What Happens When Mothers Don't Feel Motherly?

Just as we no longer speak of autism, but of Autism Spectrum Disorder, it turns out that Post-Partum Depression is not an accurate label. Instead, we know that maternal mental illness is a much larger, non-specific category: "Postpartum depression isn’t always postpartum. It isn’t even always depression. A fast-growing body of research is changing the very definition of maternal mental illness, showing that it is more common and varied than previously thought." (Emphasis added)

It turns out to be oh, so complicated because there is paternal mental illness (not a recognized disorder). Fathers, both living with their children and otherwise, are subject to depression around parenthood. “I’m not sure that the male/female part has as much to do with it as we all thought,” says Karen Kleiman, founder and director of the Postpartum Stress Center and author of This Wasn’t What I Expected: Overcoming Postpartum Depression. “It’s just hard to have a baby. It’s hard to have a baby and continue to work, at work and at your relationships.”

Okay, so fathers have post-partum depression. And it's not post-partum. But that last part of Kleiman's formulation doesn't even sound like depression, more like adjustment disorder. Where does that leave us? Mothers don't always feel they way they should, or that we think they should, or that they think they should. Sometimes that absence of "appropiate" maternal love turns lethal, but rarely. That leaves quite a large place in which mothers reside, from those who live and breathe for their children at one end, to . . . . what goes at the other end? And is it always bad, or pathological?

Here's one such atypical mother:

I talked briefly to a hospital psychologist last year, after my mom died and I was in a bad spot; The psychologist asked me what motivated me to change, want to live, and so on. I told her, kind of brashly, that I knew what she wanted to hear was my kids and how important they are to me, which I said was true.