१४ मार्च, २०२३

"In the middle of one night eight years ago, when my daughter was an infant, I was nursing her on our living-room sofa when a hulking blur loomed in the corner of my eye."

"I turned toward the nursery, adjacent to the living room, and saw, for a single billowing moment, a giant floating baby—a kind of Mylar-balloon version of my own baby—hovering in the doorframe. I knew it wasn’t real, yet there it was. Two years later... holding my infant son, I felt a hard yet yielding pressure just below my shoulder blades.... A few nights later in that room, I sensed a hand on my shoulder that wasn’t there. A ghost, or something like a ghost, was in the room with us. I felt this to be true, and I knew it was not true.... When both of my children were infants, the same image flashed inside my eyes several times a day: that by some spasm or seizure or uncontrollable urge I would throw the baby against a wall. The image was blurry, monochrome, sped-up, a squiggly pencil animation that instantly erased itself. Outside of the flash, I felt no fear that I would actually hurt my child. But I was frightened and ashamed.... The vast majority of new mothers have unwanted thoughts about their infant being harmed...."

२६ टिप्पण्या:

Wince म्हणाले...

Was it that Trump Baby balloon?

https://www.businessinsider.com/donald-trump-spy-balloon-blimp-trump-jr-funny-beijing-2023-2

Owen म्हणाले...

Oh good! Some new psychosis to obsess over.

tim maguire म्हणाले...

Not just mothers. Any hands-on parent is going to have moments where they want to throw the baby out the window. She might do a better job helping guilty mothers feel better if she were less focused on only caring about women.

gspencer म्हणाले...

Great story. But as Bart Simpson once said, "Coulda used a vampire."

Jupiter म्हणाले...

A young woman I knew, who had just had her first baby, confided in me that she had been on a rooftop with her baby, and she had had a sudden, powerful mental image of throwing the child off the roof. She was very disturbed by this. I explained to her that her subconscious was deeply aware of the danger of heights, and was communicating its unease to her conscious mind in the only way it had, using vivid imagery. So that the unwelcome image was actually evidence of her powerful protective instinct. This seemed to be a considerable comfort to her. I suspect it may even be true.

gilbar म्हणाले...

now, do post abortion depression! i double dog Dare you to!!

Rusty म्हणाले...

OK. Now do menopause. THAT is some scary shit.

gahrie म्हणाले...

Might this be a side effect of the nuclear family and social isolation? In times past women would have a support system of older women in the house and neighborhood to help guide them through their sickness. Has anyone attempted to correlate the illness with social isolation?

Iman म्हणाले...

F.F.S.

Howard (not that Howard) म्हणाले...

Call of the Void

n.n म्हणाले...

psychiatric dysphoria

TreeJoe म्हणाले...

I once was lying in my bed in the middle of the night, wide awake, and saw my infant son floating above me in the room clear as day. And not just for a moment, this went on for several seconds and he moved a good bit.

I'd say I woke up, but that would be incorrect. The hallucination faded, but I was already awake. There was no transition. I was wide awake during and after.

Still to this day the only vivid hallucination I have ever had where I wasn't half asleep, dreaming, or similar. No idea what caused it - wasn't on any meds/drugs/alcohol.

veni vidi vici म्हणाले...

Let's cry for some mom who killed her kids.

Sympathy for the devil.

Ficta म्हणाले...

"Call of the Void". Nice to know the term, I hadn't heard it before. I did see an interesting possible explanation a few years ago. Apparently, researchers found that the brain does a lot of predictive processing to "game out" events before they happen to speed up response time. The theory (which was an extrapolation, not part of the actual research, so take this with a grain of salt) was that Call of the Void events were the result of one of these predictive calculations straying into an outcome that raised warning flags in the conscious brain (Wait, what?! No, don't do that!).

Tom T. म्हणाले...

Postpartum psychosis is a rare but long-established medical phenomenon. It's a more extreme form of postpartum depression, and presumably connected to the hormonal changes going on.

holdfast म्हणाले...

It’s weird how women have these hormones that can make them crazy while pregnant, after being pregnant, once a month, and during menopause. I even believe that it’s true.

And yet we are constantly told that there’s no difference between men and women, and women can do anything that men can do.
Except, you know not be crazy at these predetermined parts of their life.

So of course we should put women in the Army Rangers, and in the crew of ballistic missile nuclear submarines.

Tom T. म्हणाले...

I'll bet the crews of ballistic missile nuclear submarines get psych screenings, and that erratic behavior would be flagged, male or female.

farmgirl म्हणाले...

Holdfast: valid point.
I’d say some women, if they can get through the training, would have earned the right to fight.

There’s a gravestone in our Catholic cemetery that has a Mom’s name and 5kids, I think. My Mom told me she’d turned the gas stove on- intentionally. That’s what her husband came home to.

farmgirl म्हणाले...

I would sooner say it was our awareness of the dangers around us, how precarious our existence and how we are responsible for our well-being- and our children. Heightened awareness and a whisper from the evil spirits thst prowl throughout the world…

gilbar म्हणाले...

Tom T. said...
I'll bet the crews of ballistic missile nuclear submarines get psych screenings, and that erratic behavior would be flagged, male or female.

what time of the month are they tested? how OFTEN are they tested?

gilbar म्हणाले...

The 1st time i went to San Fran (1993), Our family walked out onto the Golden Gate Bridge
(we went about a third of the way across)
As we were walking, and enjoying the sites, i noticed that every 100 feet or so, there was a little area where the sidewalk got wider, and you could walk out onto it, and look STRAIGHT DOWN.
I'm not afraid of heights, and never had a suicidal thought in my life.. BUT!
as we were standing on one of the outcroppings, i Suddenly thought:
THESE, are FOR people to jump from.. That's WHAT They are for
It didn't fill me with the urge to jump, but it DID fill me with the knowledge that IF you WERE to jump..
This was THE Place

It was Very creepy.
The rest of the walk, i stayed on the main sidewalk and didn't go out on a suicide platform again

gilbar म्हणाले...

OH! and Last week, i drove on the Natchez Trace Parkway;
Which up by the Nashville end, has a beautiful bridge that they built..Just to be scenic.
I've driven over it before, and the view was wonderful
But NOW.. The whole length of the bridge has a (about) 14 feet high fence, made out of links so small and tight; that you could NEVER climb it.. And then there is barbed wire at the top.

Since the links are so close, you can barely see through. So now, instead of seeing a beautiful valley, you see something like the Berlin Wall. I guess it was popular in more ways than one
What a waste

takirks म्हणाले...

TomT said:

"I'll bet the crews of ballistic missile nuclear submarines get psych screenings, and that erratic behavior would be flagged, male or female."

Yeah. And, I'll bet that anyone we gave a Top Secret security clearance to would be vetted as reliable, too.

Oh, did I forget the traitor Bradley Manning? The individual whose Security Manager wanted to pull his clearance over violations of policy and behavioral issues? Who got overruled by the brass, because they didn't want the trouble of dealing with Manning's claims of persecution?

I'll tell you the truth: They've politicized the ever-loving hell out of this crap, and your touching faith that someone, somewhere, will Do The Right Thing, and fall on their sword to get rid of the freak du jour? Ain't happening.

I have it on good authority from a friend whose got contacts on the USS Fitzgerald that a key contributory factor in that collision was that there were two female officers aboard who "weren't talking to each other" due to some crazed BS they had going on between them. Because of that, seven sailors are dead, a ship was damaged to the tune of millions, and we have the spectacle of a US Navy ship running into a clearly-marked freighter that was in a completely normal sealane.

My take on women in the military is that there are some who belong there and are a credit to their service. The problems stem from the fact that the services really do not have a damn clue when it comes to handling women in the military, and are utterly unable to do so in any workable manner. The issues range from pregnancy to dealing with the repercussions of those women that have severe behavioral swings due to corresponding hormonal ones. Used to work for one of those, and I'm here to tell you, that crazy irrational woman had no place being in command of anything other than her cat. She single-handedly brought an entire unit into a state of chaos that took years to undo.

holdfast म्हणाले...

@farmgirl - Oh, they will get through the training. Based on a lower standards for women, and unspoken directives to make sure that at least some of the female candidates pass. Because of course they will. And even if that didn’t happen, it’s proven that notwithstanding that a female soldier might barely scrape through a multi-week training course, on a multi-month combat deployment, female soldiers experience a significantly more rapid degradation of physical capabilities than do their male counterparts (meaning that everyone becomes less fit and capable over time during combat conditions due to lack of sleep, unbalanced diet, stress, etc. - but females deteriorate much more rapidly - so while a male soldier might stay 80% physically capable for 6 months on a combat deployment, for a female it could be just 3 or 4).

In theory, SSBN crews are subject to strict psych screening. In practice, these days, who knows? Nothing seems to work right, standards are shredded to accommodate feelings, and alleged adults are running scared of the woke mob.

RigelDog म्हणाले...

Perhaps this is mostly due to what Poe called the Imp of the Perverse, which is with us all. That dastardly thought/impulse that thrusts itself into our minds when standing near the edge of a cliff, for instance: What if I stepped off? What if I just randomly pushed that stranger over there to his death?

Nothing is more imperative than attending to your baby and keeping her safe; it's on a new mother's mind 24/7. It's only to be expected that the Imp will throw contrary thoughts into our heads from time to time.

RigelDog म्हणाले...

Farmgirl said: "I would sooner say it was our awareness of the dangers around us, how precarious our existence and how we are responsible for our well-being- and our children. Heightened awareness and a whisper from the evil spirits that prowl throughout the world…"

You said what I tried to but your version is perfect!