Inconsolable: How I Threw My Mental Health out with the Diapers
By Ingman, Marrit Howard '94

Buy this book at Amazon.com

Marrit Ingman '94 isn't a bad mother. She's just an honest one.

"I bundled the baby into the car and went for a drive," the Austinite writes in "Inconsolable," her new manifesto of motherhood and madness. "Nowhere in particular, just anywhere. I realized I was heading down Lamar Boulevard . . . I cried at every red light. I cried whenever I got stopped behind a bus. I cried when a bicyclist entered my lane. I cried when I hit construction, and I cried when I hit the school zone . . . The crossing guard stopped me and made full-on eye contact, and I wondered if it was unusual for crazy women in station wagons to be sobbing uncontrollably at her intersection. Probably not.

"And here were these young children teeming everywhere, wearing brilliant, clean cotton juvenile separates and earthy sandals and swinging lunchboxes and leaping into the arms of their well-educated urbanite parents . . . I was furious, positively furious at these people . . . with their wonderful children who weren't crying, and their lives were so happy and rewarding and full of love, and I wanted to yank my baby out of his carseat and leave him on the curb because I wasn't a mother."

That's one of the more placid recollections from Ingman's memoir of her first two years as a mother. After Ingman gave birth to her son in 2002, she was gripped by postpartum depression. Sleeplessness, the stress of coping with her son's severe allergies and her own brain chemistry colluded to trigger suicidal thoughts and self-cutting episodes.

"It felt really natural to sit down at my computer when I had 15 minutes here or there and write something expository to try and make sense of it," says Ingman, a film critic for the Austin Chronicle who arrived at our coffeehouse interview sporting a bubblegum-pink "Free Katie" shirt. (More later on her feelings about Katie Holmes' outspoken fiancé, Tom Cruise.) "It started out as more of a therapeutic exercise and rapidly became evident that there was something worth sharing."

Indeed, many of the book's passages will ring true to any mother who has tried to silence the needling inner voice that asks whether that bribe bag of Goldfish was really necessary to ensure quiet. Ingman recalls having her son via Caesarean section after doctors discovered he was breech, and then skulking onto the Internet to confess her "sin" of agreeing with a surgical intervention instead of birthing without medication. She unveils her "Playgroup Drinking Game" ("All drink every time a child cries. Finish your glass every time a mother or father cries.") and rages at the corporatization of childhood: "Your toothbrush will be fun! With patented Fun Bristles and Fruit Berry Fun-sation training paste! The strawberries on the tube are smiling!" Even though some of these topics have been written about elsewhere, these chapters are still beguiling — they're like e-mails from your funniest, most caustic friend.

"Some of it is just motherhood," Ingman says. "You can't really decontextualize motherhood from postpartum depression. . . . Sometimes I really struggled with the issue of what should we call it — should we even have a term like postpartum depression? Does that pathologize aspects of motherhood that are nearly universal?"

Ingman weaves these Everymom rants together with more disturbing sections about her own struggles. The result is a chaotic, compelling blend that, she says, echoes what her experience was like. She writes about trying to live up to the beatific standard espoused by Dr. William Sears' "The Baby Book": "(B)ut Dr. Sears didn't tell me what to do when I stopped sleeping and started cutting my hands with the baby's nail clippers."

"It's not, 'I wake up in the morning and I feel kind of sad,' " Ingman explains. "It's, 'I never went to sleep at night because I couldn't stop panicking,' or 'I couldn't stop thinking that I'm a horrible person, that I'm hurting my child just by existing.' " And trying the usual new-mom panaceas wasn't enough: "It doesn't go away if I sleep when the baby sleeps, or let the dishes go, or if I eat right."

What finally did help was medication combined with therapy. Which brings us to Ingman's feelings about Tom Cruise's infamous denunciation of Brooke Shields for taking pills to deal with postpartum depression. Ingman doesn't think drugs are a cure-all, and agrees that alternative therapies like nutritional regimens do work for some people. "If we get that out there, that's all for the good. Should we do that by shaming people who use medication? Absolutely not. Especially if it's coming from someone who probably will never know what it feels like to be a depressed mother."

Sharing her story, Ingman says, is her attempt to tell mothers everywhere, "Don't hate yourself." Taking the necessary steps to combat depression is actually a sign of good parenting, not weak character. "You're not a bad mother, you're actually a good one."

The above article was taken from the Austin American-Statesman, Oct. 2, 2005.
Written by Sharyn Vane, Writer for the Austin American-Statesman.

Marrit Howard Ingman is a freelance writer based in Austin, Texas. She contributes frequently to The Austin Chronicle as a book and film reviewer and writes a monthly column about parenting work and popular culture at Austinmama.com. Her writing has also appeared in Brain, Child, Isthmus, The Coast Weekly, AlterNet, Clamor, The Anchorage Press, Venus, Mamalicious, and other publications. She has contributed to various anthologies, including Mamaphonic: Mothering and Other Creative Acts, from Soft Skull Press; Secrets and Confidences: The Complicated Truth about Women’s Friendships, from Seal Press; and The Risks of Sunbathing Topless and Other Funny Stories from the Road, also from Seal Press.