Marrit Ingman's new book, Inconsolable: How I Threw My Mental Health Out With the Diapers, is a memoir of her journey through the first years of motherhood. Postpartum depression and a baby with severe reflux, eczema, and allergies meant that this wasn't the time of glowing bliss she'd imagined motherhood to be, but as Marrit writes in the introduction to the book, "We are, in most ways, happy people, in part because we got to learn what unhappiness is. I believe this is possible for everyone; it's what parenting is." I recently interviewed Marrit via email.

mamazine: My first baby was a footling breech, and I had a scheduled c-section, so I identified pretty strongly with the chapter "Birth Experience Bingo." You write about feeling that "women who have caesareans are stupid...They are poorly educated...They let male or male-identified doctors push them into a preferred outcome." And then you have an emergency caesarean, and your thinking changes a little bit. Can you tell us a little about where your ideas about the "right" birth came from, and the conflicts you faced as you dealt with having what some people seem to think is a less real birth experience?

Marrit Ingman: I think my ideas about the "right" birth came from my community and from my own sense of personal politics pre-parenthood. Austin is a big hippie AP town, and at least among the people I know, homebirths are not just normal but expected. I think that's fine, of course; I still really support a woman's prerogative. But a few people I know essentially stopped talking to me about my pregnancy when I told them I wasn't having a homebirth—they'd asked, and I guess they didn't like my answer. A woman's prerogative can go either way, after all. So then I got my back up and prepared for labor as if I were going into battle against The Evil Patriarchal Medical Establishment, which is a pretty heavy trip to lay on yourself. Sometimes you just have to think of yourself as an individual mother making individual choices. So then when I ended up with a breech and a caesarean, I felt as if I'd disappointed the world. I had an overinflated sense of my own ideological importance ("I'm going to strike a blow for natural childbirth in the hospital setting on behalf of all womankind!") and I really set myself up for failure according to my own impossible standards. Who cares if I had a caesarean? My kid doesn't care. He thinks it's funny that he came out butt-first through my abdomen.

Of course people do make snarky remarks to caesarean mothers, just as people probably make snarky remarks to homebirth mothers. When our first pediatrician (whom we later fired) noticed that Baldo was born surgically, he said, "Oh, were you not coping well?" in the shittiest, most patronizing voice possible. I think we should all be striving to accept one another's experiences and to avoid insulting one another. That's really not a great deal to ask.

mamazine: I love the chapter "Are You Okay?" in which you reflect on asking new mamas how they're doing and getting rebuffed with polite "Oh, just fine" responses. "I'd discovered from my own experience socializing with other mothers that we could talk about just about anything other than mental illness," you write. Now that you've put your story of dealing with PPD out there, what has the response been from readers?

Marrit Ingman: I get one of two responses: either it's gratitude, or it's the same wall-eyed confusion I got whenever I tried to start a discussion about maternal mental health when my son was a baby. I went to the Texas Book Festival this weekend to do a panel on mothers who write about motherhood, and I got to sit in a signing tent with all sorts of highfalutin' celebrity authors. The line for Chris Elliott was next to me. I really wanted to get in that line because I think he's a riot. Instead a lot of people wandered by and looked at my book jacket, which has a bottle of Paxil and a baby bracelet on it, and did these observable double-takes, like, "It's a crazy mother! Let's get out of here!" They feel safer with Chris Elliott. That really says something.

On the other hand a lot of women have opened up to me as a result of reading the book—not just about their own depressions, but about their own mothers, too, or their sisters, their friends, their neighbors. I did a reading in Austin and got a three-page letter from a mom telling me about her experiences with PPD and her kid's eczema. A woman asked me to sign her book and was in tears because her anxiety was so bad she was barely able to leave her house. I don't have any grand illusions about saving people, but it's pretty clear to me from what people tell me that there isn't enough open discussion about the problems mothers face. A teacher from my husband's school called me at home to tell me how ashamed she'd been all these years—she's a grandmother now—because she had "negative thoughts" after her baby was born thirty years ago. She's only really started dealing with it. Nobody said any of this kind of stuff to me if I just asked, "How are you?" I had to put something about myself out there first so they would feel safe and know they wouldn't be judged. I think of all these mothers choking on their feelings, afraid to speak up, and I feel ill. Our society is so uncompassionate, so intolerant of human frailty in its mothers.

mamazine: There's been a lot of attention focused on PPD lately because of the book Brooke Shields wrote about her experiences with it, as well as because of Tom Cruise's comments about how he thought she should have dealt with her PPD. What did you think about that whole pop culture explosion?

Marrit Ingman: All that media chatter came as a big surprise to me. I had just sold my book to its publisher when Brooke Shields announced hers. It takes a big splash to get people talking. I loved how other celebrities, like Courteney Cox, came out about their PPD. I'm not a super big fan of celebrity culture, either, but I think the mothers won that battle and Scientology really showed its ass. I can't argue with that.

I am retiring my "Free Katie" shirt, though, now that she's pregnant. That poor woman, subject to so much public scrutiny. If people want to tell her she should have a silent birth, why don't they just call her and tell her so? Why does all this crap have to be in the papers? Can you imagine someone making a statement to the press through their publicist telling you how you should give birth? I can't imagine anything more invasive. I don't even like people telling me what to do in the grocery store. Leave Katie alone.

mamazine: What are some of the things you think families and society can do to lessen the impact of PPD on new mamas?

Marrit Ingman: Smash the suburbs? That might be a start. We need to put a stop to the judgment. We need to get out in public together—nurse our babies, meet each other, socialize, advocate, tell our stories to each other and listen. We especially need to listen to mothers on the margins. We need to trade childcare. We need to give our support to local businesses that are family-friendly. We need to have house parties. We need to resist this "mommy wars" logic that people keep shoving down our throats and get our families together and fight for what we need. We need to accept ourselves as good enough and stop reading "expert" books written by men who are not the primary caregivers for children. We need to do a lot of things. Nobody's going to do any of it for us because nobody really cares about mothers as long as we keep our heads down and function somehow.

mamazine: You do something in the book that's sure to invoke some disparate responses: you title a chapter "Fuck Dr. Sears, or the Fallacy of Designer Parenting." You write about feeling like a failure because you practiced all the attachment parenting standards, and yet you were depressed and your baby was crying a lot. You argue that "there's a considerable difference between endorsing certain parenting techniques...and prescribing what turns out to be, in essence, a regimen for living." I loved this chapter, as I've carried various guilt-inducing phrases from The Baby Book around in my head for about, oh, six years, no matter how hard I try to erase them. Why do you think followers of various parenting techniques (and I lump myself in here, especially in my early years as a parent) end up getting so defensive about their ways of doing things?

Marrit Ingman: We're defensive because we're always getting attacked. It makes sense in a way. We're terrified of fucking up our children. We love our children and we're up against a wall of anxiety about their future. We need a lifesaver to cling to—Waldorf education, the family bed, a baby sling instead of a stroller—because we are totally at sea. There is such a glut of information in the world about what is and isn't harmful to children. Cosleeping is deadly! You'll crush your child! No, cosleeping is natural and crib sleeping will turn your baby into a neurotic mess, just like you are! Actually, I'm a neurotic mess for a lot of reasons, but I'm more likely to blame the Bush administration than Dr. Spock. Parents do the best they can, and a lot of our problems are too complex to be solved with organic food and silk squares. We don't like to be confronted with that idea. We want to think that if we read the right books and ailgn ourselves with the appropriate theories, our children will grow up magically empathetic and well-adjusted and sail through life. This is a particular kind of parent I'm talking about now, the overeducated middle-class striver. Most poor families don't actually think silk squares will save the world because they know better. But nobody deserves to have this kind of head game played on them when all they're trying to do is raise and love their children.

mamazine: In "The Parents We Are and the Parents We Wish We Were," you write, "I became pregnant during the initial groundswell—to my knowledge, anyway—of 'hip' parenting as a zeitgeist. You could be a mother and still be yourself." After you became a mother, you realized that being a hip parent, to many, meant not looking "like a mom" or letting the baby interfere with your life, which are pretty unrealistic aspirations for parents of young children. I think this is something a lot of mothers struggle with—we don't want to be caught dead wearing "mom jeans" and we're often exhausted from trying to do it all, as you point out. Where do you think you got the message that you needed to go on with your life as though nothing had changed, even though everything had?

Marrit Ingman: Oh, man. It's hard to pinpoint exactly where this idea starts because American culture is saturated with it. The Mommy Myth talks about this idea a lot. We think motherhood is a stupid and banal aspect of the human condition—that's patriarchy for you—and that it's only worth mentioning if you are truly exceptional. We fall all over ourselves praising women for being more than "just moms." We don't want to see chubby women in "mom jeans" handing out graham crackers in the park with snot on their sleeves. We want to see Geena Davis be an Olympic archer, give birth to twins at age 48, and then play the president on teevee. Now that's a mother! You other women are boring and stupid and sexless and obviously not trying hard enough to "get yourselves back" or whatever. America hates mothers. Pick up a glossy parenting magazine and you will see writers genuflecting before B-list actresses with personal trainers and scintillating marriages. It's extremely hard to not buy into it, to internalize that logic. When you are depressed and you literally hate yourself and everything that you are, you certainly can't snap yourself out of it.

mamazine: My husband and I used to listen to a Sesame Street tape in the car with our kids and murmur about what was really going on in those songs. "Rubber Duckie, You're the One" is about Ernie's heroin addiction, for instance. It kept us from going nuts and made us laugh. Similarly, you write about thinking of more adult themes for the Richard Scarry characters in the books you read over and over to your son. So I'm wondering what books are you reading to Baldo these days—and what alternative scenarios are you making up for the characters to keep yourself entertained?

Marrit Ingman: He's into The Magic School Bus right now. I have a hard time perverting that because the characters are all children. It's wrong. But I think Ms. Frizzle likes to party with the other teachers when the kids are all gone. The bus has some tricks Ralphie and Dorothy Ann never get to see. It can turn into a dungeon.

mamazine: In "The United States of Generica," you describe a fantasy you have of a large room with a padded floor and piles of toys where parents could bring their babies to play. "There will be no organized activities here. You will not be coerced into 'circle time.' The babies will not be made to play with scarves or clack claves along to some dorky music. And it is clear to all that this is not exclusively for the benefit of your child. This is not some shit to bring out your child's aptitudes or help her get into an exceptional preschool. This is because parenting is a group activity." I read that and thought how much I would have loved a place like that when my kids were babies. Any signs that such a place will become a reality someday, somewhere?

Marrit Ingman: It's a reality in Canada—Family Place! And it's been brought to my attention that we actually have a certified Family Place campus in Austin, where I live! I had no earthly idea. It's hidden in a really cool nonprofit for parents. It's a really Byzantine organization: they do everything, but there's so much going on that it's hard to separate the support group from the Love & Logic Class from the lending library. It's the kind of thing where you have to know about it to know about it. I'm sure they'd hate to hear that because they probably bust their butts doing outreach, but somehow the message isn't getting through. I'm sure that exists here because some enterprising person perceived the need and contacted the organization in Canada and raised funds and got it started. I can still barely get pants on each of my family members every day. So my first advice is to find out if it's already in your community and you don't know about it. If it's not really there, you may have to be the one to start it off. Sorry.

mamazine: What are you reading these days?

Marrit Ingman: I started reading a book by Chester Himes called "Yesterday Will Make You Cry"—it's a really hard-bitten prison novel that got chopped to hell by its publisher in the 1950s and has since been restored. Melvin Van Peebles wrote the introduction. I got it when I went to Portland do to a reading. I was traveling by myself then and now I'm home, so of course I haven't even opened it in two weeks. Since I got back I'm reading "The Magic School Bus Goes Batty."

yellow lamp on blue book

beach blanket mamas