"My mom," I answered, "She's been depressed since before I was born."
"I see," she replies. "That's common for daughters to have struggles with depression, if they grew up with a depressed mom."
My mother learned depression from her mother, too, whose depression was explained by the hardships of a teenager pregnancy and a husband that wasn't quite ready for marriage. My mother's depression was explained by the loss of her firstborn to preeclampsia. She would dream of him throughout her life, at various stages of his unlived life, and had massive anxiety attacks when my firstborn, also a son, had the same due date as his forever-newborn uncle.
Therapists tried to explain my depression and anxiety on my parents' divorce and then later on my own divorce, but I never really thought that was the case. I learned depression from my mother and inherited anxiety from my dad, who, having successfully managed his illness in his 30s, kept promising me things would get better, and then, apologizing for such an inheritance.
Closest to my heart is to not create a fourth generation with chronic mental illness. In my mind, I have a list of depression lessons I learned from my mother:
1. Spending hours during the day in bed
2. Staying home, all the time
3. No home-cooked meals
4. Domineering boyfriends
5. Few memories of time together
I craft my motherhood around not teaching those depression lessons to my sons. I spend almost no time in my room while they are home. Anytime in bed is spent as cuddling or relaxing time, together.
I take them to the science museum, to the park playground, to the apartment's swimming pool, to the library for the summer reading program. We attend church every Sunday. Every summer and spring break, we travel by airplane to my family's home in North Carolina, giving them more air time than most adults.
I cook them a meal from scratch every night, so regularly that they both have a long list of their favorite meals. Although my mom would cook most nights, I can't name a single meal I ask for her to cook for me on my trips home. She usually makes macaroni and cheese with hotdogs anyways.
I don't date after my divorce from their father. I tried to -- even saw one man in particular for a few months -- but ultimately decided I was better by myself as a mom. I didn't need a partner to raise the boys, who have a father-figure in their own father, so any man who would be worth changing my situation would have to be so different from my mom's bullish boyfriends that he probably doesn't exist.
I do homework with them, I need a book to them before bedtime, I watch movies on the couch with them, I play video games on the Playstation with them, I race them around the playground and tickle them on the living room floor. All these things create memories, none of which I have with my own mom, who was too depressed to read or play or tickle.
But it comes with a price, because I am still a depressed mom. And depressed people can't easily act not depressed all the time.
While my depression stays at a sustainable level, my anxiety struggles under the strain. I spend whole days in the tear-enduring state of panic, for no disternable reason, except that it simple is.
Every time I feel that I need a nap on a Sunday afternoon, every time I lose my patience and yell at the boys, every time I play a game on my phone instead of playing with them, I feel so immensely huilty. I know that I need to be forgiving to myself, but was that what my mom said to herself, day after day, when she stayed out of my childhood memories?