught up in his work. That’s what he told me this morning. I went to diving practice with that in my head. It wasn’t a good headspace. I kept thinking, his identity as a man. What the hell does that mean? I know a bunch of other dads, and I would say that they all have being a dad at the top of their list of identities.

In landmark experiments that began in the late 1980s, Michael Meaney, a neuroscientist at McGill University, in Montreal, studied how the interactions between rat moms and pups played out in the lives of the pups. His research team took genetically identical rat mothers and videotaped and analyzed their behaviors while the pups were infants. Then they let the pups grow up, and checked how the pups of nurturing rat moms fared compared with the offspring of stressed-out moms. The pampered pups grew into adults that were more laid-back, less reactive to stress, and less prone to addictive behaviors, such as overdoing it when given a free supply of alcohol or cocaine. They were also more social with other rats, more daring, and more willing to explore new places. Pups of stressed, negligent moms grew into loners prone to the rat equivalents of anxiety, depression, and addictive behaviors. Studies of monkey moms and their infants turned up similar results. Stressed macaque infants whose moms are inconsistent, erratic, and sometimes dismissive grow up timid, submissive, fearful, less gregarious, and more prone to depression than their better-nurtured peers. These early findings were the beginning of a paradigm shift in our understanding of how experiences in childhood can affect our health and the dialogue between the gut and the brain.

Huh, yeah,' Johnny says. 'My mom was always complimenting me, and look how I turned out.

I saw all my new mom friends go through a sadness other than postpartum depression: it is grieving the loss of your old self, of who you used to be.

In the proper fashion of divorced mothers, during her sane, lucid moments my mother would, of course, pay lip service to the idea that I ought to have a relationship with my father. Everybody needs and deserves a mommy and a daddy. In reality, she didn’t want me to get too close to him. She wanted him around, but only in his rightful, Saturday-afternoon place. And who could blame her? How could my mom tell me, whom she loved more than anyone else in the world, that she wanted me to have a good relationship with my father, whom she hated more than anyone else on earth, and not get found out? Ditto my dad.

My mom wasn’t interested in my miserable writing, and she just couldn’t look at it without feeling awful herself. While she was able to continue competently as a parent on all the usual material fronts—she fed me, she gave me a bed to sleep in, she theoretically sent me to school—she was completely dense about my emotional life. She just didn’t want to know about it, had pretty much decided this was a job for the professionals. On the other hand, my father loved chatting with me about how awful the whole world was because he basically agreed.

He could be good to talk to sometimes, but his actual efforts on my behalf added up to a whole lot of nothing. Every time I realized how little he would actually do for me as a father, how indifferent he was to parenting basics like buying me clothes or getting me to school on time or running me over to dance class, my misery was compounded. I could see that he might have understood me better than my mom did, but he really didn’t love me as devotedly.

Without sugar, you experience a dopamine 'withdrawal' state-you feel crabby, irritable, and even depressed.

The author wishes to acknowledge death, depression, strife, hardships and discord for inspiration. Also, mom.

Translate these thoughts into fatherhood. If you are like me, it is a task in which, most of the time, I have no idea of what I am doing. Anxiety and depression easily take over most days, as I think I have screwed up my kids or I am doing everything wrong. But this new way of thinking has given me hope. I no longer feel like I am doing this alone, and I am finding weights I picked up that I am negatively parenting from.

In the summer of 1969, Gus asked Judi if she would be interested in leading a new Saturday-morning class called Jazz Dance for Adult Beginners. Most of the women who had signed up were moms of girls already taking classes at the studio. “They were there anyway—knitting, reading, sitting around waiting for their kids,” she wrote. “Why not dance a little themselves?” Judi agreed. She carefully selected music and choreographed simple jazz routines. At first her students were excited to learn. But after a few weeks, she saw a depressing 90 percent dropout rate. What had she done wrong? She sincerely wanted to find out, so she began calling her dropouts and asking for answers.

my mom, and she’s totally cool with it… Look she’s still going through a hard time right now—divorce. My dad’s basically a dick who cheated on her. So, if she’s, like, depressed or just staring at the pool like a zombie or something, it’s because of that." As they crossed the state line into Florida, Rob said, "And no thinking about Natalie.

After seeing Dylan with the redhead, I sunk deeper into a depression. Even working at Lark’s house did nothing to distract me. I simply went through the motions. Fortunately, Lark was especially tired and slept most of the day, so she never noticed my bad mood. Harlow wasn’t as oblivious as we washed dishes after dinner. “What’s up, stinky pup?” I rolled my eyes at her nickname for me. “Nothing.” “She doesn’t want to deal with the leaves,” Jace said from behind us. Our ten year old brother crossed his arms like Dad often did when suspicious. “See, she got spooked last night and bailed on raking the leaves. They ended up blowing around the yard and now she’s trying to get out of raking them again.” “That’s not it.” “Sure, it is,” he said, his dark hair covering his narrowed eyes. “What else could it be?” Grumpy, I decided to punish him. “It’s about a sexy guy.” Jace’s face twisted into horror. “Eww!” he cried, running out of the room. Harlow and I laughed at the sound of him telling on me to Mom. “In a few years, girls will be all he thinks about,” I said, returning to the dishes. Harlow leaned her head against my shoulder. “Sexy guy, huh?” “Shouldn’t you be getting ready for your fight?” Harlow glanced at the clock. “Yeah. When I get back, I want to hear about the sexy guy making you sigh so much.” As my sister dressed to go, I finished the dishes and struggled to stop sighing. I was still grumpy when Dad got home. In this living room, he told Harlow to be careful. She said something and laughed. When Harlow started fighting at the Thunderdome, she called herself Joy and hid it from our parents. She didn’t think they’d approve and she was right. Harlow and I were naïve to assume they wouldn’t find out long before she told them the truth though. Dad might be a pastor, but he learned about the Lord in prison. As a member of the Reapers, Dad had eyes and ears all over Ellsberg. He likely knew Harlow was fighting before she threw her first punch. Entering the kitchen, Dad smiled at me. “Stop talking about cute boys around your brother. He has a sensitive gag reflex.” I laughed as he got himself a beer and joined me at the sink. “Mom said we have leftovers. Mind warming them up for me?” Shaking my head, I filled a plate and set it in the microwave. “Are you okay?” Dad asked, frowning at me. “You look worn down.” “I had a long day.” “You sure that’s it?” We watched each other and I remembered the first time he asked if I was okay. Five years earlier when I was brought to this house and met my new family. I didn’t remember a lot from that day besides thinking these people were too good to be true. I figured they’d wait until Kirk was gone then hurt me. I couldn’t remember when I knew Dad was a good man who loved me. Not like my real dad loved me. Tad felt the kind of love a person died to protect. I saw the love in his eyes as he waited for his food to finish warming. “I wish I was stronger.” “So do I,” he said softly. “Everyone does. They just don’t admit it. That’s what makes you so brave. You can admit your fears.” Even thinking he was full of shit, I smiled. “Thanks, Dad.” Taking his plate out of the microwave, he inhaled. “Mom makes the best meatloaf.” “I made it.” Grinning, Dad nudged me with his hip. “If you make this meatloaf for the boy you’re hung up on, you’ll own him.” “I’ll remember that.

Or if you wish to put more of a barb in your comments, you can always say, “Yes, Mom, I have in fact decided to get out of bed in spite of the fact that you’ve been telling me to!

The whole country looks more like a trailer park every day. As our lived economy gets worse, more jobs are becoming temporary, homes less permanent or more crowded, neighborhoods unstable. We’re transients just passing through this place, wherever and whatever it is, on our way somewhere else, mostly down. “I get really scared sometimes,” my mom tells me, “that the old days are coming back.” She means the Great Depression days she knew in her childhood, and the trailer park days I knew in mine.

Most new moms, depressed or not, tend to be sensitive to criticism. So, when you add in PPD, new moms are often even more sensitive, which means you need to be particularly careful that you say only positive things to her. Praise her as often as you can, and keep criticism to yourself, even if you feel it’s justified.

The research itself could depress you: New mothers who have fewer than twelve weeks off of work are more likely to experience depressive symptoms, and those with fewer than eight paid weeks off are more likely to have a decrease in their overall health. (Another recent study pinpointed twenty-four weeks as the amount of time needed for mothers to be least likely to experience depression.)

Lola told her mother she took a bunch of Tylenol the day after she did it. Her mother took immediate action. In many ways, maybe girls are testing—do you still love me? Is the love the same, now that I’m no longer a little girl? Do you love me in the awkwardness of age eleven or twelve, the uncertainty and insecurity of age thirteen, the rebellion and back talk of fourteen? It’s hard for a mom, who was once adored and once the center of the world, to be glared and scowled at when she says, “That skirt is too short” or “You have to be home by midnight,” “Who are you going out with?” “What will you be doing?

He loves me more than I can ever imagine and not because I am a missionary. Not because I am a wife. Not because I am a mom. But because, and only because, I am His child. Not because of what I do, but because of who I am.

Dad ran his fingers through his short and rapidly graying hair. He was only 38 at the time, but he had aged quickly in the preceding years. After Mom...well, after she was diagnosed." ​I paused in my tale to examine Dr. Wallace's reaction to my mention of Mom's illness. My mother had been clinically depressed for as long as I could remember. She had good days and bad days, but after my father left, the bad overtook the good. Dr. Wallace's expression had remained neutral thus far and I wondered what exactly Shannon had revealed about our mother's condition. How much had she blamed my mother for her illness that she couldn't help? I mean, why couldn't Shannon understand why Mom was like she was? Mom had no family in the states, she worked as a librarian in the most boring library on the planet and her husband was hardly around.

All cultures know it’s hard being a new mom. That’s why many societies reward them with one hundred days of special family care at home, so they can be fed, bathed, and babied, too. But in our society, many parents have lost that communal or family safety net. Even worse, many new parents don’t even think they want or need it. They think it’s normal for new parents to just gut it out on their own. But nothing could be further from the truth! The nuclear family—two parents and some kids—is actually a huge experiment, just a century old. And it’s one of the most unintelligent and riskiest experiments in human history. Renowned pediatrician T. Berry Brazelton tells of visiting a small Japanese fishing village where the ancient tradition was to wait on new mothers hand and foot for thirty days. “The new mothers were even fed—bite by bite—and they called their own mothers Mommy!” Brazelton recounted that in this community postpartum depression didn’t exist. Of course, few of us live in a village like that—and you can’t conjure up nurturing relatives out of thin air. But you can call on a neighbor, nanny, or doula to help you out. Getting help is neither an extravagance nor a sign of failure. It’s the bare minimum you need … and deserve! So please don’t buy into the phony idea that you are supposed to do it all on your own; since the dawn of time few parents ever did.

It’s times like these when I want to grab his shoulders and shake him, beg him to make me understand why he drinks. My mom says it’s genetic, and I know Dad’s side of the family has a history of depression as well as alcoholism. And fuck, maybe that’s it. Maybe those really are the reasons he can’t stop drinking. But a part of me still can’t fully accept that. He had a good childhood, damn it. He had a wife who loved him, two sons who did whatever they could to please him. Why couldn’t that be enough for him?

Picture an overwhelmed, anxious fifteen-year-old. How do you think being told “anxiety is a belief issue”8 would affect her? Because that’s what she would read in Lies Young Women Believe, and our already anxious girl might wonder if she has failed God. That same girl might hear something similar watching “5 Tips for Overcoming Crazy Girl Emotions” on the Girl Defined YouTube channel, run by Bethany Beal and Kristen Clark. In their video, Beal and Clark explain: “If our hearts and thoughts are in a godly place, our emotions will be peaceful. . . . Our emotions are a reflection of what’s going on in our hearts. . . . Our emotions are a dictator of where our heart is.” Listing the fruits of the Spirit, they conclude, “[The fruits of the Spirit] result in awesome emotions. If that’s what’s on the inside, the emotions will be stable on the outside, not like a hurricane. The opposites of the fruits of the Spirit are things like anger, anxiety, worry, things the Bible actually calls sin.”9 Read the Prophets, though, and you won’t exactly see accounts of people who were emotionally placid—but you will see a lot of hurricanes of emotion. Hearing that we need to take every thought captive and confront our depression and worry and focus on gratitude may work wonderfully for the stressed-out thirty-five-year-old who gets a bit grumpy sometimes. But for the fifteen-year-old who feels isolated and alone and wonders how she can get up in the morning? When you’re dealing with all-or-nothing thinking, this advice, when not paired with an acknowledgment of how deep and debilitating depression can be, can cause shame, as we’ve heard from these mothers: • “My daughter asked to stop going to church because of the predominant views taught in youth group about mental health (all depression/anxiety is a spiritual problem). She loves Jesus and seeks to know God/understand how she was made by him uniquely and perfectly. To be told she isn’t yielding to God or knowing who she is in Christ as a result of autism and related anxiety was as un-Christlike as it comes. I stay home on Sundays with her now.” • “My children were told during a chapel service at their Christian school that it was a sin against God to feel anxious or depressed. One of them was in therapy at the time for issues that were in part aggravated by the school environment. My children are no longer at that school.” These moms protected their kids. But it’s an embarrassment to the gospel that our Christian spaces can be so cold and unfeeling toward those in our midst who need the most compassion.

Do it!" my mom urged. "You're going to be a live a long time!" At that moment, in my mind, that cheery prognosis became a threat, a trap, a heavy door clanging shut. I wanted to scream and run away, evade my own powerlessness.

The hardest thing," my mom later told me, "was leaving you [in Toronto] by yourself. You were very independent and strong...but I also wanted to look after you and keep you safe. But I couldn't... "We came to realize how helpless we were, and that was—apart from the fact of knowing that we could lose you at any time—that was the hardest thing to deal with...[Being] powerless in a role where we felt it's our responsibility to help you and keep you safe.

Spending more time outside can reduce the risk for common infections, nearsightedness, vitamin D deficiency, and obesity, as well as lessen symptoms of ADHD, anxiety, and depression.

I have two kitties, Romeo and Coco. They are a part of our family and they are nine months old. They represent happiness and hope to our family, because they came during a harsh time when my mom was experiencing depression.

I mean…why? What was his reason for leaving in the first place?” He shook his head at the windshield. “He had an affair with some woman he worked with. Left us for her. It didn’t last.” I sat back in my seat. “Wow.” “Yeah. Mom was a mess. For years. In and out of depression. I had to do everything for her. Pay the bills, clean the house. I couldn’t even go to college out of state. I couldn’t leave her.