I Want To Be a Crazy Mom

My mental illness means some people think I’d be an unfit mother. I don’t care.

I am not infertile. At least, I don’t think I am. Generally, I think, by the age of 36, if you desperately want children, as I do, and you don’t have them, as I don’t, you have investigated this sort of thing. But generally, women of that disposition either have a partner they have discussed this with or are prepared to go it alone. Doctors have been visited, tests have been done, wheels have been set in motion. I, on the other hand, have mainly been investigating a glass of wine, an indeterminate amount of ice cream, and the new Sarah Waters novel. I want children very much, but I haven’t tried to have them yet.

When you want children, and circumstances refuse to align, at what point do you decide to move heaven and earth to make it happen? Conversely, at what point do you heave a sigh of colossal proportions and let yourself really accept that it will not happen? And how do you not compare that choice to King Solomon’s verdict? Cut your losses, cut the baby in half. The true mother will object. Anyone who stands by doesn’t deserve the child.

Let me say right now that I don’t want to cut any babies in half. That’s a metaphor. Given what I’m about to say, it feels like I ought to be clear.

I’m pretty sure I’m not infertile, but I am mentally ill. I have seen therapists on and off since the age of 12. I have been on medication almost constantly since 16. Any cracks left by that original, shuddering depression were swiftly filled by the steady ooze of anxiety, like lava seeping from a volcano. Last year I was given what I like to call a fond, tentative diagnosis of borderline personality disorder. I say “fond” because my last psychiatrist believed I was too nice for that diagnosis. I say tentative because I am terrified of the way the world will see it.

I admit that I have avoided reading too much about borderline personality disorder, because merely reading the comments left on essays in which I’ve discussed it scares the shit out of me. The comments say that I am a psychopath. I am not to be trusted with other adults, let alone children. I am emotionally abusive, and all-around toxic. Wait a minute, I want to say. I was a nanny for two years to two little girls who are now teenagers, and they just invited me to dinner last week. Over the summer my sister took me to Paris and left her four children in my care for five days. Would my sister, who has never been called abusive on the internet, leave four children alone in the care of their psychopath aunt?

These details are what I would write on my poster board signs at my protest of one, where I march up and down railing against People on the Internet Who Do Not Know Me.

My oldest nephew was born when I was nine, and I was not pleased. To date I have eleven nieces and nephews, and honestly, for a long time I could not be bothered. I can’t think of many nine-year-olds who would be delighted by being called “aunt”. When I was sixteen though, my sister adopted a baby, and I can say without a doubt that he was the most delightful baby to have ever existed. I will fight anyone to the death on this point. He was a little scrap of a thing, and jolly as Santa Claus, and if you held your fingers out he would grip them in his fists and jump up and down, giggling breathlessly, for as long as you would let him. I had never loved anyone like that before. Ever since then, I knew that I wanted to be a mother.

Of course I worry about my capacity to handle motherhood. That’s not about mental illness; that’s just sense. I think anyone who doesn’t is going to find themselves wildly unprepared. And as someone who needs more than the usual rules and regulations to maintain order in my life, I am used to constantly monitoring myself and my emotional state. I know that motherhood would require even more vigilance. I am prepared.

I can understand how people would think my desire to have a child is selfish, but isn’t everyone’s? If I am fully aware of the self-surveillance that would be required of me, and more than willing to go through it, doesn’t that at least put me on equal footing with everyone else? I am not delusional. I do not hear voices or have hallucinations. If I have a reckless past, it’s in the past. I have never been violent to another person. Lest I be accused of hiding something, I do admit that I bit my brother when I was two. If I didn’t have this diagnosis, would anyone even ask?

I suppose I am trying to tell you that I am not some sort of monster, because maybe you think I am. BPD is your friend’s crazy manipulative ex, the twisted mother on Law and Order: SVU. People think I don’t have children because I’m too unstable to deserve them.

But that’s not me. I have an illness; I am managing. I have weathered flare-ups without harm. I would be a good mom. Or at least, I would be no worse a mom than many mentally healthy people.

In fact, although there are countless times that I have cursed my condition, I cannot deny that it has made me who I am, and more and more these days, I actually like that person. I admit that I went through some awfully prickly years when I wasn’t much good to anyone, but I think the things I’ve been through have made me…better somehow. More compassionate. More patient. I am still not quite ready to be a mom, but I think I’m about as ready as anyone else.

But I am 36. It may not happen. And there’s no script for how I should feel about that. If you struggle with fertility, if you have miscarried, if you have lost a child, there is a protocol, an etiquette for how people treat you (although when my mother lost a child in early 70s, no one spoke of it; she didn’t even know of anyone who had miscarried, and people said some stupid, wretched things). If you are fast running out of time and options to have a child, with no interested parties volunteering their services, it’s like you have an obscure disease that no one can pronounce or knows too much about. You’ve moved into spinsterhood, and who bothers about spinster feelings? You are the favorite aunt! (I love being the favorite aunt. It’s not my only goal.)

A friend who miscarried once told me that even though she has two girls already, she will always feel like someone is missing. I know, I know, I know that it is not the same; I know I cannot imagine the pain and suffering that a miscarriage causes. But mightn’t there be someone missing from my life? Someone I can maybe see through a door that is rapidly closing, a door I have no power to stop? I do at least know what it’s like to see, to hold a child and feel something around your heart get suddenly too tight. But it’s not something I feel entitled to say. Tragedy and the absence of a longed-for happiness are not the same thing. But I still feel I have lost something, that there is something to mourn, even if only in private.

I said this to her, and I think I lost her as a friend. Add it to the list: I bit my brother, and I hurt my friend’s feelings with my pain. I am still not a monster.

I know it might look like I have chosen adventure over family, setting off for New York alone in my twenties, making mistakes that at least turned into hilarious anecdotes (“and the hot Israeli bartender still made out with me, even though the last time he saw me I was covered in puke!”). Mental illness most often makes itself known in adolescence, when everything is turned on its head anyway and everyone starts to grope around in the dark to figure out who they are. But while your peers are finding their feet and starting to come into their own, the mentally ill adolescent stays upside down. You watch the people around blossom, while you spend the day curling your fingernails into your hands until they bleed, unable to concentrate on anything more than reminding yourself to breathe. My psychiatrist used to tell my mother, “We just have to keep her alive until she’s 27.” He thought my particular blend of illness would release its grip around then, and in many ways it did. No one told me that I was going to emerge from those dark, clammy years feeling exactly like the twelve-year-old I was going in. My teenage years arrived too late, it’s awkward to cram your teens into your 30s. It doesn’t work so well. I feel like I have been running after my peers, begging that they slow down and let me catch up, and I am afraid I have missed the last train.

I know that I am still not ready: emotionally, financially, relationship-wise. I know the possibility of biological children grows ever more slender. I know I would have to go off of my medication to be pregnant, and I could do it, but it will be hard. I would adopt in a heartbeat, but I don’t know if the things I have admitted here would rule me out. Every street I look down seems to have a roadblock.

Maybe it would be wisest to cut the baby in half at this point: to accept that it really won’t happen and see how that feels. But in truth, I already know. I could cut my heart in half and both parts would still long for the same thing.