Why It’s Okay to Identify With Saiqa Akhter. And For Your Kids to Know You Do.

Last week Saiqa Akhter, an Irving, Texas mother, killed her two young children. Reports contend that after her initial plan to poison them did not work she strangled them with wire and her call to a 911 dispatcher following the acts reveals she was frustrated with the autism that plagued the children.

Since then there has been a flurry of blog coverage. Commentary on the case itself is plentiful as are various points of view on the political stances that surround it — the death penalty, insanity, immigration and — because of Akhter’s apparent heritage — anti-Muslim sentiment. Late last week Naomi Zikmund-Fisher weighed in at BlogHer offering a different tone, one I found wholly refreshing in that it took an alternate viewpoint. After all, as Zikmund-Fisher points out, we don’t know the facts about how the case may or may not relate to any of the political talking points. At this point, keeping our opinions to ourselves may be the classiest act there is. And I won’t discount Naomi’s class in doing so.

However, as I read further and took in her advice to mothers — her post offers advice on what to say if your own children ask about the news story — I couldn’t help but be disturbed by the words on the screen as well. I mulled over whether or not to comment on the story itself, to write here or just to keep my mouth shut about it entirely for a good long time. In order to put my rebuttal to her advice into words I must say things that no one, save my husband, knows; not my best friend, not my mother, not my sisters, not my in-laws. No one. In the end I suspect these will be the most difficult words I ever write. Because I have daughters myself however, and because the advice Zikmund-Fisher offered at BlogHer is the very advice that makes these words a skeleton in my closet I have decided to write them anyway. And so the story begins…

The moment my youngest daughter was conceived I knew it. It was as if my body convulsed, tightened, resisted as egg met sperm in a futile attempt to protect itself from what was to come. “This isn’t going to be good.” were the first words I uttered, and not just because the conception was a couple of months earlier than we had hoped. I knew.

For weeks I took pregnancy test after pregnancy test. None would confirm what I was sure of. Already the child was bucking convention. Finally I made an appointment with my doctor. They drew blood. They told me I was pregnant. The vomiting commenced. And continued for five long months. In exactly that order. Periodically they would re-hydrate me intravenously.

I remember the nurse’s words on one occasion like they were yesterday. “At least you don’t look sick.” she quipped. As if that was supposed to make me feel better. At least that night when I locked myself in the closet — the only place I could go that was behind not one, not two, but three doors to keep the smell down — while my husband and two-year old daughter cooked and ate dinner I would know that I made being miserable look damn good. Because what a consolation that was.

And then, just as sure as it had begun, at twenty-five weeks, it stopped. Dead. In its tracks. The sickness just stopped. I was elated. For three days. Until I went to my next doctor’s appointment and they informed me that I was hereby restricted to bed. The same bed I’d spent most of my time in anyway, the one I was so happy to finally be out of at times other than my repeated daily meditations in front of the porcelain alter. I had to stay in it. Or else. Oh, and they wanted me to see them and a specialist an hour’s car ride away. Thrice weekly. Yes, thrice.

Thirteen weeks, twenty-six ultrasounds, and thirty-nine doctors’ appointments later I went into labor. It was, at the time, the biggest relief of my life. I just wanted the kid out. I was already exhausted by her. I already, to channel Tony Hayward, wanted my life back. She was born during an, as births go, uneventful labor and delivery. For a moment, through the horrific pain, there was a margin of hope that the pregnancy was the difficult one, not the child. But just for a moment.

She was not an easy baby, or toddler, or preschooler. And now that she’s going into Kindergarten things are, at times, only marginally better. She was allergic to everything; breast milk, formula; at the sight of a nipple of any kind she would projectile vomit across the room. No, really across the room. On the second night in the hospital the nurse on duty offered to take her to the nurse’s station so we could sleep. Sleep, I wanted some of it more than anything in the world so — guiltily, good mothers keep their babies with them — I agreed. I slept. And at four in the morning I awoke to the sound of my newborn choking on her own vomit. The nurse had brought her back and not told me. It would be weeks before I slept again. And just when I started to, her days and nights got mixed up.

She was only happy if she was being held, and only if she was being held at a specific angle. Most of the time, when she did sleep and after she outgrew the choking on her own vomit stage, she refused to sleep on her back so I would sit up and watch her sleep on her stomach in fear that SIDS could strike at any moment.

Throughout all of it I tried to maintain a life. I’d spent the nine months prior to her birth locked in a closet, in bed, in the bathroom and laid out on a doctor’s office table being poked and prodded like a cadaver in a disturbing, morbid zoo. I just wanted to live, but a woman can only do so much. I don’t remember when the depression started. In hindsight it was probably very shortly after her birth, but I didn’t see it.

By the latter part of her first year of life however, very dark days and nights had descended in my head. I knew I needed something; help, medication, a vacation, but I didn’t know how to ask for it. Today I could give you a dialogue fit for a textbook on how to seek help, but in that time my adult words had been swathed in a deep, black gauze and buried alive with my sanity. I did not have the words I needed. I did not have the sleep I needed, the time I needed, the resources I needed. I was completely helpless.

At night I would ball my body up as tight as it would go and cry. For hours. My husband took over nighttime feedings not only on “his turns” but on mine too. He tried to help me, but even he was lost.

I never hurt my baby. Lets get that out of the way up front. But I will not contend that the thought never crossed my mind. I will not say that I never thought, if I could just get her to shut-UP for five seconds, five minutes, five hours, maybe things would be different. I will not say that I was never afraid of myself; that I didn’t at times close every door between she and I and sink into a corner in a dark haze of irrationality.

Some nights, through the tears, I would tell my husband how I felt in the only words I had. “I’m scared.” I would confess. “I’m afraid of myself.” He’d rub my back, kiss my tears, do everything he could from the time he came home at night until the moment he was forced to return to work the next morning. He washed the dishes, did the laundry, swept the floors, made dinner, gave the girls their bathes, read them stories, put them to bed. He is a good man, a wholly awesome man but nothing prepares a man for living with a crazy, helpless woman. I’m still not sure he knew of the depths of my darkness, because I was never able to use my words to tell him.

By the time she was one year old I hated the entire world. And then her toddler temper tantrums started. Today I can comfortably say that the only thing that guaranteed those toddler years ending well, in the way they did, was the training of my doctor and the cosmic grace that was a prescheduled one year check up. Had I not already had my appointment scheduled and had my doctor not noticed that I was a giant ball of frustration, anger and emotion without me saying so at that appointment the help may never have been sought, never received. The outcome could have been much worse.

And therein lies my opposition to Zikmund-Fisher’s advice to tell children who inquire about the Akhter family tragedy one of the following:

• I don’t know. It’s hard to imagine how someone could do that, and it’s very upsetting to hear about.
• She must have been more upset than I or anyone I have ever met has ever been to do something like that. I have never even thought about doing anything even close to that, and I never would.
• Nobody really knows. However, I would guess that she had an illness in her mind that made her think that was an OK thing to do. I’m sure that if she had a healthy mind, she would not think it was OK.
• That is a really scary story, isn’t it? One of the reasons it’s on the news is that things like that are so unusual that it gets everyone’s attention. We are hearing all about this story, but let’s not forget that it’s something that’s really, really, really unlikely.

A major part of the reason I struggled for as long as I did is an illogical social taboo that surrounds this issue; one that is at the heart of every single one of the above explanations; that mothers who even think of feeling anything but warm, cozy, loving feelings towards their children are an extreme minority, a sick and demented segment of society whose thoughts and feelings cannot be fathomed by the mainstream, untouchables whose thoughts are to real humans, real mothers unthinkable. Reinforcing these taboos, confirming that the bias towards mothers who struggle is justifiable through the dismissal of feelings that, if every mother felt the freedom to be wholly honest, are likely much more common than we think only sets up our future generations to make the same mistakes, to take the same actions out of desperation that Saiqa Akhter took last week.

Our sons hear that good women do not have these thoughts, they grow up thinking it would not, could not happen to their wives. Our daughters hear these explanations and internalize the lesson that in order to be a good mother they may not have dark thoughts towards their children regardless of the circumstances in which they find themselves. Other mothers read this advice, this sentiment and feel ostracized, shunned, embarrassed for their own shortcomings; the thoughts they have thought, are thinking, are struggling with. We create an environment of denial, of lonely suffering and the cycle repeats.

So no, when or if my children ask me about this news story I will not subtly condemn Mrs. Akhter’s thoughts, her feelings. I will tell my daughters that, while few women feel the need to act as she did, many women struggle with motherhood. I will tell them that Mrs. Akhter didn’t get help in time, that perhaps her husband didn’t have the resources, the knowledge to identify with what his wife was going through, that perhaps Mrs. Akhter didn’t know how to ask for the help she needed. I will tell them that being a mother is sometimes hard and that sometimes people can’t handle it. I will explain to them that parenting requires a support network and, at times, an incredibly strong one. I will tell them that Mrs. Akhter may not have had that. And then I will calm their fears of something similar happening here by reassuring them that I have that support network. I will tell them that my husband, their father and I talk about these things. I will remind them that one of their aunts is regularly a parenting sound board for me. I will let them know that my best girlfriend and I regularly share openly what we are going through and support each other.

Above all I will use it as a lesson to teach them that even good people sometimes think unthinkable thoughts and that the important part is in knowing that unthinkable thoughts do not an unthinkable person make; that asking for help, telling people how you are feeling and acknowledging the struggle is the first step in conquering the mountain no matter how taboo it may seem in the culture we have been raised. And I truly hope other parents will do the same, because when it comes down to it, your kids are the husbands, the friends, the other mothers mine will parent alongside. They’re going to need all the help they can get.

Tagged as: Advice, blogher, Childhood, Children, Culture, Depression, Infants, kids, motherhood, Murder, parenting, Post Partum Depression, PPD, Saiqa Akhter, Social Issues, Society