Opinion | Motherhood, Mental Health, and Education | Observatory

Reading Time: 8 minutes

How much pain you felt! A horse with
entangled legs – that’s what you were, Mother.

Watching English director Elizabeth Sankey’s documentary Witches is the ideal pastime for May, when most countries celebrate Mother’s Day worldwide. (Mexico always celebrates it on May 10). The film perfectly complements the climate of love we create (even if just once a year ) for the women who gave us life (of course, with the selfless support of malls, department stores, flower shops, restaurants…). Witches is an intriguing and dynamic documentary about the effects of motherhood on women who give birth, and about how the always awaited feelings of fulfillment, joy, submission, and tenderness, are sometimes replaced by other equally maternal but usually forgotten feelings of detachment, sadness, fear, guilt, despair, anger, hatred, destructiveness, and defeat, which many women can experience during pregnancy and postpartum, and which sometimes reach states of severe depression, delirium, and even psychosis. Recognizing these experiences of women and their children, and supporting them so that one day their Mother’s Day can be like the one they have always imagined instead of an ordeal, experts in these issues organized the first Wednesday of the month as World Maternal Mental Health Day, which, this year, fell on Wednesday, May 7.

Pardon my irony beginning this text, but I feel it to be the most convenient way to jolt our consciences a little before such a delicate subject, from which it is very easy to turn our faces. It is not the film that inspired this tone, but its content almost forces it to be brought up this month, when the last thing we do as a society is to think publicly about women who, after giving birth, suffer that long list of difficult pains.

Motherhood and Mental Health

We have all been indoctrinated into what mothers should be like. The description in Witches (the only sarcastic passage in the documentary) is remarkable and worth listening to in its entirety (moreover, it is accompanied by scenes from classic films that illustrate each of these beautiful attributes): “A mother is selfless, her entire identity is consumed by love for her child. She is immaculate, young, innocent, and almost virginal in her purity. Her hair flows behind her as she walks through a field of wild flowers. When breastfeeding her baby, she always smells like freshly baked bread. She wears long cotton dresses and strolls without makeup, shining from inner love. She never questions her life; she feels eternally blessed and whole. She is slim, attractive, and elegant. She’s never stressed, never angry, always brimming with compassion, joy, and endless emotional resources. She is a mother and nothing else, which is more than enough for her. She is happy.”

I hope I don’t “spoil” the film. As I say, the truth is that it is a documentary and, therefore, has too many things and too much information that cannot be covered in a text like this. I will only allow myself to mention and reflect on a few points.

Almost from the beginning, Elizabeth Sankey tells us that since childhood, she has been attracted and harassed by the shadow of madness. She managed to manage this cruel contradiction of motherhood and even leverage it through her profession. (She is a writer, singer, director, and screenwriter of previous documentaries.) Unfortunately, her condition, until then bearable and even fruitful, came to a crisis upon the birth of her son. Sankey describes it eloquently and then sums it up in one sentence: “I started living in a horror movie.”

I was going to say that “many of us know what that is,” but I would have forgotten an essential component: the baby. Not many (in fact, none of us who are males) know what it is to suffer a pregnancy, childbirth and breastfeed a baby while obliged to fulfill the expectations of a woman in a patriarchal society, that is, as the Director of Witches points out at the beginning of her list, her selflessness in consuming her identity completely in those acts. To a deep depression (such as one many of us experience), more profound dimensions are added due to the presence of an embryo or a baby. (Certainly, we know that depression after childbirth also assaults some males, provoking feelings of sadness, fear, detachment, and anger, which – I continue to invent – men manage to cope. Thanks to omnipresent patriarchal support, their reactions are not so socially demonized, for example, imposing neonatal care practices on the mother, humiliating her, verbally and physically assaulting her, or outright abandoning her and the baby.

The statistics about depression in pregnancy and postpartum are horrifying. The film reports those in the United Kingdom, but undoubtedly they are similar worldwide. Two are mentioned: 80% of pregnant or postpartum women suffer from depression (not necessarily severe, of course), and (the following is very serious) the primary cause of death among pregnant and postpartum women is suicide.

Let’s put it this way: the presence of an embryo or a baby can make the hell of depression change its sign – the person goes from being a condemned soul to becoming the devil himself. Elizabeth Sankey says that in her case, before considering suicide, she had the extreme idea of taking the child’s life.

We may want to turn our faces away from such thoughts, but today we will not do it. For Sankey, who felt desperation, taking the child’s life was almost the obvious option: if all this hell was not there before and began with the birth of the baby, wasn’t the solution straightforward? After a few hours, this idea thrust her almost to the limits of hell, and Elizabeth began to think of ways to commit suicide.

This is where we all have the opportunity to honestly confess how much we are on the side of the inquisitors and how much on the side of those who dare to recognize themselves even a little in that resounding hell. Once this examination of conscience has been performed, Elizabeth comes to our aid and reminds us of the key to deciding. Returning to her childhood, she evokes the film The Wizard of Oz and the heartbreaking contrast between its two witches, the good one, with whom every girl could identify, and the bad, green-skinned (sick?) one, from whom anyone would want to flee. Confronting this duality of “good witch” versus “bad witch” – so exalted socially – with the experience of her motherhood, the director throws in our faces a truth that we cannot avoid, which calls into question all our moral indicators: “Sometimes, being good or bad is not a choice that a woman can make for herself.”

The lack of definition of whether one is being a “bad” mother by free choice – that is, the so-called guilt – can make things unbearable. We might think that the solution would be that, before becoming a mother, the woman can decide whether or not she wants to be one. But reality is full of paradoxes – or hidden interests – and, as we all know, women have also been deprived of their liberty in deciding such a thing. You simply have to be a mother and find in it the meaning of life, leaving aside unspeakable inclinations, such as not feeling the slightest enthusiasm for giving birth, maintaining interests unrelated to motherhood and the feminine stereotype (such as traveling, studying or dedicating yourself to art), or not feeling the slightest attraction to men.

To speak of inquisitors and witches is to refer to the correct context, namely, one of the historical moments in which the lack of inclination to motherhood was the reason for the most violent discrimination, and in some cases (such as those of severe depression and psychosis), torture and punishment. For witches! Yes, witches, and their accomplices, those other women who interrupted pregnancies when they predicted an unhappy motherhood or who knew remedies and therapeutic rituals against postpartum anguish and depression.

It is excruciating to think that torture and punishment were not just external, but that most of the “bewitched” women had internalized the social mandate since childhood (from the womb, we could say) and suffered with deep pain, shame, and even terror, knowing that they lacked maternal feeling. How strange is it that a woman raised in such a society, and with unspeakable desires – that is, clearly alien to motherhood – feels threatened with diabolical possession or outright already possessed? It must be remembered that this is not just a thing of the past: returning to the documentary, some of the women interviewed claim to have felt so much rejection towards their baby after childbirth, and such heartbreaking guilt, that, if society had given them a measure of liberation to be taken to the gallows, they would have accepted the resolution without hesitation.

I believe that the key to this whole tragedy is the term unspeakable. The history of motherhood seems to be engulfed in both joyful noise and terrifying silence. Part of the mandate is that women cannot speak, not even to themselves. That is why all their depressive and even delusional reactions come as a surprise: no one has told them about these. They feel desperate and guilty, but no one explained that these feelings thread through a history that has always been silenced (personally and socially) and is only now about to be heard with due attention.

The Role of Education in Motherhood

For this reason, Witches is a social education work of great significance. Although it is classified as a documentary, it belongs, in my opinion, to another genre, that of confession. Its depth transcends a simple documentary, which is undoubtedly convenient for a world that increasingly resorts to concealment. (In this sense, it is easier to believe that we are dehumanizing ourselves than to recognize the truth: no, we are not dehumanizing ourselves, we are hiding.)

Witches is the testimony of women who decide to give birth. Although it may seem like a play on words or a glib cliché, I think there is some truth that before giving birth, women must themselves be born. (The problem with a simple formula is that it makes it seem like accomplishing something is only a matter of thinking about it and wishing it, when in reality, it is an arduous task.) Women in this way open spaces that have never been open before for themselves or others, and in doing so, they also open spaces for everyone. Because of these pioneers, more ears in society are attentive to their stories.

I am convinced that it is time for testimonies at all levels of human communication. The confessional genre can shine a light on forbidden regions and begin to show them to us, restoring our confidence in who we are and in the community to which we belong. Even in academia, testimony is starting to be valued not only for exposing the knowledge of others but also the knowledge of ourselves. We can show ourselves to our students, affecting their feelings and reasons; trusting that, in topics like this, exposing the intimate can counteract the anonymity to which we all tend to reduce ourselves.

However, I insist, this is not easy. As a dear friend said, it is not a question of throwing oneself into the striptease of one’s own emotions and ideas; it is not a matter of giving a personal testimony only as an outlet or catharsis, and much less as a careless act. Confession must be prepared, growing within, in a straightforward gestation process. Usually, before bearing fruit, personal experience passes through a time of inner self-affirmation, developmental phases that mature in the shadows.

As I say, it is not a question of concealment but of incubation and preparation. It must be clear that the time will come to expose yourself, because seeds are lost if they do not sprout, fruits rot if they remain on the tree, and human experiences deteriorate if they don’t come to light.

I believe that the best indicator that a fruit is ripe is that it can be shared, and that a testimony is ready when it becomes communication, that is, when it ceases being only a need for personal expression and emerges as a sharing with another. Of course, exposing oneself (and I clarify that this also applies in the didactic sense of “giving a presentation”) does not imply a particular amount of courage; when the time has come to do it, one feels how fraternity, empathy, solidarity, and tenderness prevail, and how, by listening to the other, these become transformed into collective unity and denunciation – denunciation for women who suffer like this, of course, and for whom a change of attitude in the environment is liberating. For children, young people, and adults, who suffer desolation in the presence of a depressed or psychotic mother (depression that is not only sadness but also bitterness and violence), denunciation allows communities to become support networks for the women and children who live in them (and when I say communities I do not mean abstract entities but neighborhoods, barrios, housing units, schools, universities…). Finally, the mother denounces to all children, so that they grow up knowing that motherhood and fatherhood are options that, above all, must be chosen with total freedom, and that a significant human achievement is to add non-reproduction to considerations of biological reproductive capacity.

In conclusion, I would like to confess the following: I began writing this article with the personal commitment that it would be a testimony about my condition as the son of a woman in a situation of postpartum psychosis. You can imagine! Perhaps to evade my pain, the text became a reflection about Witches and an introduction to the value of the testimonial genre in our time. However, I still have the entire month of May to commemorate my mother’s mental illness. Wait, then, for that article, and I will leave as a preview the two lines I wrote to her years ago, those with which I opened this text and with which I also want to end it:

How much pain you felt! A horse with
entangled legs – that’s what you were, Mother.

Translation by: Daniel Wetta