Author: Dr. Mama Esq.

Mommy. Wife. Scholar. God's Child.

Drowning in Fear

Dr. Mama Esq.13 Comments

Today was our first day of swimming lessons. While Ahmir, my 4 year old, was like a fish out of water – scared, timid, shaky – at least he resembled a fish. I was amazed at what the instructor got my notoriously skittish little one to do – let go of the side (while holding him, of course), straighten out his arms like an airplane, kick, put his chin and eventually his mouth in the water. My daughter Amina, on the other hand, at almost 3, actually cried and wouldn’t get into the big pool. She did eventually walk in the baby pool, with much prodding by me, but she did not live up to what I expected for my $24 half-hour lesson.

But we are going to stick with it, as ridiculously expensive the lessons are, because I want my children to know how to swim. Black children drown at a rate of almost 3 times that of white children, and mostly that is because they don’t know how to swim. I can understand, because embarrissingly enough, I also don’t know how to swim. Many black adults, epecially those that I know were raised in the Northeast region of the country, don’t know how to swim. And while the reasons run the gamut from lack of access to pools (the public pools in Philly during the summer were so jam packed there was no room to swim!), to the expense of lessons, one of the most troubling reasons is a fear of water.

Again, I can understand. I’m terrified of water. Really, I’m terrified of drowning. But isn’t that ironic – I’m scared to drown, so I don’t learn to swim?

Fear is drowning us adults and our children, and honestly robbing them of a sport and a exercise that does not need to be held back from them. Granted, the lessons are hella expensive, and my checkbook is hurting right now, but I know that I am giving my children a skill that lasts a lifetime. Furthermore, water is one of the most precious things we have on this earth, and one of the most beautiful. When I hear of people diving off cliffs in St. Lucia into pristine waters, or exploring underwater caves, I want my children to be able to experience this wonderful natural resource and engage with it, not be in fear of it.

And you are probably asking – well, what about you, LaToya? Are you going to get over your fear and learn to swim? As soon as a recreation class in beginning swimming fits into my schedule, I’m there. I don’t want my life ruled by fear of anything.

P.S. And while we’re talking summer health, don’t forget the sunscreen. Brown folks do get skin cancer.

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Too Rich for My Blood

Dr. Mama Esq.4 Comments

Today I had to fill out a form for a grant for housing assistance. It’s for money from a fund established here at school for grad students who live on campus who have two or more kids. The grant is typically about $1,250 a quarter toward rent that runs $6,125 a quarter, a nice percentage. At the end of the application, it asks how much educational debt you have in total.

Black folk tend to feel that education is the way out. I had an almost full scholarship to Penn as an undergrad. It was full less the amount the government said your family could afford to pay, which in my case was $5,000 a year. So my student loan debt coming out was about $20,000 because, well, you know that the government has little idea of what people can really pay. And $20,000 for an Ivy-League degree really ain’t bad. At all. But then on some bad advice from said Ivy-League’s career services (I should sue them once I get my law degree), I got a Master’s from Penn, thinking it was my foot in to get a Ph.D. since I didn’t have a liberal arts background. Terminal masters degrees are often called cash cows, because you usually get little financial aid and the University makes a killing off of you. So after one year, my $20K debt became $82K. Yes, a $60K masters. I’m suing. Seriously.

But it doesn’t stop there. Because once I get accepted into the PhD program here, at Stanford, I realize that even between my husband’s salary and my PhD stipend, we can hardly afford to pay rent and buy food, let alone put the kids in day care. So here comes more loans. Year 1: $7,000. Year 2: $14,000. Year 3: the year I have to pay for law school. Guess how much? Really. Guess. UPWARDS (because my budget allows for childcare) of $50,000 (I’m actually embarrassed to say exactly how much upwards). For ONE miserable year of school.

So the total educational debt I have for 8 years of college and beyond is upwards of $150,000. And I plan on being not a high paid lawyer, but an academic. Did I make a tragic error of judgment along the way? Is it always true, like many of us, especially in the browner communities, believe, that educational debt is “good debt” that’s worth the investment?

Last week, an article was published in the NYTimes about a NYU college student who had a lot of student loan debt. It basically blamed her parent and the school for her even going to NYU “without asking many questions about whether they could afford a $50,000 annual tuition bill” because they had a “grim determination” to “do whatever they could to get [the student] into the best possible college.”

I feel like I have been doing that, doing whatever it takes to get into the best schools (hence the $60K masters degree), but perhaps at the cost of mortgaging my family’s future. But that’s because I’ve been taught to believe that I deserve the best, just like everyone else, despite money. But what’s going to happen if I come out, yes with a PhD and a law degree, but in an economic climate where the environment is screwed up and the stock market is tanking and there are hurricanes and earthquakes every other day and the world has basically gone to crap and nobody is hiring sociologists and legal academics?? And my kids are still going to need to go to good schools, and I’m still going to want them to play football (the world’s version, not the American kind), and take dance lessons, and of course, sing and play the piano. But the banks will most definitely still want their money back. They’ll call my house phone day and night and once I get that turned off they’ll call my cell phone and once I get that turned off they’ll find a way to stalk me on Facebook. That day is coming, I can smell it.

Is educational debt still always good debt? Do you, dear reader, feel as though all the education that you have and paid for (or are still paying for) has been worth it? Will you encourage your children to take out the loans to go to the school of their dreams? Or will you encourage them to be “practical”, turning away from the $50K a year schools in favor of a cheaper, but less prestigious school?

I still have about 4-5 years to go, meaning my debt will probably be around $200,000 by the time I’m done. I’m taking donations. For real. I’m not kidding.


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Chasing the Jones

Dr. Mama Esq.14 Comments

This week, the NYTimes published an op-ed referencing a famous report: The Negro Family: The Case for National Action. In this 1965 report, Moynihan, the Asst. Sec’t of Labor, declares the deterioration of the black family as the main reason why blacks were and would perpetually be at the bottom of the indices for well-being in the country. What Moynihan most considered pathological is that

In essence, the Negro community has been forced into a matriarchal structure which, because it is to out of line with the rest of the American society, seriously retards the progress of the group as a whole, and imposes a crushing burden on the Negro male and, in consequence, on a great many Negro women as well.

This report angered many, and continues to anger. Pathology is a deviation or difference from some “normal” condition, and this report made it quite clear that what is normal is what white folks do.

The report itself does contain some references saying that the differences in the black community are pathological because they differ from the white community, not because the practices themselves are inherently bad. Like in Chapter IV:

There is, presumably, no special reason why a society in which males are dominant in family relationships is to be preferred to a matriarchal arrangement. However, it is clearly a disadvantage for a minority group to be operating on one principle, while the great majority of the population, and the one with the most advantages to begin with, is operating on another. This is the present situation of the Negro. Ours is a society which presumes male leadership in private and public affairs. The arrangements of society facilitate such leadership and reward it. A subculture, such as that of the Negro American, in which this is not the pattern, is placed at a distinct disadvantage.

Of course, that is not the dominant narrative of the report, which then goes forth and gives all the testimonies of the black leaders of the time that spouts thinly veiled black female hating nonsense, such as:

Whitney Young:

“Historically, in the matriarchal Negro society, mothers made sure that if one of their children had a chance for higher education the daughter was the one to pursue it.”32

“The effect on family functioning and role performance of this historical experience [economic deprivation] is what you might predict. Both as a husband and as a father the Negro male is made to feel inadequate, not because he is unlovable or unaffectionate, lacks intelligence or even a gray flannel suit. But in a society that measures a man by the size of his pay check, he doesn’t stand very tall in a comparison with his white counterpart. To this situation he may react with withdrawal, bitterness toward society, aggression both within the family and racial group, self-hatred, or crime. Or he may escape through a number of avenues that help him to lose himself in fantasy or to compensate for his low status through a variety of exploits.”33

The report is pretty clear that it believes that these “pathologies” began due to the three centuries of injustice and oppression, but that going forward, the burden is on the nation to strengthen black families. After it does that, blacks are on their own:

In a word, a national effort towards the problems of Negro Americans must be directed towards the question of family structure. The object should be to strengthen the Negro family so as to enable it to raise and support its members as do other families. After that, how this group of Americans chooses to run its affairs, take advantage of its opportunities, or fail to do so, is none of the nation’s business.

The report is fascinating in that it both “blames the victim” and properly roots the problem in history at the same time. In 20 pages, the report gives an overview of American slavery, the failure of Reconstruction and urbanization, and shows how it has contributed to the “pathologies” it identifies. It recognizes the horrors inflicted on Black people, but consistently downplays that racism still existed in 1965 or that racism or bias has any effect on family structure, test scores, education, or crime and delinquency.

In recalling the report in the op-ed, the author of the NYTimes op-ed interestingly ends with a call to provide for the safety and well-being of children, citing some of Moynihan’s predictions about out-of wedlock births and fatherless homes. While I obviously agree with the sentiment, these days family structure is not the primary reason for why children are unprotected. A single mother could do a damn good job raising her children if she had a job that could adequately provide for them. If the criminal justice system did not disenfranchise felons, making them ineligible to live in public housing or receive student loans, then perhaps more fathers could live with their children, or get educations.

If we continue to base what’s “normal” on what white folks do, we will continue to miss what the real problems are, and continue to believe the lie that there is something “wrong” with us. There is nothing wrong with us. There is something wrong with the world we live in.

Little Women

Dr. Mama Esq.2 Comments

So apparently there is a lot of “outrage” surrounding this video, which features 7 and 8 year old girls performing in a dance competition, dancing to Beyonce’s Single Ladies. If you haven’t seen it, here it is:

And while I have my own personal views on whether little girls should be doing such dances, I am more than a little annoyed at the national press this “story” is getting. For I cannot help but notice the color of these little girls. Or more to the point, the color they are not. Because of course they are White.

My thing is this: Where was the national outrage when Drake and Lil Wayne had little girls – including Wayne’s daughter – on the stage at the BET awards while they sang about wanting to f*ck every girl in the world?? Do y’all remember the Juvenile video for Back That Ass Up when you knew it was 13 year old girls up in this video? Where was the national outrage when this was a summertime hit across the country, when it was OUR girls dancing inappropriately for their age?

How many times have you been at a talent show or dance competition and seen Black little girls doing all kinds of dances that you feel like you want to cover your eyes cause it just don’t seem right? Where is the national outrage any time OUR girls are treated like little women, instead of the children they are? Why does it take little White girls to gyrate for someone to say that there is a problem? There has BEEN a problem. It just must not have been the right color.

But of course, the media hasn’t even identified the problem correctly. They are blaming the parents – what’s wrong with these parents, they are asking. And perhaps some blame belongs there, perhaps. But like one of the parents said, this is an extremely popular song, with an extremely popular video. And Beyonce has every right to make it – she’s a grown ass woman.

But has anyone asked, why is this video on in the middle of the day? Is it appropriate for children? And the answer that is clear, judging by the media coverage, is that its okay for OUR kids, for OUR girls. As long as they thought only our girls were mimicking these videos, dressing like prostitutes and shaking what they mamas gave ’em, everything was all good.  But as soon as it soils the lily-white purity of THEIR girls – oh no, we have a problem. A national problem worthy of morning news while two wars are being fought, bombs are being set, the economy is being tripped by computer glitches, and so on.

This is some bull-ish. But who am I to complain – we got a black President. Hallelujah.

For the Children

Dr. Mama Esq.4 Comments

“Everyone wants someone to take 100 white infants and 100 African American ones and raise them in Disney utopia and prove once and for all that we are all equal on every dimension, or at least the really important ones like intelligence. I am merely not 100% convinced that this is the case.”

http://abovethelaw.com/2010/04/hls-3ls-racist-email-goes-national/

This statement comes from a minor controversy that was brewing among law students (and perhaps others) about two weeks ago. As a law and sociology student, of course I saw all the flaws in the thinking, and crafted what I thought to be a perfectly rational response, aided by some other perfectly rational people, and we sent something to our law students that amounted to a big debunking of her incorrect thoughts on race, biology, and intelligence.

But when I was thinking about what I was going to write for my post here tonight, I really started thinking about the little excerpt above, and it made me feel something different than the outrage that I felt two weeks ago. I felt something different than indignant, or embarrassed that a fellow law student didn’t know how ignorant she sounded.

I feel sad.

I feel sad that there continues to be people out there that will look at my little boy and my little girl and really believe that just because his and her skin is a different color that that fact has anything to do with their intelligence. I feel sad that there are people who are so simple minded that they really believe that it would be “settled” if they could just take 100 white babies and 100 black babies and raise them on an island and then “test” to see if they are equal. I feel so sad that even with Barack Obama in the White House, a man we all know has a “white” mother yet we still call him “black,” meaning that we all do have some sense that race is socially determined, not biologically determined, we fail to apply that knowledge to our children, who deserve the benefit of that knowledge the most. I feel so sad that a woman like the one who wrote the little thought experiment above might be an important cog in the wheel of deciding the law in one of the most influential courts in this country.

It just reminds me that we have to keep fighting the good fight, wherever and whenever it comes our way. We do it for ourselves. We do it for our children.

The Finest Things

Dr. Mama Esq.3 Comments

Sacrifice. Life requires so much of it, especially when you are married, or otherwise partnered. Especially when you have children. Things don’t go smoothly unless you are willing to sacrifice something, be it something you wanted to do, or be, or have. And even if you are used to sacrifice, even if it’s been drilled in you from childhood and culturally because as women of color we are supposed to be long-suffering and give up everything for our men and our children, sometimes sacrificing sucks. Hard.

The second half of this year there are a lot of things that either my husband or I want to do. Combine that with things that we both want for the children, like swimming lessons and enrollment at an elite preschool, and you come up with an expensive docket. On a grad school budget. I’ve committed to one trip that’s a wedding for an old friend, and another that’s a wedding for a near and dear friend, but there are five others looming. One is a writing festival in Aspen that I’ve gotten a half scholarship to attend, but travel and lodging are not cheap. And it’s just for me – nothing in it for my husband or the kids. But the other five things are family things that aren’t especially important to me – weddings and reunions for friends of my husband, things that happen once in a lifetime. Things that you can’t just not go to when your husband, who never goes anywhere, who never spends money, really wants to go. And we can’t do it all.

But I want to go to Aspen.

I want to go like temper tantrum want to go. I want to shout and yell and lay on the floor and pound my fists and kick and scream until I’m hoarse. I want to wear everyone out so the universe finds a way to revolve itself around me to make what I want to do possible. I want the universe to just figure it out so money grows on trees, people get things based simply on how much they want them, most importantly I don’t have to sacrifice what I want. I want the universe to figure it out because sometimes I feel like I’ve gotten a raw deal and any bit of sunshine and happiness shouldn’t be denied to me when I can capture it just because I can’t afford it. It’s not fair.

But of course things don’t work that way. As one of my fellow law student colleagues said to me callously one day, life isn’t fair. Deal. I’ll have to take a big girl pill and suck it up and spread what little we have around and get a little bit of what I want so they, the people I love and want to see happy, can get what what they want, what they need. In the end, in lieu of a miracle, four days in Aspen will pale in comparison to seeing the joy on my husband’s face at seeing his friends married or celebrating his ten-year reunion, or knowing my children are being stimulated in a school to reach their highest potential, or are learning an essential skill like swimming that I still don’t have.

Everyone sacrifices something, sometime, for someone. They’ve sacrificed a lot for me to be here, doing this. I have expensive taste, but they – my husband, my children, my friends – are my finer things in life.

stranger than fiction

Dr. Mama Esq.4 Comments

I’ve been bit.

One of these Cocoamamas has gotten me bit by the writing bug, and it’s sucking me like a mosquito. It’s kind of annoying because I can’t think of anything else and I cannot get rid of it. It’s turning into a life of its own, with my right brain drifting to book ideas (short stories or novel?), creating sentences, experimenting with first and third person, wondering what’s going to happen next.

And I love it.

I’ve always wanted to be a writer. I’ve always wanted to be a lot of things. I’ve always wanted to be a singer. And a dancer. A piano player. A professor. At one point a poet, and a scientist. A fashionista. A mom and a wife. But the only thing I’ve done consistently well is write. I suppose 20 years (wow) of formal education tends to make that an inevitable destiny.

But never fiction. Good fiction is hard to write. Bad fiction is painful to read. The project started as a memoir, but that idea was scrapped early. Too many things to include, too many people to hurt. And a life that is a bit unbelievable.

Because seriously, and bear with me for just a moment as I make this point, how many other black women do you know who have two children, pursuing a joint degree at one of the top universities in the country, who also suffers from bipolar disorder and fibromyalgia? And I say this NOT to point out anything extraordinary about myself, b/c these things are not, and that’s really not my point, but to say that my actual life is too strange to make a good story.

Recently I read a draft of something where a character flashes back to a scene as a child where she was the only 6-yr-old to stuff cake in her mouth while all the other children ate “properly”. And it immediately struck me as false because I don’t know any 6-yr-olds that are so proper to drape a napkin across their lap and use their fork, nor did it strike me as believable that she would be the ONLY kid out of place. Yet, it was a true story. And while I know that truth is often strange, it sometimes just doesn’t work in a story, because it’s too strange. It just doesn’t SOUND true.

I don’t want to write a story about me, because I am strange. When I told people I was going to California, 9 months pregnant with an 18 month old to start a joint JD/PhD, people looked at me like I was crazy. And I was. “Normal,” real, sane people don’t do that. When I spent a week on the psych unit and then started the next quarter, finished my qualifying paper before my deadline, everyone told me how strong I was. I didn’t feel strong. I was scared to be home by myself. And I guess that can be a story but it’s too much, too much drama for one person to be real. And I don’t want to write a story about perseverance, or strength, or any of that stuff. I don’t even know how my story, the story of my life, ends. It might not be about any of those things.

I want to write a story about mental illness and family and friends and being scared and not knowing how things are going to turn out. But to make it believable, I need to change the truth. Ramp it down some. It can’t be about me.

Cocoa Sibling Love

Dr. Mama Esq.4 Comments

Here at Cocoamamas we have a rotation for posting, so I hope I’m not stepping on anyone’s toes. But today is my birthday, and something came up that I just felt the need to post. My brother is just 11 months younger than me, and as children we were very close. Over the years we’ve drifted apart a bit, due to geography and interests and time, but the love is still very strong. And he is a person that never quite ceases to amaze me.

I’ve taken a bit of a facebook break lately, but I knew that facebook lets everybody know its your birthday, so I logged on. And of course, lots of birthday shout-outs. But there was also a little note that my brother had on his page, entitled “My Sister: Carrying the Torch.” I clicked to his webpage, and I found this:

My sister is 11 months older than I. And being that we are our parents’ only two children, one of us is bound to be the first (or only) to do lots of things. Thankfully, i have a sister who has been willing to carry the torch, so to speak, for the two of us.

My parents were very adamant about us kids acheiving highly in school. My mother checked our homework nightly. So on the nights when my sister’s work was unacceptable and she went crying back to her room, my mother’s sharp eye for schoolwork excellence had been — luckily for me — dulled before viewing my efforts.

Naturally, my sister skipped a grade in elementary; attended the most prestigious high school in Philadelphia (the same HS that rejected my application two years later despite my having a sister as a character reference); went to an Ivy League college on full scholarship; and is now working on a Master’s (or is it PhD… probably both). My last semester of formal education? I was still falling asleep in lectures.

My sister went and had her own kids first, relieving me of the burden of the “kids” questions at family gatherings. Every parent wants their kids to have kids — my sister went and took care of that for us.

Well, today is Latoya’s birthday. And even though she rarely returns my calls in a timely fashion (or my texts at all), I love her and want to send her a public BDay well-wish. Enjoy it!

Of course, I have some objection to the phone call and text message thing (my mom just told me that yesterday, that he said I don’t return his calls) but I otherwise can’t imagine getting something more beautiful for your birthday.

Raising Non-Racist Kids

Dr. Mama Esq.12 Comments

I don’t know if I’ve extolled the virtues of this book enough via the internet, although I’ve certainly done so for my in-person folks. I mentioned, and my husband bought, NurtureShock solely for the chapter on race, because news articles had convinced me that these people thought like I did, and better yet, had great data to back it up. For example, something I’ve believed for a long time, is that you cannot teach anti-racism or even have successful integration if you can’t talk about race. Same for our children. Here’s this writer’s take on what NutureShock says we should not do, if we want to raise anti-racist children:

Step One: Don’t talk about race. Don’t point out skin color. Be “color blind.”

Step Two: Actually, that’s it. There is no Step Two.

Congratulations! Your children are well on their way to believing that <insert your ethnicity here> is better than everybody else.

Despite the evidence, it continues to amaze me that parents think that not talking about race and racism will somehow protect their children or make them colorblind. For white parents, NurtureShock’s authors do a great job of striking down that idea. Not talking to white children about race makes them especially susceptible to belief that being white is better than being any other color. Without active push-back from parents (and I would argue educators), white children do not learn to be colorblind, but rather learn what is reflected all around them – that white people are superior.

While the chapter does not go into much about what racial and ethnic minority parents should do to ensure that their children are not racist, I think much of the same advice goes for <put your race and ethnicity> parents too. In fact, I think not talking to your kids about race and racism is even more dangerous for kids of color than for whites.

Why? Well, if white children are coming to understand their superiority, and perhaps other latent messages about other folks, why would we not assume that kids of color are not as well? In other words, as white children learn to internalize the racial and ethnic hierarchy, so do kids of color. Whether you like it or not. Given this, as parents of color I think its even more important for us to talk to our children about race and racism, if just simply to counteract the negative messages about themselves that they receive on a daily basis. Children as young as 3 understand race.

Many parents of color that I talk to just feel that talking about race before their kids bring it up encourages them to “see race,” and this belief is something parents are heavily invested in, no matter how much research I tout. True, people of color come to learn the racial hierarchy at some point in their lives. Unlike whites, they most likely do not have the privilege to ignore it or act like its not there. But I would suggest that instilling positive, anti-racist messages from a young age help tremendously in being able to put the social hierarchy in perspective as they get older, and to better understand the world around them. Consider this:

But Harris-Britt explained that if you’re reading a picture book to a child, if you are pointing out the red of a balloon, or the yellow of a lion’s fur, you can also point out the brown of a person’s skin.

Ignoring the color of skin, yet dutifully pointing out the color of every inanimate object and animal, only sends a message to children that talking skin color is taboo.

I grew up in a house filled with books about race and racism; my mother read black literature; my father worked someplace where he was the only black person. I was never taught to hate anyone, but I also wasn’t necessarily taught to love my black self. I don’t remember explicitly talking about race, but do remember hearing adult conversations about racism, and watching Eyes on the Prize. I remember being in elementary school, a school that was in my neighborhood and therefore 99% black. There was one white boy, maybe when I was in 3rd or 4th grade. And the most I can remember about him is thinking, “Wow, his family must be really bad off if he has to go to school with us.” Some way, some how, I understood that whites were up here, and we were somehow down here. I don’t think its simply because of segregation in schools; I remember feeling the same way when I saw white families in the neighborhood, or the one old white lady on the block who couldn’t afford to move when all the black families came into that part of town. Consider this, about school desegregation:

Stephan found that in only 16 percent of the desegregated schools examined, the attitudes of whites toward African-Americans became more favorable. In 48 percent of the schools, white students’ attitudes toward blacks became worse. African-American attitudes were also mixed, but overall were significantly less dismal. African-Americans attitudes toward whites improved38 percent of the time, and turned in the negative direction 24 percent of the time.

I realized how race was tied to class because my parents didn’t have a car, and we had to get a hack back from the supermarket, like many of the black people I knew. Intuitively, I knew this:

When its students were polled if they’d like to live in a diverse neighborhood when they grow up, about 70 percent of the nonwhite high-school juniors said they wanted to. But only 37 percent of whites wanted to. Asked if they’d like to work in a racially diverse setting when they were an adult, only 40 percent of the whites said yes.

But maybe if I’d been specifically taught about slavery, its evils, Jim Crow and redlining, along with messages that of positive associations, I could have made better sense of what race really meant. Perhaps in being told the reality, maybe I would have been more indignant, more outraged rather than passive and acquiescent. Maybe with some active anti-racist parenting, for both white children and children of color, we can avoid this type of thinking for our children.

Mad Mommy: The What Ifs

Dr. Mama Esq.7 Comments

She lost her babies because of a what if. Actually several what ifs.

“I couldn’t see living the rest of my life worrying and wondering what had happened, or what if she hadn’t taken her medicine, or what if she relapsed,” said Ms. Baker, who has four children of her own.

Ms. Baker was the gestational surrogate of twins for Amy and Scott Kehoe. None of the four adults involved in bringing the children to life are genetically related to the twins, but the Kehoes are the ones who chose the sperm and egg donors, chose Ms. Baker as a surrogate, and paid for all her medical expenses. Ms. Baker had previously served as a surrogate for other couples, and at first, days after the twins birth, stood in front of a judge and relinquished custody of the children to the Kehoes. But then she changed her mind*. Because of what ifs.

She changed her mind because what if Amy Kehoe, a woman who through some biological quirk could not have a child through her womb with her egg or her husband’s sperm, didn’t take her medication for some mental illness? What if her medication stopped working? I mean, what if she went all Susan Smith on her kids, or Andrea Yates, or Amber Hill? Women who all, because of mismanaged mental illness, went on to do the unspeakable to their children, children they were genetically related to, children they birthed from their womb.

Amber Hill was actually on her way to the hospital when her mismanaged depression got so severe to cause a psychotic break that factured her grip on reality.  I remember the day things, my depression**, got so bad that I knew I needed – must – go to the hospital. The day after my 28th birthday, I dropped my kids off at day care. I sat in my living room. And it felt like my world had come to an end. It had been building; the sadness, the hopelessness, the profound sense of nothingness. I was in so much pain – my body from fibromyalgia, my spirit from a sense of being very far from God. I wasn’t sleeping, I wasn’t eating, I couldn’t concentrate. For the first time in my life, I was seriously looking for an exit plan. And at that moment, I knew the only way to save my life was to get someplace where I could totally let go and not even be responsible for me anymore.

Thank God I never felt I could do anything to hurt my children, but I doubt Amber Hill did either. Described as a lovely woman who loved her kids, her depression was simply (if that word even remotely captures it) not managed, and the depths of what was occurring in her brain caused a major malfunction and her children were the casualties. For most people with non-managed depression, they themselves become the casualty, as I thought I was going to be on March 18, 2009. But once its managed, usually with medication and therapy, most people with mental illness live like… well, most people. Up days and down days. Happy days and sad days. Days were you (figuratively) feel like you want to kill your kids. (Just joking. Really just joking.)

Does a history of mental illness, knowing what we know non-managed mental illness can lead to, make a woman unfit to be a mother when the child is not coming out of that woman’s womb? Or when a custody battle arises – what kind of information do we think is relevant to show whether a mother would be fit or not? I don’t think I’m getting divorced any time soon (if you know differently, I hope y’all got my back), but it is always in the back of my mind that with the right lawyer, the fact that I spent a week on the psychiatric unit of a hospital when my children were 1 and 3 years old surely cannot bode well for me. Or that I take 4 anti-depressant/anti-psychotic medications daily to manage bipolar disorder, and given my history, will likely need to take them for the rest of my life to function “well.” Or that I have to see a psychologist and psychiatrist on a regular schedule or that I’ve been in a day program.

I feel for Amy Kehoe, the woman who lost the babies in the surrogacy case. She’s had her illness under control for 8-9 years, and takes her medication faithfully. While Ms. Baker, the surrogate, has a genuine concern as she voices her what ifs, I hoped someone reminded her that life is all about what ifs. What if her husband got hit by a car and died as he rides his bike to work? Then the twins wouldn’t have the two parent home Ms. Baker imagined. What if she got breast cancer, and had to go through treatment, meaning the twins didn’t get the kind of care Ms. Baker expected them to receive. What if one of their other children developed mental illness, and perhaps became a threat to the babies? Then what?

And so what if Amy Kehoe did have a relapse, and dealt with it? Sometimes, I’m what what my therapist calls “fragile-stable,” meaning I’m okay, but I’m teetering near the edge. But I’m still parenting the best I know how. I’m still living. My kids are still growing and learning and laughing. And they are living too. No childhood is perfect. No family is perfect. No parent is perfect. No mother is perfect. I wish Ms. Baker, instead of worrying about the what ifs, had instead focused on the here and now, and saw in Amy Kehoe a woman who simply wanted to be a mommy.

* The law on the Kehoe surrogacy case concerns the fact that some states, like Michigan, do not enforce surrogacy contracts, so people like the Kehoes have no legal remedies when the surrogate decides to keep the babies, esp. when they have no biological ties to the children.

** I hope you all know, but I want to make clear – people like to throw around the saying, “I’m depressed.” Most times people mean they are sad, in the dumps, upset, about something. What I am talking about, and what these women were experiencing, is/was clinical depression, something that may or may not have been triggered by some event. Clinical depression has certain symptoms, that many times you cannot simply “get over” on your own. I was not depressed about anything. Contrary to popular opinion, while I may have been tired because I have two kids and am in grad school, that did not “cause” my depression. I’ve had depression since I was 16 years old, and probably developed Bipolar II in college, way before having kids or being in grad school. Depression is something in the brain, out of my control, although I can manage it, but not caused because I “do too much” (although doing too much can trigger symptoms). I really despise when people say that. I didn’t cause my depression or Bipolar because I’m ambitious or because I work too hard. I think all of it was already there. Now I am working to find out who *I* am under all the labels, and allow me, myself, and I, along with befriending the illnesses, to have a peaceful coexistence.  [Okay, off of my soapbox.]