July 7, 2021
Lara Ehrlich
Hello, and welcome to Writer Mother Monster. I’m your host, Lara Ehrlich, and this is a special episode about writing motherhood and mental health with writer mothers Alicia Elliott, Liz Harmer, and Megan Leonard. Please share your thoughts and questions with us in the comment section, and we’ll weave them into our conversation. And I’m honored now to introduce Alicia, Liz, and Meg.
Alicia Elliott is a Mohawk writer whose essays have been nominated for national magazine awards and whose fiction was selected for Best American Short Stories 2018. Her first book, A Mind Spread Out on the Ground, was a best-seller in Canada and the recipient of numerous awards, including the 2020 Forest of Reading Evergreen Award. She’s working on a novel and lives in Ontario, where she has a 14-year-old son. Alicia describes writer motherhood in three words as “difficult, meaningful, confusing.”
Liz Harmer’s first novel, The Amateurs, received starred reviews with Publishers Weekly and the Quill & Quire and was a finalist for the Amazon Canada First Novels Award. Her second novel, Strange Loops, is forthcoming in 2022. She writes about love, madness, motherhood, and religion, and she’s working on a memoir on her experiences of psychiatric crises and treatment. A Canadian living in California, Liz has three children, ages 9, 11, and 13, and describes writer motherhood in three words as “challenging, interesting, deep.”
Megan Leonard is the author of A Book of Lullabies, a collection of poems that explore mental illness and new motherhood through the lens of fairy tales, Disney princesses and labyrinthian language. She teaches writing through the Connors Writing Center at the University of New Hampshire and has been a mental health advocate for more than 20 years. She has four children, ages 8, 5, 3, and eight months, and she describes writer motherhood in three words as “playful, adaptive, messy.”
Now, please join me in welcoming Alicia, Liz, and Meg. Thank you all for joining me. We have a full house here tonight, so let’s get started. Thank you for being brave enough to join me to talk about an issue that is often ignored in our society, mental health, especially for mothers. And we’ll talk about that a little bit. But before we do, I’m going to ask each of you just to tell me why this topic is important to you. What’s your personal story? What brought you here? And we’ll start with Liz.
Liz Harmer
Hey, thanks, Lara. I just want to say, first of all, it’s important because it’s so stigmatized. I still feel the effects of that stigma, and no matter how sane I appear to be, there’s still a feeling of if I transgress and I don’t seem mentally healthy, it feels like I’m doing something wrong and other people are judging me. So anyway, I just wanted to put that out there—that it does feel kind of scary to talk about it, because there’s such a strong stigma. I’m writing a memoir, which is about when I was 17 and had a pretty severe crisis of depression and anorexia. It led to a long, manic psychosis. That led me to be in the hospital for about six weeks of my final year of high school, and then figuring out what all that meant and what the diagnosis I received meant, and whether I should stay on the meds and how to care for myself. All of that has been my life’s work. I’ve been writing about that ever since. That was over 20 years ago. I’ve also experienced pretty severe postpartum depression. I have three kids, and only with one of them did I have postpartum depression, and it was one of the most difficult things I’ve ever gone through. I’m talking about that in de-stigmatizing. That’s really important to me as well.
Lara Ehrlich
Thank you, Liz. Yeah, we’ll definitely talk about postpartum depression, and thank you again, because it takes a lot of courage to come on and talk about something that there’s a lot of stigma around, and rightfully so. And so now, let us hear from Alicia. Alicia, can you tell us a little bit about your story?
Alicia Elliott
Yeah, it’s a little bit complicated. My mother had bipolar disorder. She was diagnosed with different things throughout my life, and I’m fairly sure her most recent diagnosis is schizoaffective disorder, which is bipolar disorder with schizophrenic elements. I was mostly being cared for by her. Our family was very traditional: my dad went out to work, my mom stayed home and raised the kids. We dealt with her having this mental illness and saw it in front of us in ways that really shaped how I felt about about the world. And I saw the ways that she was criminalized, in certain senses, as well, for having mental illness. There was one time in particular, where she was tasered in front of my young siblings while we were on the res, and this was because she has a mental illness. This kind of binding up of mental illness with criminalization, using the police, in some senses, to deal with us … I saw that growing up, and I wrote about that in my book of essays, A Mind Spread Out on the Ground. My mother talked about mental health, and at the time I wrote it, I had only really experienced depression and anxiety—like bad depression for years. But then I had a mental health crisis last year, of mania and psychosis where I ended up in the hospital, mandated there by the court, by my siblings. It was a very complicated thing. I’m still dealing with the fallout of that, in terms of how my family sees me, despite the fact that we all grew up with a mother who had mental illness. The novel I’m working on now actually talks about psychosis and what it’s like as a mother, particularly having postpartum psychosis and things along those lines.
Lara Ehrlich
Yeah, thank you, Alicia. That’s a lot. Having a mother who was dealing with mental illness must have been traumatic to have witnessed as a young child. We’ll definitely come back to the criminalization of mental illness. I think the phrase of having the police “deal with us,” quote unquote, is so telling, especially with the criminalization of mothers with mental illness. That’s something that we’ve all seen in the news, as well. Meg, same question to you.
Meg Leonard
I love your podcast, Lara, because of this use of the word “monster.” I feel like motherhood is this space where how our society defines what’s healthy and acceptable is so narrow, and I feel like the mentally ill mother and the selfish mother are the two tropes that show up in media and movies and songs and writing as the two things that are like the most monstrous that a mother could be. And of course, writers, to some degree, have to be selfish, or perhaps it’s more accurate to say they’re seen as selfish. I feel like being a mentally ill writer mother has the potential for this monstrosity. That really interests me. I have a long mental health history. I had multiple hospitalizations in my 20s, I was very ill as a teenager, sort of did better in my 30s, but mostly because I had lots of therapy and lots of support and knew my own illnesses better and knew how to manage them better. I have four children, the oldest one is 8, the youngest one is eight months, and I had postpartum psychosis after my first and fourth children, and then just sort of a run-of-the-mill postpartum depression after the second and third. All of my friends know this about me. Most of my friends are also people with complicated mental health histories. And when I became a mother, suddenly, I felt all of this pressure to be quiet about that part of my identity. I felt like if I talked about it too much with other mothers that that would be scary to people or might make them think twice about being my friend or think twice about me. I was interested in how this one identity as a mother made this other identity that I was pretty comfortable with sort of unravel, in terms of my public comfort with it. I feel like we don’t have a lot of models for healthy mentally ill writer mothers. If we think of mentally ill mothers who write, we think of Sylvia Plath and and Sexton. We don’t think of the women who survived and wrote dozens of books. I’m interested in having these conversations so that we can talk about what healthy writer mothers with mental illness might be, and how that’s possible. And I’m also just interested in talking about how these monstrous identities like mental illness and selfishness are not monstrous and are actually just part of being human. The two do not have to be in opposition to each other. When I was writing my book of poetry, I was interested in those identities and how they hide each other and subvert each other. And so I was excited to learn about your podcast, and I’m so happy to be here today, because I feel like this topic is one that touches a lot of writers and a lot of mothers. I think our collective feelings around it are not going to shift until we talk about it more.
Lara Ehrlich
Yeah, thank you. Man, that was really eloquently said. And I should have said at the top of the show that you actually came to me with this idea and helped me craft the episode around motherhood and mental health. You’ve brought so many amazing ideas and questions to this moment, where now we’re all gathered to discuss. This is a great group of strong, monstrous—in the best way—women. I want to keep the focus on you all as the panelists, but just for the sake of transparency, I also struggle with anxiety and depression, and having had a child, raised the stakes for that. You kind of realize how much there is to lose and how easy it is to to lose the things that you love and how fragile your children are. That, for me, raised the anxiety level. Motherhood and anxiety and mental health, for me, are very intertwined. Just putting that out there. You gave us a good launching off point with monstrousness. Can we talk a little bit about monstrousness and about the stigma, as Liz named it, around mental health specifically for mothers? Who wants to take that runway?
Liz Harmer
I don’t know if I have anything to say about that, but I just love what you said, Meg, about healthy mothers who also have mental illness—like, those things coexist. The monster thing … I feel like there are people in my life who think I’m a monster. It doesn’t matter how well I do and how stable I am and how good I am. It seems like some people have decided that I’m a monster. It’s pretty terrifying to come out from under that. One thing that is really useful is that because I’ve gone through these things, I’m less afraid of what might happen to me, and I’m less afraid of the judgments I might receive, since I’ve received them all. In a way, it’s very freeing, because I can be bold in ways that maybe would be frightening if I hadn’t gone through those things already.
Lara Ehrlich
How does that come out in your work, that boldness?
Liz Harmer
I’m not hung up on apologizing for being selfish or choosing art. Because for me, art, or being a writer, is a very important part of how I cope and make sense of my experience, so it doesn’t seem to me like a selfish act. It seems like it’s an important thing that I do. I choose that as a healthy choice for myself. I guess that’s one way that it comes out.
Alicia Elliott
For me, also, just thinking about the ways when I was younger, I conceived of my mother as a monster when she was manic, for example, or when she was super depressed and couldn’t get out of bed. Those kinds of things, you don’t understand as a child, particularly when, in my case, a parent is basically telling you all of these things, like you need to look for this, you need to look for that. Basically, I was kind of policing my mother’s mental health, by, like, “Oh, you got to make sure that if she isn’t sleeping much, she’s doing this”—all these different things that made it so that it was kind of like this carcerality imposed into my head, in terms of how I conceived of my mother. I never really had a chance to really reckon with that until I was writing, particularly an essay about her specifically in my book. It was then that I was trying to reckon with this way that I had conceived of her as someone else entirely when she was sick. Having been on the other side of that now gives me this difficult but necessary insight into what was happening with my mother at the time and all the ways my father had failed her, in terms of giving options, like giving the idea that you could be healthy, in any sense, while you have mental illness. It felt like there was no model for that for our family. We fell into these patterns that are still very much there. At least, I saw them when I had mental illness and saw how my siblings reacted. As a society, despite how many years we’ve been aware of mental illness, there has not really been any significant changes. It’s been illuminating to think about that and put that into my work, that double-sided awareness of being on both sides of that, as a mother myself and as the daughter of a mother who had mental illness, I was encouraged to think of her societally and within my own family. Seeing how people were to frame me, once it was clear that I had mental illness in very similar terms, despite there being 30 years difference between when those things happened.
Lara Ehrlich
Yeah, Alicia. Forgive my ignorance in asking the question, but I wonder what it was like for you growing up on a reservation. In that rarefied society, did you notice differences in the way mental illness was addressed or not addressed, as compared to where you live now?
Alicia Elliott
I think it’s important to note that I didn’t grow up on the res, I moved there when I was in grade nine. I had a significantly different experience than my siblings who were much younger and spent most of their lives growing up on the res. We were in a very particular situation, because my mother was not indigenous. She was white. My dad just moved us there. He had been very abusive to her in the past—including moving us there to begin with. He didn’t do anything to make it so that she had legal standing there. She basically had to hide that she was there the entire time, and if you know anything about the way that reservations in Canada work as a result of the Indian Act, there was a period where if you were an indigenous man and you married a white woman, she would gain status and therefore be able to live on the reservation, whereas, if you were an indigenous woman and you married a white man, you would lose status, and all of your kids would lose status, and you would basically be forced off the res. That kind of sexism was really embedded into the Indian Act, and that affected my family because right before my parents got married, they had changed it, so she didn’t have any status there. That meant that because she had no status, she was not supposed to be living on the res. All it would take was someone to find out she was there and be mad at my dad and report it to BAM Council, and they could send a letter evicting us. We were in a really precarious situation, considering the historical context. When she did have mental illness, we couldn’t take her into Branford, for example, to get help, without it having to be something we would pay for. Instead, we would have to literally drive her to Buffalo, and my dad would have to call the cops on her and get her put into the hospital as a threat to herself. That’s kind of how it went. It was this constant trauma. Sometimes, all the kids would have to be in the car so she wouldn’t get out of the car while we were driving on the highway and things like that. I think that my dad really was very aware of the power he had in that situation. It was a complex situation. I think as a result of intergenerational trauma, we don’t like to talk about mental illness on the res. You kind of put it to the side. We’re all dealing with our things, or not dealing with our things, and that’s not what we talk about. This idea of silence got really reinforced through the places where I was and the historical context I found myself in.
Lara Ehrlich
Yeah, different layers of silencing, not just womanhood but being on a reservation, indigenous culture, the context that you were living in. That touches on something that Meg noted. Alicia, your word power—the power that your father had in that situation, the power that the authorities had to step in and try to manage, that leads into monstrousness and some of the power dynamics that you mentioned as well. Can we talk a little bit about power and powerlessness of women, particularly mothers, when it comes to mental health?
Meg Leonard
Alicia, one thing I loved that you said that I think is so important is you talked about how the systems failed your mother. And in her case, it was many layers of systems. I think for those of us in this conversation, that seems very obvious, but it’s such an important thing to name. I think there is this thing in our culture, especially around postpartum depression, but also around a lot of other mental illnesses, to where we view them as individual crises, and we view the treatment as individual: it’s a pill and it’s therapy. There’s something wrong with the individual’s mind. This is very similar to how our society currently treats new mothers. It’s very individual. People are parenting in silence, they’re not with their families, they’re not getting time off from work, we don’t have these big communities who bring us hot meals, there’s nobody to hold the baby at night. Mothers, even if they’re married with great, supportive partners, are very, very isolated, in a way, and their challenges are individualized in a way that’s very similar to how we individualize mental illness. I think this allows us as a culture to not look at the way the systems are failing us, and they are failing us as mothers, and the systems are failing people with mental illness. And it’s so much more so for people who are people of color or queer or living in poverty. We know that the systems actively make marginalized people ill, yet we persist in believing that the problem is in the individual mind, where the problem can only be solved with individual treatment, instead of thinking about: how do we radically change these systems, so that women have more support when they have young children, so that people with mental illness have more support? I’m glad that you brought that up because I think that’s crucial to the conversation.
Lara Ehrlich
Absolutely, thank you, Meg. And that leads us to the importance, as you said, of naming issues and of defining terms. Let’s take one step back and just define what we mean by postpartum depression and postpartum psychosis, for people who don’t know what that means, and talk about new mothers’ experiences with mental health specifically. Who wants to take that one?
Liz Harmer
I had postpartum depression, but to be able to define it would be very difficult for me to do. I could talk about my experience. I have a very complicated relationship to my diagnosis, because I rejected the diagnosis I received when I was a kid. Part of what I’ve been exploring is trying to figure out what happened to me if it wasn’t this biochemical thing. I’ve been reading a lot about systems and ways that families can create these problems, or the way that lack of resources or certain kinds of stresses can exacerbate mental illness. I have three kids, I wasn’t on medication for any of them, but only with one did I experience the depression. This is part of my mystery for me of what it means to be on a spectrum, to not have a clear idea of what it means for me to be mentally ill. That’s my caveat. As a result of that, I was used to taking a lot of responsibility for my own illness as an individual. When I became bereft, I kept describing myself as shattered. I couldn’t get through a day. I could hardly walk. Every day just felt like a mountain I was climbing. I remember one way I was thinking about it at the time was like, oh, here comes 9 o’clock again. Like there was nothing. Like I just had to get through it. But I couldn’t get the rest I needed. People who might be vulnerable to hormonal fluctuations or lack of sleep, in addition to all of the other anxiety that comes with being a mother, I believe that sets you up for the possibility of having postpartum depression. For me, I was in this confusing relationship with psychiatry. They wouldn’t put me on antidepressants, because antidepressants can cause mania, so I couldn’t get the kind of help that maybe I needed, so I kind of suffered alone. I feel like I am lucky to have survived it. Because when I look back at how desperate I felt, it might not have been survivable. That went on for a year for me—an experience of not feeling like I could be a good mother, and the feeling of not feeling like I could be a good mother somehow made my mothering worse. You get into these guilt/shame cycles. I don’t know, Meg, if this connects for you at all, with your experience.
Meg Leonard
Yeah, I had a very similar thing, and I really appreciate you saying that you’re glad you survived because it was potentially not survivable. I feel like that is one of the things that mothers are not allowed to name. It’s like, once you become a mother, it’s one thing to say, “I have the baby blues, and they put me on Zoloft.” And that is really hard, but in terms of acceptability. Then, if you talk about being so unwell that it’s a miracle you survived, that’s the sort of thing that we don’t say at dinner parties. People are really uncomfortable with it sometimes, or perhaps it’s that we perceive people will be uncomfortable with it. I feel like I’m afraid to say those things a lot of the time. I had a very similar experience after my first was born. I actually had postpartum OCD, which was interesting, because it helped me understand my lifelong OCD in a completely different way, because it was so magnified, so in a weird way, it ended up being almost like a gift. I sort of hate to use that word, because wasn’t a gift at the time, but now, at age 40, having survived it, I feel like that experience allowed me to understand my own mental health in a new way. But it was so extreme, and it lasted well over a year, which goes outside of the typical diagnosis. I was back at work two weeks after I had my baby. Now I worked from home, and I was working part time, but I was working two part-time jobs, so it was a lot of hours. I feel like a lot of what made it so dangerous for me was things like I wasn’t eating well, I wasn’t sleeping, I didn’t have people to talk to, I hadn’t met a lot of friends with young children yet. It was this isolation and this longstanding ambivalence with the psychiatric community, because I had a very long mental health history. A lot of what you say really moves me. And I think what you were saying earlier, Lara, about power, when someone feels like they can’t trust the potential care providers, or when they feel like they have to be alone with their symptoms, because if they say the wrong thing, it’s going to trigger a chain reaction of responses. Or if they say out loud to their friend how desperate they are, that would be entering in the taboo, and, somehow, that renders a person powerless. You can’t speak any of those truths, because of all of those very legitimate fears.
Lara Ehrlich
Yeah. Alicia, would you like to add?
Alicia Elliott
I think it’s hard for me to talk about anything to do with postpartum stuff, just because I was a teen mom. When I gave birth to my son, it was a month and a half before I was supposed to be going to university, and I was very fortunate in that my partner’s mother was willing to basically take care of our child while we were going to university. We were coming home every weekend, and for the first six months, I was still trying to basically pump breast milk, and trying to figure out how to not tell people that I couldn’t go out because I had to be home to pump breast milk every four hours, put it in this little freezer, and then be able to take that back on the weekends. It was like very isolating in a different way. A lot of guilt for not being there with my baby, even though I knew that we were trying to make it so that we could have a better life, ultimately for our son. It was one of those things where I felt so much shame, I didn’t tell anyone anything. In my residence that I was in, I didn’t really talk to anyone. I was just nervous to talk about any of this stuff. It’s hard for me to know, I guess because I was so young, what was going on with me mentally and how much of that was situational and how much of that was other stuff. It’s kind of depressing to say, but for so much of my life, I’ve dealt with depression, so it’s hard for me to be able to point my finger at something and say, this was a time where I wasn’t depressed.
Lara Ehrlich
Yeah, that resonates with me, too. Like, what would it feel like if it were to go away? It’s interesting to think about. Let’s talk a little bit more about support. You have mentioned a broken system that was actively moving support away from you, and in other cases, a lack of support from family or friends or people who understood what you were experiencing. How important is support? Have you found support? Since you’ve become mothers, have you found communities that you’ve entered into or created for yourselves that have helped with surviving, to Liz’s point?
Alicia Elliott
Because I had my son so young, it kind of set me apart from a lot of the mommy groups that were around at the time. A lot of the women were older than me, and there’s always this judgment of young mothers. Even with my son growing up: we have an apartment, and the other people that were in his classes were in their 30s, established, and had houses, and we’ve never had that. Having to deal with that sort of stuff has been difficult, in terms of not feeling support. Having a child before you’re a certain age, I guess, society deems is appropriate. It’s always changing, it seems. We did have, like I mentioned, my partner’s mother. She was very supportive. But there was always this underlying fear that she might not let us have our son again. When we would be in fights, that would be something that would come up. It was constantly me having to worry about being considered an appropriate mother enough for a court to me give access to my child or custody of my child, and that kind of thing constantly played in the background. I remember when I was first pregnant. I decided to have my baby in a birthing center on six nations because I was terrified of the general hospital, where it was common knowledge that young teens from six nations who had babies, they had basically social services outside of their door as soon as they were born, asking questions or taking kids, specially if they had any kind of involvement themselves, when they were children with social services, and we did have that in my house, so I was terrified of that. You have this fear of policing of particular racialized communities and their ability to be mothers at the drop of a hat. That was something that was also difficult to navigate. I’m just glad that my family has always been supportive of me. My dad was there every single weekend to pick us up all the way from Toronto and drive us home, and then drive us back on the Sunday night. My dad is flawed in a lot of ways, but he also is someone who’s really supported me in a lot of other ways. That was helpful when I was feeling otherwise isolated and not sure how I was going to be able to fulfill my role as a mother while trying to do these other things to make it so that society would see me as someone who should be a mother and would be able to have my child.
Lara Ehrlich
Thank you, Alicia. This is a point that Meg brought up before the show. And you’ve led us into it. This is the way in which this mirrors how women writers are often working in isolation and without structural supports in my language, which affects their ability to create and reach an audience. Let’s pivot a little bit to the writing and how you see the things that Alicia really beautifully pointed out playing out in our careers as women writers. Who wants to start? Liz has something to say.
Liz Harmer
I have kind of a funny—to me, funny—anecdote, which was that I was reading over my psych records as part of writing my memoir, and they’re always looking for “delusions of grandeur,” so they would constantly find me writing a novel and calling me “grandiose,” like I was having a delusion of grandeur. I really was just always writing novels. It wasn’t a delusion; it’s just what I did. The writing: In my case, I feel like my family was really supportive of writing—like, writing was a really important thing. We were kind of … I call it “shabby intellectuals,” because we really didn’t have much money, but we had a lot of education. That’s possible in Canada. I don’t know if it’s the same in the States. There were always books around my mom’s library, and my dad was an elementary school teacher, so writing was really important and valued. When I had this episode that everybody kind of had to recover from, I’m interpreting it, at this point, as like a trauma. It’s not just that the trauma can exacerbate the symptoms, but the thing itself causes a secondary trauma—the breakdown itself and all the treatment and coping with the treatment. While that was all going on, everyone was just not sure what would happen to me, and I kind of felt like nobody expected anything. They felt like we would be lucky if Liz got her degree. I felt left alone to figure out my ambition. To me, that was kind of a blessing with having had this crisis. I could just go ahead and do my thing, because no one expected anything. That’s maybe not fair to my parents, but that’s kind of how I feel about it.
Lara Ehrlich
Yeah, Meg, this was your point to make, so I want to come back to you and ask you if you want to talk a little bit about how women writers are working in isolation and how that plays out.
Meg Leonard
I’ve been thinking about this a lot, because I had a baby in the pandemic, and my book also launched in the pandemic. In the poetry community, we talk a lot about being good literary citizens. Practically speaking, what that often means is buying each other’s books and going to each other’s readings and promoting each other on social media and inviting each other to speaking events and networking to be on panels and things like that. I feel like this group of people will understand that when you have a young child, that becomes impossible pretty quickly. And when you have a mental illness, that becomes impossible for different reasons. I have started noticing, in my own life, how much I have to say no—because I have to go to bed at 9, because my baby’s gonna wake up at 5, and if I don’t get enough sleep, I am going to be in a bad place with my mental health. Or, you know, I find networking so exhausting, and it takes such a toll on my mental health, so even if it’s something I enjoy, it might be something that I have to limit to some degree. The poetry community tends to be kind of small, so I don’t know if this is true in your writing circles as well, but we put so much emphasis on this work that people do behind the scenes, and women especially. A lot of it is about the way we use our relationships to promote our work. I’ve just been thinking about how I just can’t do a lot of those things—things like residencies. I can’t go to a residency. I’ve been breastfeeding somebody or pregnant with somebody since 2012—so, basically my entire 30s. So, right at the time, when I’m supposed to be trying to promote myself and get out there, I’m sustaining other people with my body, and it’s time consuming. I don’t know how to solve that. I think one way to solve that is to make things like writing conferences and residencies child friendly. That would be huge. There is no residency that I know where you can bring a breastfeeding infant. I went to AWP when I was really pregnant with my first, and I haven’t been back to one because it’s too hard to travel far away from very young children. So: Making things child friendly would be one thing. And then I think recognizing that literary citizenship is going to have to include people with mental illness and chronic illness and other disabilities, and in order to include everyone, there has to be space for just recognizing that not everybody has the same energy levels, or that staying up late to get stuff done can mean very different things for different people, and that can shift for individuals over time. I feel like right now, we’re at a point where we’re just, as a writing community, starting to recognize that things that we label as working hard or hustling are actually just keeping out anyone who doesn’t have uncomplicated health. I’d like to see those things change. I think that will help women. And I think that will help women with mental illness. Hopefully this can be part of that conversation, and we can all start shifting our thinking around those things.
Lara Ehrlich 47:35
I love that Meg. Thank you. Yeah, and I agree. I’ve heard a lot of women on this podcast talk about residency, specifically, and fellowships, and how these are often one- or two-month long experiences. I’ve just gotten to the point where my daughter’s 5, and I’m like, maybe I could go away for two weeks—maybe. But a month? No. It’s definitely different.
Alicia Elliott
I also feel like one of the things that is complicated, particularly when you’re dealing with mental illness, is up in Canada, we have festival circuits, when you’re promoting your book, and things that you’re expected to do. People don’t really talk about the fact that you write a book, and you’re just supposed to write a book, but that’s not how it works. You have to promote it. In some instances, audience members or other people on the panel ask really inappropriate questions, or you have to deal with other people saying things that are super offensive. And you have to keep smiling the whole time and make sure that you’re viewed as professional because to show any signs of weakness or anger, these are things where you would be considered monstrous. If you’re a mother, too, people have all these expectations: What does your family think about this? Where’s your son right now? They’re projecting these societal shames onto you, and you’re just supposed to smile because you have to sell books. That’s something that is really difficult. When I was touring my book, there was a lot that was going on in terms of me having dealing with depression but also trying to push myself to do all of these things. There was also a lawsuit launched against, and I was terrified of people asking me about it. There are all these things that I don’t think people really think about, in terms of how they’re making spaces for writers, especially if we’re writing about things that are very difficult. There’s this expectation that we should always be slashing our wrists open and letting everybody see all of the mess. We chose what we wrote about because we felt comfortable writing about it, so when you’re asking all of these deeper questions, it’s like, I didn’t write about that for a reason. It’s kind of gross and appropriative or exploitive. People don’t really consider those things, or what it means to hold someone who’s trying to talk about their work that’s very difficult and has a lot of personal things blended within it.
Lara Ehrlich
Yeah. We talked before the show about the way that this industry reinforces ableism by not treating our work on these subjects with care and respect. I think, Alicia, you’re getting at that, but that there’s a sense that if you put yourself out there through your work that people have permission then to dig at wounds and ask you to display yourself in public. I don’t know, I’m just putting this out there, but what if the same request is made of men who write about mental illness? I feel like that’s literary, if men write about mental illness. What do you guys think about how it’s perceived when women write about mental illness? And we talked about monstrousness and shame. There’s definitely a disparity there, I think.
Liz Harmer
The problem being taken seriously as a woman is compounded by being a person who’s perceived as mentally ill. It’s just being credible, people taking seriously what you have to say about your own experience about anything. It’s a big problem.
Alicia Elliott
Oh, yeah. There is always this sense that men have more authority on whatever they’re speaking about, that they have more control over themselves. Just the idea of women, as you know, having hysteria, this whole idea of madness that is specifically female. It has its roots in being in women. This whole notion of this is so prevalent in our culture, it’s hard to not see it, wherever you look, this idea of how when men break up with women, they’re “my crazy wife,” “my crazy ex-wife,” “my crazy ex-girlfriend,” whereas, you don’t as often hear people saying, “Oh, my crazy boyfriend” or “my crazy ex-boyfriend,” even if they were abusive in different ways. There’s this idea of a certain level of harm that’s acceptable to lobby towards women, and if women respond to that in any way, then they’re crazy. If they have any sort of emotions that aren’t just smiling, docile, this version of submissive femininity, then we’re crazy. Automatically, there’s always this kind of idea lodged against us. But then when you are on top of that, when you actually have a severe mental illness—or any mental illness, really—then that also lowers your credibility to a certain extent, where people don’t believe anything you’re saying, even people who are close to you. They’re always seeing you as someone who they can’t trust. They can’t trust your perceptions of what’s going on around you. They can’t trust your memories. Then, that kind of makes you wonder about how much you can trust your own memories or how much you can trust your own perception of the world. It kind of creates this sort of self-fulfilling prophecy, where you’re mired in this doubt about yourself and about your worth. I really do believe, too, that the literary industry just doesn’t make space or provide the respect and care necessary for the works of mentally ill women. There’s this notion that our book is our product, and we have to be able to sell them to people, and there has to be some sort of pitch for it, in terms of, well, who wants to read about a crazy woman? No one wants to read about that. It’s really gross.
Meg Leonard
I really relate to that, Alicia, because I think we do see motherhood and mental illness and women as a niche subject, when the reality is, we all, every human, has mental health. We have mental health days that are great, and we have periods of time when our mental health is less strong, even if it doesn’t cross over into the line of a diagnosable mental illness. We all have mental health; that is a universal experience. And almost all of us have mothers. Yes, there are people who don’t, but everybody came out of a uterus.
This is how we all got here. We all have some relationship to motherhood, whether it’s an absent mother or a painful mother or a loving, wonderful mother; whether it’s mothering our own children or imagining how we might mother other people. We all have a relationship to motherhood, and we all have a relationship to mental illness, yet the book marketing industry pretends like this is a niche thing. And if you say, “I wrote a book of poetry about motherhood,” people will go, “Oh, like Sharon Olds?” Well, there are a lot of people who have written about this, not just one. It’s fascinating how both motherhood and mental illness is used to discredit women, and how writing the truth about this — or a truth, writing our truth — is a way to push back against those cultural beliefs that would discredit us. There’s a real fierceness to that. I think this is why I love reading motherhood stories, and I love reading about women who have experienced mental illness, even though it can be very painful to read sometimes, because the very act of putting it out there pushes back against this idea that it’s unimportant or uninteresting or not reliable … that we somehow can’t be experts of our own experience. That’s BS. I love these spaces, like this conversation, where people take the time to say, “No, that’s a lot of crap.”
Liz Harmer
I wanted to just add one thing. I love what you both are saying. I was just thinking about how rebellious I felt to that notion, like becoming a mother was so transformative and weird. What’s more interesting than that, I can’t think of a so-called masculine topic more interesting than that. I guess war and mafiosos? I’m trying to think of masculine topics. Race-car driving? Those things don’t interest me as much. First of all, like a psychotic experience of feeling like something has happened to your mind and other people are no longer in the same world that you’re in. I mean, that is an incredible thing to go through. And motherhood is also a transformative experience. It doesn’t even make sense to me why would that be diminished. It’s just interesting inherently.
Lara Ehrlich
I want to keep going here. I think it was Meg, in an email, who mentioned Britney Spears. I feel like this is a really timely conversation, given the publicity of Britney Spears’ testimony in court recently, about her conservatorship. I think it speaks to all of the things that we’re discussing here about trust and about trusting a woman’s perspective on her own mental health and her own lived experience. Let’s talk just for a second about that example. And Meg, since you brought it up in an email, do you want to start with just why you felt like that was something that we could talk about today?
Meg Leonard
I’m getting credit where it isn’t due. I wasn’t the person who brought up Britney, but I’m so glad somebody did.
Alicia Elliott
I think what resonated with me and a lot of other women who have mental illness was the fact that her conservatorship made it so that she had to get an IUD implanted, and they would not allow her to marry or have any more children. And the way that that ties into this idea of eugenics, whether women with mental illness should be parents or our ability to parent and be mothers, and not only mothers but also productive. On the one hand, this conservatorship was making Britney so that she was working over 10 hour days, all the time, to make all of this money for the conservatorship and for these people who are profiting off of her. And yet, at the same time, she can do all of this and be on these sets for hours and hours a day and months-long residencies in Las Vegas, she cannot have another child. She should not have had children to begin with is the the idea that I think is being implied there. I think that because she’s so famous, and this has happened to her, it’s shocking to some people in a sense, but they maybe have never had to deal with court systems and the ways that police come into play with mental illness and controlling mentally ill people, specifically women, and also racialized people. People are looking at this, and they’re saying, “Yes, this is so terrible,” and they’re thinking about the fact that all states, that I’m aware of, have laws where you can force someone into the mental hospital, outside of their will—that’s definitely the case in Canada and all of the provinces. When my siblings put a Form 2 for me, they hadn’t even spoken to me in weeks. I was not asked to go to the judge, I could not defend myself in any way, I didn’t even know any of this was happening until I was arrested. This is the kind of stuff where we talk about things like this happening to Britney, but I don’t think we’re doing enough work as a culture to really interrogate the assumptions underlying the situation, so that other people, who are not famous and rich and resourced like Britney Spears and privileged in those certain ways—what are we having to deal with? What are the assumptions that are put into law that make it so that we are not able to make decisions on our own, even if they’re bad decisions? I think we all probably have friends who have made terrible decisions, and they’re still allowed to do that, and yet, if you’re mentally ill, and you decide that you want to do something that other people determine is not okay, then they can force you to do that. We are talking about defunding the police and things like that, but I don’t think there’s enough attention being paid to the fact that a lot of the people who are being killed, even in terms of indigenous and Black people in the States and Canada, are people who have the cops called on them for mental health issues or mental health checks. The fact that they’re considered monsters immediately, and therefore, it’s okay to kill them, not only because they’re racialized but because they have a mental illness and they’re somehow dangerous or more dangerous than other people, despite all of the evidence to the contrary, all these statistics make it very apparent that people who have mental illness are much more likely to be the victims of violence than to be perpetrators. I feel like there’s so much there, and these things are all intertwined. I just think that if we aren’t looking at what these bigger standout cases say about the society that we’re in and the assumptions that we make, the laws that we have, etc., then we are failing, in some sense, to really do justice to this topic and all the other people who are not getting the same attention as someone like Britney Spears.
Lara Ehrlich 1:05:23
Yeah, thank you for suggesting that we talk about her, because, like you said, all of these issues are coming together in this one really hyper-visible example. But you’re right, there’s a sense of spectacle involved, too, because she is so well-known, and people are interested, but are they interested because it’s important to change the laws and the systems that are in place that have led to this point, or are people interested because it’s Britney Spears, and they want to read about her testimony in court? I agree, there’s a lot of work that still needs to be done and contextualization that needs to happen.
Meg Leonard
Alicia, I think this speaks to something that I have noticed about women and mothers in particular, that we’re allowed to occupy this very narrow space around difficult subjects. Like, it’s okay to talk about or write an essay about a miscarriage, but nobody wants you to write an essay about 12 miscarriages, and there are women who have 12 miscarriages. I feel like mental illness is like that. A lot of the narrative I’ve seen around Brittany is that she shouldn’t be in this position, because look at her—she can do all of this work, and if she can do this work, she should be able to make these decisions about her own body. But the real thing is that anybody should be making decisions about their own body. There shouldn’t be a point where we say, “Well, that person doesn’t get to.” With the police brutality, even if someone is having an enormous mental health crisis, they still do not deserve to be shot. I think about this in terms of writing, and I love that both of you are bold enough to write some autobiographical things. I don’t write a lot of autobiographical stuff, even though I approach mental illness in my poetry, and part of that is because I struggle with this window. I’ll share a brief story. After my first child was born, I had this horrible postpartum experience. When I was pregnant with my second child, I went into my midwives office, and I said, “Okay, you know what? I had a really, really difficult time with mental illness after my daughter was born, and I want to get ahead of this. I want to have support in place ahead of time.” My biggest fear had been that if I was honest with my practitioners about how I was feeling that I would be forced to take medication I didn’t want to take or that I would be separated from my child because I would be hospitalized. I was talking to my midwife, and I was asking, “Do I have to worry about them? I don’t want to lose that autonomy.” And she was like, “No, of course not. We would never make you take medication if you didn’t want to, we would never, make you be hospitalized if you didn’t want to.” And I was like, oh, thank God—now I can be honest with her. And then she said, “Well, unless, of course, you were suicidal, thinking of hurting yourself. Then we would make you take medication, and we would hospital.” And I was like, “Oh, okay.” So, now I’m aware of my window, and it’s small. I can be honest right here. But everything out here is very risky to tell someone who could help me, because in asking for help, I could lose autonomy, not only over my own body but also with my relationship with my infant child. I think for some people, having time away from their baby to rest and recover can be really healing. For me, just because of what I was experiencing, being separated from my child, even for a 72-hour hospital stay, would have made things so much worse. Just knowing that I couldn’t be honest with my care providers and get help because I could lose my own ability to advocate for myself—it was ridiculous. Like, this should not be the case. This should not be how we’re treating women with mental illness. I like what you’re saying about Britney as this big example. In some ways, she’s a sympathetic example. A lot of us grew up with her, grew up listening to her music, and we can see that she should have autonomy over her own treatment and her own body. But that truth really needs to be applied to every person with mental illness, no matter how extreme their illnesses.
Liz Harmer
I was thinking about how I was told I shouldn’t have children, at some point, when I was very young. I had just had the diagnosis, and I was being told what the course of my life was going to look like, and it was not going to include children, if I wanted to be safe or careful or good or whatever. Obviously, I rejected that, but I do feel very distressed by the news around Britney. It’s partly the way people talk about it. I was trying to watch something on the news about it, and I had to turn it off, because this lawyer was like, “Oh, we’ll have to see how she performs mentally.” And I’m like, what would she be able to do that would prove to you that she’s been proven ill? I’ve had that experience, before I my diagnosis, where you could have a day where you were feeling jubilant or excited—a symptom of mania—and now I can’t behave in any way because I’m being watched, and my symptoms are being reported on. It’s just very painful to watch and to think about—the IUD thing, the social situation, the whole thing is unbelievable. I remember being very careful about what I told my doctors around birth, because I wanted certain kinds of psychiatric care, but I didn’t want to raise red flags. If you talk about anxiety and depression, or your former eating disorder, those are kind of like, “Oh, we can deal with those. Just get more rest. Here’s some vitamins, here’s your anxiety support group.” If you start talking about psychosis and more serious illness, you lose that credibility, and you no longer have that kind of control over how you’re treated in those situations. It’s all kind of flooding back to me, but I’m glad we’re talking about it.
Lara Ehrlich
Thank you for sharing that, Liz. And you use the word “perform,” which I think really ties into what Meg was saying here, and what Alicia has been touching on. You said the lawyer in the courtroom would have to see how Britney performs mentally. Can we talk about that word “perform”? I hear you saying that there’s a level of performance when it comes to healthcare and motherhood, that there’s a line that you shouldn’t cross, and in order not to cross it, there’s maybe some performance that you’re navigating. Can you talk a little bit about that word “performance”?
Liz Harmer
I think a lot of people in my life don’t know that I have this history, and when I talk about it, I start to feel like I’m testing to see whether people are going to be too alarmed. Or you’ll overhear people saying things that are horribly ablest, and it’s very shocking and upsetting, and you think, this is what people think of me. I was thinking about the ways that I have been unconsciously strategic, and one of those things is that my partner is a white cis man who’s very successful, doesn’t suffer from an any mental illness at all, and is able to very much be my advocate and ally and is able to speak for me when people don’t listen to me. I was thinking a lot about how I’m finding a support person or a person who’s able to resist all of those other things happening, all of those other people who mean well but who are maybe doing you a disservice. That’s part of the performance of my life. Partnership is a resource for me, and it protects me.
Meg Leonard
I love that. And Lara, I’m so glad you brought up, or pulled out, this word “performance,” because it’s making me realize that there’s so much performance of wellness when you live with mental illness. And there’s also so much performance in motherhood. Unfortunately, I think it’s really hard to step out of the performance that our culture requires of us when we’re mothers, and I really see writing as something that dramatically resists both of those types of performance, and that when we’re authentic in our writing, even if it’s not telling our own story, just when we’re authentic about motherhood in our writing, or when we take up space as mothers who write, or when we take up space as people with mental illness who also choose to mother, that it takes away some of this power that the requirement of performance has, so I love that we’re talking about that.
Alicia Elliott
I think that another aspect of performance is the ways that everything is okay, in terms of how society sees you, if you’re performing your job, hitting your deadlines. It doesn’t really matter what’s happening to you outside of that, because you’re doing those things. If you are, for example, having a mental health crisis and need time off work, what does that mean then? Are you going to actually take that time off work, or do you not have the money? I believe that this idea that we all have to be constantly performing under capitalism and making sure that we’re making money and spending money contributes to that stigma, because if we’re not doing that, then we’re hangers-on, we’re burdens. There’s this notion that if we are too mentally ill and can’t make money, then we have less value to society in general. I’m not just talking about values in terms of social value but also literally economic value, and the ways those all fit together. What would it look like if we not only had maternity leave but paid mental health time off? When you start thinking about the ways that we can’t care for ourselves because we’re stuck in this wheel, it really does make matters worse.
Lara Ehrlich
Absolutely. I know we’re coming to a close, but I want to come back to something we talked about at the beginning and what a healthy writer mother monster who lives with mental illness looks like. What can that look like? Tell me your vision for a healthy writer mother monster.
Liz Harmer
Oh, you can read my face. It’s a curse. It’s been my curse. This has been something I’ve been working on a long time, because I was very afraid of my emotions. For me, what’s really important is healthy expression of emotion and accepting that emotions are healthy to express, even negative emotions. Being distraught, being angry, and things that are frightening to others, we don’t find those frightening in our family. To us, it’s sort of like being able to have a narrative around emotions that gathers them all up and says, “Hey, this is what it is to be human. There’s nothing to be alarmed about.” Because I think sometimes that stuff can just build. For me, the gift of being a person who’s a healthy mentally ill person is that I can not be afraid for my kids in the same way, because I can love and see them and not be afraid of symptoms that I might perceive, and that kind of thing.
Alicia Elliott
I feel like I’m still trying to figure out what that looks like in a lot of ways. I know that through my experience, one of the things that I was always worried about is what would happen if my son had a mental illness as well. I think, if nothing else, the experiences that I’ve gone through have made it very clear to me what someone needs in that situation and what someone doesn’t need in that situation. Going through that, and being able to turn those negative experiences into wisdom, helped me figure out how to then approach others who are in similar situations. I’m not just thinking about it in terms of me as an individual, but what it would mean to be a good community member, who is aware of these things happening with other people all the time and being able to know how to advocate. I guess I’m still figuring it out.
Lara Ehrlich
Still figuring it out is, I think, a good place to be. That’s where we all are, right? Endless work. And Meg?
Meg Leonard
I think for me, one thing that I love to think about and that really helps me feel grounded in health is when I let myself believe that my mental health and my writing life are not in competition with each other, and that my writing life and my children are not in competition with each other, and that my mental health is not in competition with my children—that I can attend to all of these things and take care of myself. Like I said, that might mean going to bed early and not going to a reading that I feel like I should go to. Maybe I missed out on some writing time that I wanted. I can also take some writing time and let my children watch TV for the afternoon, if that’s what I’m needing. There’s space in my life for all of that. I don’t have to choose or put these things in competition with each other. And Alicia, what you were saying about capitalism really resonated for me. When I start thinking that there is not enough time or enough of me to live as a healthy mentally-ill person and a poet and a mother, it’s usually because of these embedded capitalist beliefs that have me thinking I need to produce more poems, I need to somehow be doing something with my children that I’m not doing, that I need to be more outwardly productive in some way that goes against my mental health. When I can release those ideas and uncouple them from my own belief system, then I do find that living in that space of health is really fulfilling, and really very possible.
Lara Ehrlich
Thank you all so much. I think those are some great words to end with. And I really appreciate all of you, your honesty, and your bravery to be willing to speak to these experiences in this truth. It’s so important, this conversation. You guys have brought tears to my eyes—like, I’m tearing up here. Thank you all for joining us tonight.