On Narcissistic Mothers, Postpartum Depression, and “…But You Are So Good at This”.

This one is a bit personal and might not resonate with everyone…

Three things get written about as though they happen to different women: being raised by a narcissistic mother, surviving postpartum depression, and being flattened by years of caregiving. Unfortunately, most of the times they are one sequence and the women in the third stage arrived there through the first.

Stage One

Mothers that carry narcissistic traits tend to parentify their daughters. It doesn’t have to be dramatic, it just has to be consistent to wire the young girl’s mind that everything is her responsibility, and love has to be “deserved”. Then all the expectations land on the child. When it is expected that she will handle all of it: her mother’s moods, the atmosphere in the house, her parents’ marriage, the difficult emotions adults are supposed to carry.

Children do not learn to steady themselves on their own. They learn it by being steadied, thousands of times, by an adult whose nervous system does the work until theirs can take over. Researchers call that co-regulation, and self-regulation gets built directly on top of it. A parentified daughter is the one supplying the calm and nobody is supplying it to her, so the capacity never gets built. She reaches adulthood able to tell you exactly what everyone around her needs and genuinely unable to tell you what she needs. It holds even when her needs are not small. Even when they are severe and entirely legitimate, she will not be able to recognize them and she will not act on them.

What makes this worse and what I see as a double betrayal of a woman in this. Her survival response gets praise on societal level. It gets re-affirmed as some special kind of virtue. She gets called responsible, mature for her age, an “old soul”, “such a help to her mother”. This praise is not accidental. A woman who reads everybody’s needs and registers none of her own is useful, and our societal setup has always rewarded that particular self-sacrificial usefulness in women. Her mother starts the training and the culture keeps it running long after she leaves home.

Stage Two

Then this girl grows up and has a baby, and she is required to produce the one thing nobody ever produced for her. An infant cannot regulate itself. It borrows its mother’s calm and gives it back years later. She is being asked, around the clock and on no sleep, for a capacity that was never built in her.

Postpartum depression gets talked about as though it arrives from nowhere. That’s not what the research says. Researchers have sorted through which parts of a difficult childhood increase the risk of postpartum depression, and emotional neglect came out near the very top. A woman whose emotional needs went unanswered as a child is around three times (OR 2.87) likely to develop PPD as a woman whose needs were met.

(Emotional abuse is on the very top, if you are curious. It comes out at OR 2.95 times the risk, with emotional neglect fractionally behind it. The part worth noticing is that the top two are both the invisible kinds. Not physical abuse, not sexual abuse, not physical neglect. The two things that leave no marks and that nobody outside the house would have ever registered are the strongest predictors of what happens to her after she gives birth. But that’s a conversation for another letter.)

One “fun fact” about my childhood I can remember is that sleep was shameful. That was one of my mom’s favorite twists on reality that I absorbed. So when I became a young mother and, as most of us slept 3-4 hours a day, I did not register it as a problem. It felt normal, and underneath that, it felt correct. I was not being deprived of anything I had a right to.

I say this out loud online now, to anyone who would listen, that sleep is not optional. It took me a very long time to be able to say it to myself.

Stage Three

Then the caregiving started, and everything I had been trained for turned out to be precisely what it required. I was good at it. That is the part that keeps a woman like me from getting help, because competence reads as wellness. Nobody checks on the one who seems to manage.

Postpartum is expected to end. The people around you count the months, and every conversation assumes you will be through it eventually. Caregiving is not expected to end, and nobody is counting anything. It simply continues, and every year I did it well made it slightly less likely that anyone would ask, because the longer a woman manages, the more the managing becomes what she is.

Becoming a caregiver to a disabled child is rarely a choice. Nobody is handed a disabled child on purpose, and the caregiving arrived in my life the way it arrives in most people’s, as a complete curveball. What was already in place was my inability to tell what I needed, what healthy looked like, and what loving mothers do for themselves or their family. I came from a house where concern went in unpredictable and illogical directions, so I never learned how to see myself as something worthy of prioritization. It is why I am good at this and why I struggled with it for ten years.

P.S. Stage Four

What I want to write about next week is what happens when the season changes. Sometimes it does. A child settles into school, or a situation that had no give in it finally gives, and there is an hour or two in the day that belongs to you. That happened to me. I was not remotely ready for it, because a woman who never learned to treat herself as worth prioritizing has no idea what to do with an opening when one arrives. I have not found a single resource written for that woman. And I have been building this resource for myself and for others in the similar season.

I wrote the practical version of some of it out, nine things that fit inside a caregiving life rather than the usual advice about bath bombs and date nights: Radical Self-Prioritization: What It Actually Looks Like in a Caregiving Parent’s Life.

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Related from the blogWhen caregiving takes your name  ·  The shame about the depression