Mis-Mother: Truths About Motherhood Your Mom Never Revealed

By Kate Emerson Forrester

Mis-Mother: Truths About Motherhood Your Mom Never Revealed is a story of survivorship, love, and imperfect mothering spanning 150 years in one crazy family. Our culture both adulates and irrationally blames mothers, obscuring much of the real maternal experience. This secrecy often leads women and men thunderstruck in early parenthood.

Intending to do it "better" than our own parents, we find ourselves reliving and re-enacting the experiences of previous generations. Epigenetic research indicates historical trauma, mental illness, addiction, and peculiar coping styles are passed down through both nurture and nature.

This was my personal experience as a mother when I suddenly understood why my Irish great-great grandmother was referred to as "Mad Mary." With humor, honesty, and historical references, I share my journey and that of my maternal ancestors from wounded soldiers to devoted warriors.

With universal appeal, everyone will recognize elements of their own story in this powerful and poignant memoir.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Gatekeeper Press
• Release date: Apr 22, 2022
• ISBN: 9781662926075

Book preview

1

MATERNAL LEGACY

To be candid, my ancestors were wounded mothers, driven fathers, and the orphans they created. My mother’s side of the family gleefully admits to being crazy. Mind you, we’re not the worst kind of crazy. The worst kind of crazy believes itself perfectly sane and presentable. That would be my father’s people. These broken ancestors gave me the beginning of a story, and my children gave me a chance to change the ending.

But first, motherhood tore me open.

When I became a mother, a part of me as old as the stars longed to run and leap into the arms of a dreamt-of mother, yearned for a wholeness and union that I was missing.

When I became a mother, I became a warrior, conscripted into a battle my maternal ancestors had been fighting for centuries.

When I became a mother, my foremothers stood by and held onto hope when I could not find it in myself…

On a wintry night in 2003, I left my home in agony and fury and drove high-speed twenty-five miles south on the Interstate intending to drive off a floating bridge spanning a lake. I felt I was burning alive, and the only solution was to plunge into the water. Something overpowering drew me to that water, and then something inexplicable pulled me away from the bridge. Instead, I drove to a nearby hospital emergency room, where I walked in and spoke this truth: I have a toddler and a ten-month-old baby, and I’m going to kill myself…

We are familiar with notorious bad mothers, like Euripides’ Medea of Greek tragedy fame, who killed her sons in revenge for her husband’s abandonment. Joan Crawford, glamorous Hollywood movie star of the 1920’s to the 1960’s, adopted five children and reportedly abused them while guzzling alcohol and obsessing about her career. In 1994, Susan Smith of South Carolina murdered her two children—three-year-old and fourteen-month-old sons—by strapping them into their car seats and driving into a lake, then falsely claiming a black man had kidnapped them. Andrea Yates of Texas in 2001 drowned her five children, ages six months to seven years, in the bathtub. Lashanda Armstrong of New York drove her minivan off a boat ramp into the Hudson River, killing herself and her four young children in 2011.

But there is one lesser known: my own great-great grandmother Mary McConville, who walked into the San Francisco Bay in 1890 to drown with her four daughters. My mother referred to her Mad Mary and declared, "She just got sick of that man and marched right into the Bay!" That man was my great-great grandfather Martin O’Neill of County Cork, Ireland, known to some as the hanging judge of Crockett, a small town perched on the Carquinez Strait at the northeast corner of the San Francisco Bay.

The ripples of Mary’s plunge have been felt for decades in my family and her story shrouded in shame and secrecy, only whispered from mother to daughter. Each time my mother asserted Mary’s attempted murder-suicide was an act of liberation, my grandmother Irene and Great Auntie Vi would shout, Don’t speak ill of the Dead, Susan! For the love of God! When I asked the men in the family about the incident, they told me they never heard that story about Little Grandma and didn’t know what I was talking about.

Of course, they didn’t.

Then I bore children and experienced firsthand our family legacy of peripartum mood disorder, and I realized that Mary’s story was far more tragic than my mother made out. The peripartum period, meaning surrounding birth, is a crucial and vulnerable time for women. For an estimated one in five women, PPMD takes hold during pregnancy or within the first four weeks after delivery, and it can persist throughout a woman’s childbearing years. Each one of my foremothers silently suffered undiagnosed and untreated depression, anxiety, and peripartum mood disorder.

Mary’s youngest daughter was my great grandmother Viola, a toddler in arms in 1890. Viola’s eldest was my grandmother Irene. Irene’s eldest daughter was my mother, Susan, and I am my mother’s eldest daughter. Maternal bonding has been impaired in my family and shame has flourished. Though Mary bore shame for being Irish, just two generations later, my grandmother Irene was fiercely proud of her Irish heritage.

There’s always been injustice and evil in this world, Honey-Lamb, and there always will be, Grandma told me. Be like a prism: catch the light as you can and make rainbows. I adored her. She was a dark-haired beauty, and played the ukulele singing Five-foot-two, eyes of blue…Has anybody seen my girl? As a girl growing up in Vallejo, California, she was all tom-boy; played baseball with the neighbor boys, fearlessly roller-skated all over Vallejo’s hills and skinned her knees and elbows something awful when she took a tumble. She smoked like a chimney, and told us she was given her first cigarette by Grandpa Martin O’Neill in his study when she was twelve years old. She was his favorite, she claimed, favoritism being another family tradition. She had two younger siblings, Vi Jr. and Bud, over whom she ruled like a capricious queen. Her mother, my great grandmother Viola, was always away at the talkies. A devoted admirer of Rudolph Valentino, she slipped away to the theater, or who-knows-where, leaving Irene as a child in charge of the younger children for hours on end. Irene used to put a hand over her mouth in false shame with her head bowed, laughing eyes looking up at her granddaughters, and confess, They called me ‘Bossy.’ She recounted a time when Vi Jr. and Bud locked her in a closet, having tired of her stern rule, then listened in terror to the threats and curses of the Irish temper igniting behind the locked door. It wasn’t safe for them to release her until Mother came home.

As Irish-Catholics, many of us adopt a stern piety. My grandmother was no exception. Striving to emulate the self-sacrificing behavior of our preferred saints, we go to extreme measures to follow the rules: fasting, depriving ourselves, reciting the rosary, kneeling before the crucifix, visiting the Stations of the Cross. But our Shadow Selves simultaneously loom large with all this self-denial, and we develop a flair for cruelty, vicious gossip, humiliating jokes, stinging sarcasm, wonton drinking and sex, and worst of all, the infamous Irish Temper. Cycling as we do between extremes of good and bad, we also place some family members on pedestals, then shove them off those pedestals when they disappoint. We may even ostracize them for years.

Irene had many people on pedestals: all Catholic clergy, her husband Robley Passalacqua, affectionately known as Passey, and of course her own father, Joe Ryall. She admired bright men and perceived them as more intelligent than she because of their gender. She seemed to regard her mother Viola as a dear, but very delicate rose. She referred to her sister Vi Jr. as a nervous breakdown waiting to happen, and her brother Bud as a poor lost soul. As her Honey-Lamb, I was an angel with hair like spun gold who could do no wrong. She never saw me torment my little sister. I tried to play the angel for Grandma because I didn’t want to disappoint her. Of my mother Susan, Irene’s middle child, Grandma always anticipated trouble. She tread on eggshells in my mother’s presence. Susan harbored all manner of grievances toward Irene and others, and often started an argument about some event in the past during our visits. Grandma tried not to dispute her, but we often had to storm out of Grandma’s home because my mother got up in arms about something.

It’s been said that no one holds a grudge like an Irishman, or an Irishwoman in my mother’s case. My mother Susan nursed and fed her anger like a life-saving fire in desolate Ice Age conditions. She kept it roaring for years. She put all kinds of fuel in to feed it: her wedding dress and wedding photos after my parents’ divorce were all burned. Even parts of photos with my father’s image were torn away and thrown in. She fire-bombed relationships, telling off friends and family members, threw into the fire gifts from people that offended her, letters to and from men she had loved, things we had given her as children when she felt we didn’t show enough appreciation of her, her own art work and photography, sheet music from the folk guitar group in which she played. My goal when I started my family was simple: to be as different from her as I could possibly be, to put an end to family legacies of neglect, abuse, and trauma.

That proved harder than I thought…

2

MOTHER-WARRIOR

Pregnancy and childbirth astounded me. I knew that women had been soldiering through the experience for thousands of years, often in brutal circumstances. I also understood that Mother Nature was entirely in charge as soon as I entered maternity, and my body was no longer my own. I was inhabited, and I enjoyed the attention and privileges that being with child conferred upon me.

A new organ was created in me with the formation of the placenta in the first twelve weeks, and it became the site of exchange between me and my baby. The placenta forms an enduring connection; cells of babies stay in their mothers’ bodies for decades, and her cells remain for decades in her children’s blood, and in organs such as the pancreas, heart and skin.

During the early months of pregnancy, my hormones surged impressively, and new ones appeared. The human chorionic gonadotropin hormone caused my ovaries to produce more estrogen and progesterone until the placenta took over the work of hormone production. HCG is implicated in the nausea during the first trimester of pregnancy. The so-called morning sickness, a misnomer since it occurs throughout the day, diminished for me after the first three months. For some women, it continues throughout pregnancy. The all-new high of estrogen in my system increased my uterine lining and musculature. My blood supply increased by fifty percent, and progesterone softened my blood vessel walls to accommodate this. Extra blood went to the milk duct system in my breasts and caused water retention. My breasts became full and tender, nipples larger and darker to help the baby later find its target. Dark skin pigmentation appeared on my belly as a line from my breast bone to my pubic bone. My body fat increased. The extra progesterone went to work on the smooth muscles of my body, inhibiting their contractions and causing indigestion as my stomach and bowel walls relaxed to increase absorption of nutrients. There were new leg cramps, back ache, urinary urgency and frequency, increased perspiration and body warmth. The amniotic fluid was completely exchanged every three hours. With my circulatory system taxed and impeded, varicose veins, hemorrhoids and swollen ankles appeared. My skin stretched and was marked. The hormone relaxin softened my ligaments, cartilage and cervix so that I could contain the growing baby and allow its exit at delivery, also causing clumsiness.

These changes and the growing fetus in my womb caused fatigue, sleepiness and moodiness. I found myself choking up at commercials for long-distance calling or baby diapers. My opinions became very strong. My intellect and logic, always overshadowed by intuition and emotion, took a complete hiatus. I craved certain foods I don’t normally eat, like rice pudding. Some women even crave non-food substances during pregnancy, such as laundry detergent or dirt. With the hormones’ effects on my brain, I was more sensitive and anxious. I felt vulnerable and dependent. Periodically and without any evidence, I believed my husband’s abandonment of me was imminent. Once my uterus reached up to my breastbone, I had shortness of breath and stomach acid reflux. Given all of the above, and what lies ahead, I believe pregnancy must always be voluntary for a woman.

Society regards a pregnant woman as a holy vessel. She is doted upon, scrutinized and envied. Once the baby is born, she often becomes invisible, with the baby at center stage. People who would run to open the door or give up their seat for her while she waddled around in late pregnancy don’t seem to notice when, after the baby is born, she is fumbling with a baby, a purse, a diaper bag and perhaps a folded stroller or umbrella while attempting to get into her car. When breastfeeding, suddenly people are all eyes again.

The Sales Pitch on motherhood promises joy and fulfillment, but some of us feel cheated after purchase. Increasing numbers of women are experiencing PPMD today, and despite the fact that it is a biological illness, it is still viewed by many as a disgrace and a failure. No one wants to admit to it. The stigma of this illness is worsened by the sense that the sufferer has betrayed her family and betrayed society at large by not fulfilling her vital role. Women who become mothers are expected to transform into nurturing, indestructible, self-sacrificing beings. Failure to do so is unforgivable and has no statute of limitations.

The medical profession has gradually begun to understand PPMD as a medical condition. Prior to this, PPMD has been referred to by various names over the centuries: female hysteria, hysterical neurosis, women’s nervous breakdown, baby blues, postpartum depression. The term hysterical neurosis, was not removed from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders until 1980, and PPMD is still not a distinct disorder in the DSM V. This omission leads to misdiagnosis and ineffective treatment. Treatment often targets PPMD’s comorbidities, such as substance abuse disorder, panic disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder and major depressive disorder. However, the failure to identify PPMD negatively impacts service planning, funding, research, and public health documentation.

What I am about to share may seem maternal heresy. In telling this story, my intention is not to paint a negative picture of motherhood, but to fill in some of the gaps in the mythology of motherhood with which we are well acquainted through the media and revisionist family history. What lies in those gaps is waking every morning feeling like a cornered animal because you’ve only had three hours of sleep in thirty-minute increments. Days of walking around like a pane of glass covered with cracks: one more blow, or even a tap, and you shatter. Moments when you drop something or jam your finger and irrationally scream, Goddamnit, leave me alone, because you feel assaulted by life. Times when you feel as though you have a sign on your back that reads, How’s my mothering? Call 1-800-up-yours. What self-esteem you had prenatally vanishes. Every whimper, every whine, every moan of that baby is like fingernails on a chalkboard to your nerves. Terrifying thoughts may occur to you about how you might hurt your baby, followed by horror for even imagining such things. The baby’s fragility and utter dependence is overwhelming. Demolished as you feel, you must keep your infant alive and perhaps care for other children as well.

One hundred fifty years ago, my great-great grandmother Mary was poor and Irish. Her parents had survived a Famine that caused the disappearance of approximately three million people from an island that had eight and a half million to begin with. Over one million Irish died of disease and starvation, and an estimated two million more fled to North America.

To be clear, the experience of displacement is not unique to the Irish, and this story is in no way intended to overshadow the oppression of other groups. For centuries upon centuries the world over, people have been removed from their land. Dehumanization, slavery and persecution of targeted groups, with cover-ups and lies created about it to obscure the truth, have occurred throughout history and continue today. Many cultures survive by the sheer will and strength of their people, but trauma leaves its scars, even genetically.

John and Mary Catherine McConville, Mary’s parents, never spoke of the devastation they carried from mid-nineteenth century Ireland, but history informs that landlords came to the small homes where Irish tenant farmers lived ten or more to a room and evicted them, set fire to their thatched roofs as families grabbed what they could. Survivors ate what livestock they had and lived off what they could catch: birds, insects, rodents. Some ate grass and starving children were seen with grass-stained mouths. Illness set in and spread. The young and the old died first. Orphaned, starving, dressed in rags tied together for clothing and without shoes, they climbed aboard what were then called coffin ships bound for Newfoundland and New York, ill with dysentery, diphtheria, cholera, small pox, influenza. The journey took twelve weeks. One in five of them died along the way and was dumped overboard. They paid for their passage by signing as indentured servants and laborers in America, agreeing to work for five or more years without pay upon their arrival. This was not much different than the subsistence life they’d had as sharecroppers in Ireland, except they were in a strange land with strange people and their family members were lost. They were illiterate and most were Gaelic-speaking, with just a few words of English. They were not welcome upon arrival at Castle Gardens in New York. Ellis Island Inspection Center was built later in 1892. They were disparaged as Bog Irish, Bog Trotters, filthy Paddies and thick Micks.

To better understand my family, it was helpful to research the Irish and Irish-American cultures. As a colonized people, many Irish carry a bittersweet sorrow, a homesickness for a forgotten place that dwells in the soul, old as Ireland itself. It is a sense of loss they brought with them to the filth and poverty of America’s nineteenth century cities, and was dispersed through the generations. There is a peculiar sense of foreboding many Irish have. Hence, Murphy’s Law: if anything can go wrong, it will. Exploited for centuries by the British, there is a sense of endured suffering among the Irish. Research on epigenetics indicates that genes of trauma survivors bear chemical marks of that trauma that are passed down to their offspring. These marks don’t cause damage or mutation, but they alter the ways in which the gene is expressed, leading to differences in appearance, physiology, cognition and behavior. Epigenetics may in part explain why depression, anxiety, and peripartum mood disorders run in the family.

Like crop infestation, trauma and shame do not diminish over time without conscious healing. Rather, they fester inside people and deteriorate them. They are displaced onto others and the oppression is transmitted and repeated upon new victims, spreading like disease. Hidden truths have deadly, exponential power, and can plague families for generations.

The trauma experienced by the Irish dates back even before the Great Hunger, to the loss of the Celtic culture that worshipped a Mother Goddess and other deities. The ancient Celts lived communally and had a reverence for nature born of an animistic view of the natural world. They adored their poet-storytellers and spent evenings gathered to hear vivid tales told with humor and sadness. Life in Ireland altered dramatically with the Anglo-Norman invasion between 1169 and 1175. A feudal system was instigated, with widespread construction of castles by aristocrats, commoners forced to swear fealty to one lord and become tenants bound to the land. The Anglo-Norman clergy and the Catholic Church banned many pre-Christian traditions of Gaelic society in the belief that the Irish were barbarous and pagan.

For centuries thereafter, the majority of Ireland was held by absentee landlords and rented out to Irish tenant farmers, who paid rent in the form of their produce, taxes to the Church and State, as well as renting their farm tools. These farmers could never hope to own the land they worked. As is common in many parts of the world today, a small number of wealthy families living elsewhere owned the majority of Ireland, with little interest in its wellbeing and development.

Then the Potato Famine struck from 1845 to 1849, brought on by a disease called late blight on the potato crops. It was the water mold Phytophthora infestans, which traveled to Ireland on ships from America, devastating potato crops across Europe. The leaves developed black spots and holes, and there was a terrible rotting odor. The potatoes, when pulled from the ground, were shrunken and corky, inedible.

There are questions whether the Famine was the inevitable result of Phytophthora infestans. The disease had far less devastating consequences on the Continent. Irish nationalist John Mitchel wrote in 1861: The Almighty, indeed sent the potato blight, but the English created the Famine. For that statement, Mr. Mitchel was convicted of treason by the British government and banished to Bermuda for fourteen years.

The Famine was an avoidable tragedy. Many of us were led to believe that Ireland is a wasteland where the only thing that could grow were potatoes, and lacking crop diversity, the Irish did it to themselves, brought on their own starvation. This is revisionist history. The Irish were forbidden to produce anything other than potatoes. When they did manage to grow something other than potato, it was very difficult and at great cost, and the produce was taken away by armed guards and exported to England.

The English poet and social reformer Ebenezer Jones wrote in 1849, In the year A.D. 1846, there were exported from Ireland, 3,266,193 quarters of wheat, barley and oats, besides flour, beans, peas and rye; 186,483 cattle, 6,363 calves 259,257 sheep, 180,827 swine; and yet this very year of A.D. 1846 was pre-eminently, owing to a land monopoly, the famine year for the Irish people.

There was a belief among some at the time that a cleansing was needed in Ireland. The barbaric Irish who had been living on and communing with the land for centuries, tilling the soil, worshipping their Catholic and Celtic deities, collectively raising their children, composing song and poetry, transcribing the world’s great manuscripts while others burned civilization on the Continent, had to be culled. They were viewed as lazy, filthy, strange and ill-fitting in Britannia. The free market should not be interfered with to make food available and affordable for them. Neither should alms be offered, as it created dependency and engendered laziness. Those who tolerated the peasant-parasites with their rents in arears had done the Irish and themselves no favors. It was in their economic interests to convert the lands for the grazing of animals; a more profitable venture. The people should be eliminated. Although no one dare say it explicitly, the goal was to have the Irish get out or die off. In a word, genocide. Like all survivors of the Famine, the McConville family was deeply imprinted with the shame of being Irish and the trauma of being targeted for genocide.

The Irish bean si, or banshee, is a female spirit who heralds the death of a family member by wailing, shrieking, or keening.

3

AMERICAN WAKE

Mary McConville, known as Little Grandma in our family, arrived from Ireland in her mother’s womb in early 1862. She was born on March 5, 1862 in New York City, during the Civil War. She spoke with a brogue all her life. She grew to just four feet, eleven inches tall. Small, but strong, she endured much and died in 1945 at age eighty-two, as World War II concluded. Her parents, my great-great-great grandparents, had fled Ireland with their two boys and not a single possession. Her mother almost certainly suffered with peripartum mood disorder.

The McConville family lived in the tenements on the lower east side of Manhattan. As an Irishman, John took work no one else wanted. He learned to recognize signs that read, Help Wanted; No Irish Need Apply. He worked in the city’s sewers, digging canals and trenches, laying cobblestones. The McConville family shared a cramped flat with another Irish family. There was no running water and there was a communal lavatory outside in back of the building. These tenements, hastily built, were fire traps, and many inhabitants died in them. The fire escapes one sees on the older buildings in New York were not always there. The mothers worked day after day cooking, cleaning, doing laundry and mending, nursing their babies, and changing and washing diapers. When the children were able to walk well enough, they were turned out on the streets in the care of the older children. There were accidents that maimed or took children’s lives. Some were run over by a carriage or a street car and lay writhing and screaming on the cobblestones as the other children ran for mother who arrived only to find the child dead. Others fell from a window to their deaths, and many succumbed to illness. One of every four Irish immigrant children died before they reached adulthood. The surviving kids came through with scrapes and injuries they could boast about later, crooked bones that had healed improperly or scars from cuts that should have had stitches but were never seen by a doctor. Countless mothers were lost in childbirth. So many babies died the mothers hardly let themselves bond with their infants until they reached a sturdy age. The women bore babies year after year, as all good Catholics did, growing families with eight, nine, ten, eleven, and twelve children that were impossible to adequately feed and care for. Once the children were old enough to work at seven or eight years of age, out they went to jobs. Work day