In about six weeks, my oldest daughter will have a major surgery for her cleft palate.  It will be painful for some time, and will restrict her summer activities.  This isn’t her first surgery, though.  She had three before she was one year old.  She’s had a number of other outpatient surgeries, but those first three were pretty significant.

That was also the time period when my postpartum depression set in.  I’m sure I had several things stacked against me from the beginning.  I was a first time mom, so I was inexperienced and already adjusting to motherhood in the first place.  I knew I was going to have a baby with medical challenges.  I appreciated knowing first rather than being surprised.  But learning about the long-term process was overwhelming.  I was returning to work two months after her birth, which was also the time when her first two surgeries occurred.

Just reading the above paragraph can probably clue you in to the amount of weight I was feeling on my shoulders.  She was healthy and cleft palate isn’t an immediately life-threatening condition, but her care was complicated and she was pretty small.  My postpartum depression had already taken a hold on me by then.

One moment I remember very well from her first surgery when she was two months old.  It was a brief procedure, just inserting an appliance in her mouth to help widen it slowly in preparation for the next surgery.  When she came back from surgery, she was wailing in pain before her medication kicked in.  Her appliance covered some of the cleft and filled up some of her small mouth.  Her cry sounded more muffled than what I was used to.

I felt so helpless for her.  The surgery was necessary, but we had put her in pain and she didn’t understand why.  Whatever I had done to try to be strong for her fell apart.  I couldn’t comfort her with my words or touch, I just cried.  My long hair draped over her head and my tears rained on her face.  We were …

When I was preparing to have my first baby, I read books on pregnancy and being a mom.  Nowhere did I find anything that recognized the difficulty of having a baby who needed a lot of medical visits and procedures for a complex birth defect.  Oh, maybe it mentioned something general about birth defects and other complications, but like maybe one page.  Ten pages were dedicated to getting your nursery set up properly.  Nothing I read ever gave proper notice or warning of the variety of postpartum mood disorders out there either.

Depression Is The Elephant In The Living Room

I know new moms don’t want to be scared when their pregnancy journey is half-started.  Nobody wants to hear about depression.  Nobody wants to read about depression.  It’s too, well, depressing.  A light perfunctory mention is about all saw, I’m sure.  This was ten years ago, long before most of these wonderful postpartum depression blogs or books were around.  Of the top fifty books or audio recordings on Amazon about postpartum depression, only five had been written or recorded at the time I was going through it.  No wonder nobody said anything to me.

My symptoms didn’t quite fit the classic profile of depression all the time.  I was in more of an agitated on-guard state of despair and survival.  I didn’t do a whole lot of crying.  It was mostly feelings and thoughts whirling inside like an F4 tornado.  But when I had my PMDD, the mood swings were pretty strong.  I was flying around with tons of energy, waiting for the other shoe to drop.  When it did, I sometimes spent hours crying on the couch when my husband was at work and the girls were napping.

And let me tell you, I saw NOTHING in any book about all that.

Had A Needy Infant But No Guide Through The Stress and Depression

I had a child with a significant birth defect – cleft palate and lip.  Not life threatening, but requiring frequent trips to a doctor’s office three hours away and three surgeries before she turned one.  What …

Hello, and Happy Mother’s Day to all moms everywhere!  I know a lot of people think that Hallmark invents these holidays – Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, etc.  But you know what?  Who cares!  I am happy to have a day that your status as a mom or dad puts you in the limelight for a moment.  Then, it’s business as usual.  But who doesn’t enjoy a little breakfast or lunch “at your service”, and a bonafide stapled crayon and computer paper CROWN to wear? That was my Mother’s Day morning today.

But seriously, I want to take a minute to do another quick public service announcement for Katherine Stone’s Postpartum Progress blog.  Katherine is hosting the Mother’s Day Rally for Moms Mental Health right now as I type.  Since midnight, about fifteen letters have been posted from moms, one dad, and some professionals about postpartum mood disorders.

It is incredible!  The stories are so different from each other, but have a familiar tone of pain and despair in them.  Some of these folks, I’m telling you, you can see the images painted in your mind from their descriptions.  There are some pretty funny comments, almost make me gasp at the shock of honesty.  Others are more focused on suggestions and helpful things to make the postpartum journey healthier.  All of these letters are treasures.

My letter happened to be the very first one posted, at 12:05 am.  Although I was technically still awake when this happened, I didn’t see it up until this morning.  The earliest letters have been bumped to another page by now, which will keep happening all day as the letters get posted.  Go back to those first letters and read them all, not just the ones on top.  They are all worth the time you take.

I started out my mental health career as a family counselor, logging many hours on the road doing in-home therapy.  Although I do different therapy now, that time as a family counselor taught me so many lessons.  These were some tough situations, and I still think about these families from time to time.

One thing that struck me was how parents sometimes turned into a wet noodle in front of their children.  They threw out some strong words, but then took themselves out of power in a matter of moments.  They responded rather than acted.  They behaved as if they and their children were peers.  And also, they were simply doing the best they knew how as parents.

Parents As Friends

One disturbing issue I’ve seen more frequently is the “parent as friend” situation.  Parents let their kids do whatever they want because there are fewer arguments this way.  Parents talk about adult issues with their children, using them as a confidant. Divorcing or separating parents make the oldest child their pseudo-adult companion. Parents enthrone their children’s wants more than their needs and become a “favorite parent”.  I had one parent tell me how they weren’t supposed to “provoke their son into anger”, citing scripture to back her up.

Kids need parents and want boundaries.  When a kid’s parent acts like their friend, they actually lose a parent in the process.  Who can they count on to show them healthy limits?  Who can they depend on to show them the right way when they’ve done wrong?  Who will be there to both forgive and teach when they make a mistake? A parent who acts like a friend isn’t doing any of these things.

You Can Reclaim Your Rightful Position As Parent

I know that this list above might strike a few of you the wrong way.  Perhaps you’ve done one of these things yourself, or had a friend act this way for a while.  It’s something that can be corrected and changed, but you might have to suffer the consequences for a while.  Kids are not often rational creatures.  They are …

People often underestimate the importance of joy in family life.  It’s not a luxury, something you get to have on weekends, or something you feel only when you’ve been good enough to get dessert.  Joy is a very necessary part of having an emotionally healthy family.

A family is cross between the business office of a small city and a sports team.  The business part includes all the schedules, the transportation issues, food supply, clothing, shelter, chores, finances, and so on.  People take on tasks that need to be done so the place can keep running.  Laundry – don’t forget the laundry!!  A lot of these are mundane, repetitive, and sometimes frustrating activities.  This is the mechanical engine that runs the family machine.

The sports team part is where the emotion is.  Yes, a business office can run without a whole lot of emotional input.  In fact, that’s better in many cases.  But a sports team has something to play for, a personal effort that defines their participation and importance in the group.  The entire reason a family is together is to *be together*.  Parents chose to be together or sometimes have a partner involved.  Children are brought into the family to expand the group and create a new generation.  Children need their parents, and parents find parenting to be meaningful.

Sports teams experience a wide range of emotion and often don’t have trouble expressing it in front of each other.  Their disappointment is shared when they lose.  And when something great happens, they feel joy together.  The shared experience of joy reinforces how much they value being together.  It softens the edges of the disappointments and moments of conflict.  Joy is the fuel the feeds the system.

Take a look at these examples of joy and see how they help bind the family together.

-Celebrating the baptism of a new baby in the family.
-Going to a birthday party to see your niece’s reactions to her cake and presents.
-Cheering and screaming together for your favorite football team when they make the game-winning score.
-Being cheerleaders when a family member is striving …

Three kids, two jobs, after school activities, friends coming over, house cleaning, visiting relatives, mowing the lawn…Life just keeps tossing balls at you, and you just have to keep swinging.  It seems like you’re never caught up, never getting ahead, just paddling to keep your head above water.

Sit where you are and ask yourself, honestly.  What are all the things you do to take good care of yourself?  How much do you do of the following:

Have pampering time for yourself
Delegate chores to kids at age-appropriate times
Have regular relaxing time with your spouse or significant other
Have regular social time with friends
Splurge on something (doesn’t have to be big or even with money)
Do something that excites and energizes you
Get some regular physical activity (something resembling exercise)
Eat nutritious food in a relaxed setting most of the time
Get immersed in something meaningful and emotional (music, art, performance)
Get enough sleep to feel rested and ready for your day

If you said no to many of these, you may be shorting yourself quite a bit.  It might be time to take a look at how many things you have packed into each day, how high your expectations are, and how much down time you plan.  If you are resentful of how your time is occupied, if you always feel tired, if you always feel too busy, then something needs to be corrected.

Human beings have a lot of potential, but only a certain amount of sustainable energy.  They need rest, refueling, intellectual and emotional stimulation.  Too much is not better – keeping things in harmony is ideal.  It may mean you need to drop something, or alter it to make it work.  Having your kids in four different activities doesn’t necessarily make them a better student or person.  Working a 60+ hour a week job may help your career, but might leave your family behind.  Doing all the housework yourself might make you feel like everything is done well, but you may miss out on lemonade in the backyard with your kids and spouse.

We all only get 24 hours in a day, and …

Something awesome will be happening on Katherine Stone’s Postpartum Progress blog on Mother’s Day, May 10.  It’s called Mother’s Day Rally for Moms’ Mental Health.  It’s a series of letters to new moms sharing the importance of good maternal mental health.  These letters have been written by moms who’ve lived through postpartum mood disorders and postpartum experts.  They will be presented one by one for every hour of the day.

Twenty four letters in twenty four hours.  How cool is that?

Could you think of a better day to celebrate moms and moms taking good care of themselves?  And these letter writers, many of them are well-known postpartum authors and bloggers such as Ruta Nonacs, Karen Kleinman, Susan Stone, and Katherine Stone.  Some of the names I haven’t heard before, but I can’t wait to read their letters.  It’s going to be so interesting to hear this many different takes on postpartum mood disorders.

I am completely privileged to be among the few and the proud who wrote letters.  Yes, I’ll have my story in there too, though I don’t know what time of day it will appear.  I feel really new on the scene among so many pros, but it certainly feels right to share.  And in this, a conversation about mothers with postpartum mood disorders, nobody is a celebrity or superhero.

Prize-winning authors, highly decorated professionals, modest stay-at-home moms, hard working moms with too much to do – none of that really matters as much as understanding the common experience of the disorder.  It doesn’t care what you do for a living, who knows you, who doesn’t know you, how great your husband is, or if you are a single teen mom.  The social and monetary levels that may be between these moms fades to the background.

The whole point of this is to give hope for managing and surviving mental disorders while also promoting good mental health for moms.  I’m sure there will be humor, sadness, and a whole lot of other emotions in these letters.  Wow – what a journey to go …

Bipolar is a word you hear tossed around casually from time to time.  It’s often meant to describe something that quickly goes back and forth between extremes.  In real life, this can mean unexpected mood swings with unpredictable behavior.  If you have this in your family, it pays to learn the symptoms and understand your risk.

A recent article from Science Daily states that kids who have parents with bipolar disorder have an increased risk of several mental health problem.  There risk includes early-onset bipolar, mood disorders (such as  depression), and anxiety disorders.  The risk for bipolar was highest for kids with both parents having bipolar.

This might sound like a life sentence for something horrible and debilitating.  Let’s not mince words here – bipolar disorder is certainly a serious issue.  The most intense form of bipolar disorder comes with a real risk of suicide, so proper diagnosis and treatment is absolutely necessary.  However, with good care and support, people with bipolar disorder can live good lives.

According to the article, the key is early identification and intervention.  This is true for a few reasons.  First, many people with bipolar can identify symptoms or “episodes” from before the age of twenty.  Some have had problems in their early teen or tween years.  Untreated mental illness at any age in any form is daily torture.  It shapes your beliefs about yourself and the world, it affects your behaviors, and it affects your ability to form and keep relationships.  While this can be difficult at any age, it’s particularly important to give children the chance to develop a healthy lifestyle and outlook on life.  Unidentified bipolar disorder can make difficulties early on.

This is not to support looking under every rock and crack for kids who behave a little erratically.  Some of that is just the normal range of teenage behavior.  But if you are a parent with diagnosed bipolar disorder, it’s wise to keep an eye out for symptoms in your child.  Educate them about their risk and what to look for.  If you have bipolar disorder or …