On the coast of Acadia National Park in Maine, a lone seal suns itself ahead of me in a little nook on the rocky shore. I’ve never seen a seal in real life before. She is silky white and grey, with her belly out in the sun and her flipper tilted up. I’ve spent the past day bopping around Bar Harbor with my friend, making jokes about curing my depression with day drinking and lobster rolls and the cool Maine air. I feel okay. I’m six weeks back on Zoloft, which has been terrible, but at least my Adam Sandler meets Caroline Bessette Kennedy outfit isn’t pinching anywhere on my matronly body.
Maine makes me remember my high school East Coast Ivy aspirations but the memories feel like a movie I watched, not my own life. I try to find them in me, the me here now, but the only thing that’s left is maybe the desire to plant some hydrangeas where they won’t get scorched by the North Carolina sun when I get home. On the rugged coastline, I watch the tide come in below me in surges of clear North Atlantic water, turning the submerged green plants into a color richer and more sparkling than fine jewels. I’ve been thinking about fairy tales and motherhood, who I’ve been and wondering who I might still become–or if that’s even possible at 38? It must be, but it is very hard for me to imagine–and now, watching the seal sun herself, I think about the Selkie Wife.
Postpartum Depression & the Selkie Wife: A Story of Motherhood and Losing (and Finding) Myself
The Selkie Wife is a fairy tale about a creature that can shapeshift between a woman and a seal, and who is forced into marriage as a human woman when her seal skin is stolen. Unable to return to the ocean without her skin, she lives life on land, staring longingly into the sea despite her husband and children on shore. In the story, she eventually finds her seal skin—or has it returned to her by her children—and leaves for the ocean. Like the Selkie Wife, I imagine myself slipping into these cold, clear waves where my fat is turned to sleekness and the waters are deep and dark. I imagine myself swimming very far away where it is silent and I am alone. I’m committed to living, as I’ve told all my care providers in the weeks leading up to this trip, but I understand the Selkie Wife. Some call it post-partum depression, or “the baby blues,” but for me, it is an inexplicable grief I am reborn into with each child.
Post-Partum Depression is one of those tedious subjects no one really wants to read about—not even me—which never makes an auspicious subject for writing. When you are pregnant, the doctors make you fill out the depression and anxiety screener sheet every time they ask you to pee in a cup—so, I’m already weary of the topic. Beyond that, depression is boring. Someone else’s depression is even less interesting than their dreams. Like menopause or incontinence or anything involving your pelvic floor, post-partum depression ends up getting muddled through, privately, in our own mundane ways, none of which is interesting or pathological enough to warrant an essay.
It is no surprise to my doctors or therapists I am depressed, but it is somehow always a surprise to me. I’m one of those lucky people that gets the pre-disposition to it via genes and trauma. Like having mommy and daddy issues. A yeast infection and bacterial vaginosis. But there is a part of me that still fundamentally misunderstands depression as a lack of will to live or a question of my vitality. I’m always semi-delusional like no no, you don’t understand, I want to do and be all these things, I’m depressed because I can’t and I’m not!
Science mostly explains that post-partum depression is due to the hormone progesterone drop within the three days after birth, and while I understand it, I have a hard time accepting it. If post-partum depression was simply a matter of hormones, then when my hormones regulated, so would I! I shouldn’t be two years out in a sea of grief. When I start looking at the timeline, it is admittedly more complicated than those three days to level out progesterone. The other hormones involved in pregnancy go back to normal levels three to six months after birth. But if you breastfeed (like I did), those don’t go back until three to six months after weaning. This means, if you breastfeed for one year (the recommendation), you can expect to be hormonally disrupted for up to 18 months. And then, just because your hormone levels return to pre-pregnancy, that doesn’t mean your body does.
I know this superficially, of course. I’m somehow sweatier now and I can’t budge my weight lower than 20lbs over my pre-pregnancy self. My hair has fallen out and regrown, leaving a wild demarcation line of regrowth. Then there’s the changes from my three other children–the stretch marks under my arms and knees and belly from the swelling in pre-eclampsia, the loose skin that just waits for the next pregnancy or death, and the softness in my breasts. But it’s deeper than flesh. Your child’s DNA—DNA that is totally separate from yours—stays in your body after pregnancy. Starting as early as six weeks, the DNA from your child migrates into your body and can stay there a lifetime. This foreign DNA can have positive and/or negative effects on things like wound healing, lactation, thyroid function, autoimmune disease, cancer and maternal emotional, and psychological health (source). And during breastfeeding? The milk isn’t just flowing out: immune information is flowing back into your body—changing your immune profile for years to come. I feel this as a kind of body horror, not empowerment. It feels like becoming a mother is to become a chimera–a single organism composed of different genetic identities. Each time I give birth, I am reborn as a new and far stranger creature. Four children later, there is no part of me that feels like myself. I do not even know my own face.
My youngest son and current reason for traveling through this post-partum wasteland of self, is two-and-a-half. He is a lover and rubs my arm, all night long, even in his deep sleep. He hates my moles and will hone in on one or two that are directly in his rubbing path to try and pick off. Before the Selkie Wife, before the Zoloft, lying there bleeding while trying to put him to sleep, I thought a lot about changelings.
In fairy tales, a changeling is the substitute left behind when a human is stolen by the fae. The substitute can be a piece of wood, spelled to resemble the stolen human or a deformed or ravenous creature with the human’s face. It is frequently a child who cries all the time or acts too old for their age or uncanny in some way. Nearly all those fairy tales tell a story of a child being replaced, not the mother. I keep imagining myself being substituted by someone else—someone who wears my skin, and my face, but that both me and my baby recognize is not me. It goes like this–one day I go to pick up my son and he reaches to rub his mother’s familiar moles but finds them no longer there, only smooth, perfect skin. Gasp, horror. An other mother, a changeling mother, has taken my place. She will try to soothe him just the same, but he knows—he knows something is wildly wrong. This is not his mother, she is only wearing her face.
I imagine this other mother is better than me—placid, less sweaty, less the extra twenty pounds swaddling her belly. I imagine her in chic, flowing white while she feeds the baby organic fruits and never screams back. I feel the horror in the imaginary story from my child’s perspective—of finding the dynamic warmth of your messy, sweaty mother and her witchy moles replaced by cool, smooth perfection. I take the Zoloft to fix my brain chemistry, but it can never fix the part of my grief that is rooted in finding that I cannot substitute a better, more perfect being as the mother of my children. They’ve only got me—my mistakes, my insecurities, my struggles, and my moles.
If I look at it through a Jungian lens, where every element or character in this scene is a reflection of myself, I can see that this imaginary tableau reveals both my longing for another—better—mother to take my place, but also my horror at not recognizing myself in the role of mother at all. When I look in the mirror these days, I don’t see myself at all. I see someone’s sad mom–sweaty and chubby and unnecessary. I have no idea who she is and even when I try to care for her, I feel like I get it all wrong and I long for the foaming tide and the shimmer of my sealskin. I just want to unzip myself out of this terrible form and go back to the dark water where the stars seem to touch the horizon and nobody needs me to find their soccer socks. But to go back to the sealskin is to leave my children.
In Maine, my baby refused to Facetime me. He was determined to wait it out until I got home and he could rub my arm instead. What I’m about to admit makes me a terrible mother, I know. But when I leave my children, I don’t really miss them all that much. I truthfully don’t think about them unless I’m telling someone about them or anxious about the person I’ve left to care for them, or replying to their texts. I don’t resonate with descriptions of the relationship to my children in terms of someone who is part of me or someone whom I am always longing for. It is simply that these are the people I care most about. The closest I’ve ever or will ever allow anyone to reach me.
Much of my comfort with leaving is knowing I will return. I am committed, after all. The selkie wife can shapeshift—she could come back to her children on the shore–but in no version does she leave the water again. It is a difficult part of the story for me. It feels so cut and dry–couldn’t she have split the difference? And I think that’s what I end up trying at this point post-partum–to belong both fully to myself while also belonging fully to my children. But no matter how physically I can divide it, spiritually there is something zero sum about motherhood. No matter how much me and my partner strive for 50/50 or how much I organize things to give myself time away, I feel like a battery that must be drained for anyone else to be filled.
I would like to blame society for this zero-sum situation. There’s so much to blame–the lack of substantive support, the way we force new parents to go back to work right away, the white-Victorian ideals of motherhood and the way this version of capitalism puts the responsibility of surviving entirely on individuals and then prunes back our opportunities to do so. But like hormones, while I can explain my post-partum struggles this way, I feel like it’s an incomplete answer. I’ve had four wildly different pregnancies, births and circumstances. I’ve been a stay-at-home mom and a working mom, a single one and a married one, a poor one and a middle-class one. The consistent thread in all of them is that I am most vulnerable to depression when reality collides with my vulnerable post-partum self. Each time, I’ve left the water in the form of a woman of my own volition, like the Selkie does, but it’s when I realize my sealskin has been stolen and I am now fixed to this shore that the grief overwhelms me.
Most interpretations of the Selkie Wife view the husband in the fairy tale as the patriarchal villain, stealing her sealskin and pinning her against her will to the shore. But in truth, I am my own husband. I am the one who wanted this, who longed to be here, who committed, ruthlessly, to being a mother. I am the one who stuffed my seal skin into the chimney to keep it safe, and who takes it out in the dead of night to move it again. The husband part of me is committed to them in a way I’ve never been committed to myself. I don’t think I would have ever had the courage to leave my abusive family or ex-husband if I hadn’t done it for my children. I wouldn’t be so driven to succeed if they weren’t depending entirely on me. My commitment to living is really a commitment to mothering. But that’s the whole crux of motherhood that I end up mourning each time, the thing hormones and society cannot explain: once you’ve met yourself on that shore, you can never wholly belong to yourself again.
I leave the seal to her waters and fly back home the same day my middle two leave for their week-long youth service trips. While my youngest one is happily reunited with my moles, it is a long week before my older ones return to me. I am in different seasons of motherhood at the same time and I start seeing something new. For these older children, the season is turning, and the moon is rising into the dark and they’ve started slipping away into the depths of the sea. They come back with their hair wet and their faces shining and I meet them on the shore and can only know what they want to tell me. Somehow, when we shapeshift and slide into those waters, we are each alone. It is only on land where I can meet my children and they me.
The worst answer–the one that I hate because it leaves me in this sweaty, miserable mess–is that there is no answer. That this is an inherent tension in being human. We cannot substitute better versions of ourselves. To live in community, perhaps we can only meet each other on the shore, where we then no longer belong wholly to ourselves. That after giving birth I become so much more sensitive and aware of the world, deeply feeling all its tensions both around and inside me, and this demands both medication and tenderness. I slip back into the routine of taking my meds, working, ubering my children everywhere, carrying my screaming toddler out of Target, and scheduling time with my partner for meetings and for a moment to breathe.
There’s only one part of the Selkie Wife that I still wonder about–her child in the fairy stories who finds the sealskin and returns it to his mother, thereby setting her free. Even though it feels impossible to ever find a young and new part of me, I have a vague recollection of feeling exactly this old, exactly this matronly and sad with my first at the age of twenty-two. So I hang on to hope that there is still some part of me that will return with its gifts of youth and freedom, like a tide that always returns to the shore.
Xx,
Sarah