Salon.com > Kim Brooks

Is motherhood causing my depression?

Mon, 25 Feb 2013 23:30:00 +0000

A few weeks ago, I had a bad flareup. I’d been laid off from my part-time teaching job, was going through a difficult period in my writing life, and at the same time, my psychiatrist persuaded me to try a new medicine. Meanwhile, my daughter got strep throat, then my son got the flu, then our baby sitter got the flu, then I got strep throat — all just a week in the life of a mother with kids in preschool. Nothing about any of these stressors was catastrophic or even unusual.

Nothing unusual except that in the middle of it, I found it physically painful to get out of bed. All day, going about my stay-at-home mom business, I cried. I cried while asking my kids if they wanted their morning bagels with cream cheese or peanut butter. I cried while driving them to school. I cried at the coffee shop where I go to write and in the dried foods aisle of Trader Joe’s. There was no sobbing, no blubbering or nose blowing, just a stream of tears stopping and starting all day long without any real cause.

My husband worried. My children were fussy and confused. And I couldn’t blame them. I knew exactly what they were going through, because long before I knew what depression was, before I’d ever heard of mood disorders or anxiety, I knew what it felt like to live with someone who was often, inconsolably, unhappy.

My private school guilt

Tue, 09 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Last month, in the midst of Chicago’s seven-day teachers' strike that left thousands of parents across the city scrambling for childcare, I ran into a neighbor at the grocery store who looked as though she was holding onto her sanity by a thread. “Soon,” she said to me, through gritted teeth. “The strike’ll be over soon, right?”

I nodded sympathetically.

“How are you managing?” she asked.

I began to shake my head, to remind her that my kids were not yet in kindergarten and attended a private preschool, but then I stopped. “Oh, you know,” I said. One of the kids started screaming for Fruit Loops, and the two of us parted ways. It wasn’t until I’d made it to the checkout counter that it occurred to me what I’d done. That I’d basically lied, letting this woman go on with her misconception that I was, as she was, making my way through the public school system.

Is my Facebook page a liberal echo chamber?

Sat, 22 Oct 2011 16:00:00 +0000

A few months ago, for reasons I don’t quite understand, I thought it would be a good idea to become Facebook friends with some people I knew in high school. Nostalgic, bored, procrastinating, emotionally unguarded after wrestling the kids into bed, Facebook’s algorithmic magic produced these old classmates’ names and before I knew it, I’d reached out to them with a click.

Why? I wondered almost immediately. These were people to whom I hadn’t spoken in more than 15 years, people I hadn’t much liked at the time, people with whom I’d had little in common besides geographic proximity and attendance at the same underperforming high school in central Virginia. I regretted it instantly, but tried not to worry. After all, I’m Facebook friends with plenty of people I don’t know well or like much, second cousins in south Florida, random playgroup moms, people I’ve met on planes or at Starbucks. What did it really matter -- having a few more virtual strangers in my life. That was what I thought. Then, a day or two later, I read one of their posts.

The Jewish mother I never thought I'd be

Thu, 29 Sep 2011 00:01:00 +0000

I always knew my mother was different, different from the other mothers in the way she dressed, the way she spoke, but most obviously, the way she mothered. I remember a slumber party where instead of a sleeping bag, she urged me to bring a small, inflatable mattress because the dust on the floor was liable to aggravate my allergies. I remember a little boy in a play group whom she threatened with physical harm after he pulled a chair out from under me. And I remember the nagging -- the questioning of whether or not I'd finished my homework, my college applications, my thank you notes, my chores -- the questions asked not once, not twice, not three times, but on so many separate occasions that the words began to feel as though they arose not from my mother's mouth but from some dark and tormented place inside my soul.

Is it time to kill the liberal arts degree?

Sun, 19 Jun 2011 15:01:00 +0000

Every year or two, my husband, an academic advisor at a prestigious Midwestern university, gets a call from a student's parent. Mr. or Mrs. So-and-so's son is a sophomore now and still insistent on majoring in film studies, anthropology, Southeast Asian comparative literature or, god forbid … English. These dalliances in the humanities were fine and good when little Johnny was a freshman, but isn't it time now that he wake up and start thinking seriously about what, one or two or three years down the line, he's actually going to do?

My husband, loyal first and foremost to his students' intellectual development, and also an unwavering believer in the inherent value of a liberal arts education, tells me about these conversations with an air of indignation. He wonders, "Aren't these parents aware of what they signed their kid up for when they decided to let him come get a liberal arts degree instead of going to welding school?" Also, he says, "The most aimless students are often the last ones you want to force into a career path. I do sort of hate to enable this prolonged adolescence, but I also don't want to aid and abet the miseries of years lost to a misguided professional choice."

Death to high school English

Wed, 11 May 2011 00:30:00 +0000

Like so many depressive, creative, extremely lazy high-school students, I was saved by English class. I struggled with math and had no interest in sports. Science I found interesting, but it required studying. I attended a middling high school in central Virginia in the mid-'90s, so there were no lofty electives to stoke my artistic sensibility -- no A.P. art history or African-American studies or language courses in Mandarin or Portuguese. I lived for English, for reading. I spent so much of my adolescence feeling different and awkward, and those first canonical books I read, those first discoveries of Joyce, of Keats, of Sylvia Plath and Fitzgerald, were a revelation. Without them, I probably would have turned to hard drugs, or worse, one of those Young Life chapters so popular with my peers.

I’m pregnant, I’m fat and I hate it

Wed, 03 Mar 2010 12:01:00 +0000

About six months after my son was born, I was picking up some dry cleaning, and the woman behind the counter smiled at me sweetly as she handed over the bag of shirts. "So," she said, "when are you due?"

"Oh, last fall," I said, forcing a smile. "He's crawling."

The woman looked confused, then mortified. I did my best to act like it was no big deal. Then I got in my car and cried, vowing to go on a diet and find a new dry cleaner. The truth, though, was that I really couldn't blame the woman. Like many other new moms, I was fat; not obese, not fat in the gastric-bypass, reality show spectacle way, but a solid, undeniable, 15 to 20 pounds over the range that is considered healthy for my height.

Slave to the boob tube

Mon, 17 Mar 2008 10:58:00 +0000

I do not know when my son first began to crawl. (Where exactly does scooting end and crawling begin?) I do not know when his gas smiles gave way to social smiles or even when he held his first bottle. Most of his milestones have been fairly ambiguous events. But the first time he watched television was impossible to miss.

He was about 2 months old. I strapped him into his bouncy seat and, as I went through my five-minute, breakfast-bathroom-hair-and-hygiene routine, I flipped on the news to find out what was happening in the world beyond diapers. Roscoe began twisting his head and arching his back, contorting his entire pudgy body to get a better view of the anchor lady and her flashy graphics. Eyes wide, drool pooling beneath his lower lip, he looked like a cross between an expert yogi and Linda Blair in "The Exorcist." "Oh, TV," his little months-old soul seemed to sing.

I dashed for the remote.