I Survived My Mother's PPD

When we drove by the river tonight I saw a small cross planted beside the guardrail. The cross isn't new; it's been there since I was in high school. One cold winter night a young mother slid off the road and went into the water. Her two young children were with her. All three perished. I remember reading in the paper that the deaths were ruled accidental and thinking how sad it was for those babies to die. Now, twenty years later, I wondered if that mother landed in that river intentionally.

I don't recall hearing much about Postpartum Depression before Andrea Yates sent her boys to their watery grave. So the idea that this mother may have killed herself and her children was never openly discussed- at least not in our household. Now that I'm aware of that condition and have children of my own I wonder if that terrible accident was the result of a severely depressed mother. Now I know that 1 in 8 women suffer some form of PPD. How many women have driven past that spot near the river and thought "That's it! I'm done!", only to successfully fight off that urge to turn the wheel in the wrong direction.

My own mother fought that same battle with herself when I was about 6 years old. I now know that she'd taken a handful of pills and then called my grandmother to come pick up my siblings and me. I didn't know it then, but my mommy was almost dead when the ambulance finally arrived to carry her away. That was my only memory of that night- sitting on the couch watching the gurney go through the front door. We lived with our aunt for 6 months after that, while our mother was getting help for her depression. We were somehow lucky that she didn't fall into that kind of despair that makes a mother take the lives of her children. It would have been so easy for her to give us those pills, take some herself, and just allow all of us to fall into an everlasting sleep. She had three children under the age of eight and was raising us on her own. We couldn't even afford real milk (we drank the powered kind) and often found ourselves without electricity or heat. I don't remember being overly bothered by any of this, but I understand now why my mother found it hopeless.

Of course, now we are more aware of PPD and know how to treat it. Unfortunately, many women still go undiagnosed because they aren't taken seriously or their symptoms are written off as just "hormonal". They, many times, aren't aware that something is wrong with them and that treatment is available. Treatment that wasn't always available. Before Postpartum Depression became real to the world, how many families were destroyed because of it? How many families ended at the bottom of rivers, in house fires, or freak automobile accidents? How many still are? Certainly we hear about the mothers that kill their newborns by cooking them in microwaves, but what about those that die in seemingly common ways?