Ordinary Insanity Quotes

“And while I miss my carefree self, my fear has also brought a new vision. I have seen in my own gradual shift from fearlessness to extreme fear that to be scared is to care, sometimes too much, sometimes to the point of sickness, but to have no fear is to be carefree, untethered to the fates and concerns of others, unable in some cases even to see them beyond one's assumptions.”
― Sarah Menkedick, Ordinary Insanity: Fear and the Silent Crisis of Motherhood in America

“Mothering, radically defined, is the glad gifting of one’s talents, ideas, intellect, and creativity to the universe without recompense.”
― Sarah Menkedick, Ordinary Insanity: Fear and the Silent Crisis of Motherhood in America

“Now, I do not know who I am. I have never not known with more conviction in my life. I find myself writing in my journal each morning, "I don't know. I don't know. I don't know." How much of what I have lost or given up has been to the disease of my anxiety, how much to the nature of motherhood, how much to the simple fact of time? I can't begin to work through these questions until I first accept the loss of the mother I thought I was or could be.

I believe, I hope, that on the other side of this loss is a love that I have found in connecting with other women. These women have, in the words of Joan Halifax, found "the gold of compassion in the dark stone of suffering." I have never loved women or needed them the way I have since becoming a mother.”
― Sarah Menkedick, Ordinary Insanity: Fear and the Silent Crisis of Motherhood in America

“The navigation of reproductive risk rarely challenges existing social structures and power dynamics.”
― Sarah Menkedick, Ordinary Insanity: Fear and the Silent Crisis of Motherhood in America

“Everything is fine on paper, just as it should be. We should be having the happiest times of our lives. Yet we squint, visor our hands to our foreheads to try to make out the path, and all we see is shadow.”
― Sarah Menkedick, Ordinary Insanity: Fear and the Silent Crisis of Motherhood in America

“The body knows the looming of disaster or is convinced it knows in a fundamental way that has nothing to do with statistics or facts or conscious awareness or so-called reality. The body carries within it the constant possibility of betrayal, from within or without.”
― Sarah Menkedick, Ordinary Insanity: Fear and the Silent Crisis of Motherhood in America

“In fact the "choices" women face in becoming mothers - how or whether or not to balance career and motherhood; how to negotiate family life; how to afford family life and where; how to find any time for community or self in the midst of all of this - often don't feel like choices at all but like very imperfect compromises in the throes of a system that tells women to be thankful.”
― Sarah Menkedick, Ordinary Insanity: Fear and the Silent Crisis of Motherhood in America

“In the United States, Roberts declares, we have a negative view of reproductive liberty: that is, we recognize it as the right to be free from state interference in "private" decisions, individual choices. We don't see it as a positive liberty: one that obliges the state to provide the resources necessary to prevent procreation or to promote healthy mothering. In this way, we erase social context and government and political responsibility, imbuing "choice" with an almost mystical power, as if it were a wand a woman could wave.”
― Sarah Menkedick, Ordinary Insanity: Fear and the Silent Crisis of Motherhood in America

“Most women feel isolated, with few policies or governmental programs to support motherhood (particularly working motherhood), and few if any systems in place to address maternal mental health. "We've lost any sense of power around our bodies," Joseph told me. We often talk about choice as if it is the be-all and end-all, as if it is something possessed by certain women and not others, as if it is a simple solution, when all of our choices exist within a warped system that denies both maternal power and maternal vulnerability. "Reproductive freeodom," Roberts writes, "is a matter of reproductive justice, not individual choice.”
― Sarah Menkedick, Ordinary Insanity: Fear and the Silent Crisis of Motherhood in America

“Paula Nicholson, a psychologist who has studied women's transition to motherhood, makes the case that it is taboo to mourn in the postpartum context, though motherhood can be many women's first experience of grief. Whereas death or divorce or other life changes usually involve a culturally and socially sanctioned period of mourning, Nicholson argues that mothers are not allowed to experience loss, and if they do, they are pathologized. 'So strong is the taboo,' she writes, 'that women themselves frequently fail to admit their sense of loss in a conscious way.' Motherhood, the ultimate "happy event", Nicholson declares, seems antithetical to loss. And yet Nicholson lists a whole host of losses inherent to having a child: loss of autonomy, identity, work, time, friends, relationship patterns, sexuality, health, comfort. Each woman may experience any one or several of these. Nicholson makes the somewhat radical claim that "some degree of postpartum depression should be considered the rule rather than the exception. It is also potentially a healthy, grieving reaction to loss.' Postpartum depression might be the only ritual American mothers have to express their grief.”
― Sarah Menkedick, Ordinary Insanity: Fear and the Silent Crisis of Motherhood in America

“The remaking of the self that mothers experience- the struggles of overcoming bordeom, fatigue, irritation; of being persistently present; of trying to survive a love that can feel like an ocean one can't swim- is not of great concern to a world focused on having. So many fall back on a system of rewards, products, and achievements that fits into the framework of success in which they've operated for most of their lives: this is the "Mommy Olympics," as de Marneffe calls it. Or they can resort to cliches, which mask the complexities of individual experience and squash it into a quote to be hung above the dining room table or posted on Facebook. There is no way to articulate and venerate being in a society so focused on having. One of the ways, which we have mostly lost, would be ritual. In a void where few rituals, stories, and symbols are available to mothers, women have responded by conjuring a shadow universe of fear and darkness and loss. The immense passion and confusing energy that motherhood generates gets channeled into a never-ending series of disaster scenarios necessitating vigilant prevention. The wide-open and terrifying potential for being narrows into a relentless pursuit of security.”
― Sarah Menkedick, Ordinary Insanity: Fear and the Silent Crisis of Motherhood in America

“At the same time, the deeper I get with my OCD and treatment, the more I realize that it is also a part of me. It is the part of me I try so hard to repress, the part of me I don't believe is worthy of love, the part of me I judge in other people. It has to be fought, but to some extent, it also has to be placated. I also have to say, I'm not as smart as I thought I was, I'm not as in control, I better not judge these people because whoo-ee look at me. It can't simply be exorcised. It illuminates the brittleness and arrogance of my own precious assumptions about myself: that I am smart, that I am in control because I am smart, that I can do everything just so, that I can do it better. But it also attacks the parts of myself I want to keep: the gritty traveler, the artist who bucks conventions, the bold experimenter. Fine, it says, my thoughts are random, my thoughts are constructed, my thoughts are only thoughts, but then so are yours: all of it is a fantasy, dark and light.”
― Sarah Menkedick, Ordinary Insanity: Fear and the Silent Crisis of Motherhood in America

“Throughout history, white women have chosen racial solidarity with white men over gender solidarity with women of color in an attempt to gain access to the fruits of capitalist triumph. An alternative to that erroneous path is to choose solidarity with other women, other mothers in particular: to seek the resonances between our lives so that we may begin to repair the gaps. Erich Fromm wrote 'Important and radical changes are necessary if love is to become a social and not highly individualistic, marginal phenomenon.' I asked Erin Spahr of the Perinatal Mood Disorders clinic at Johns Hopkins what her strategies were for low-income women of color versus upper-middle-class white women. She responded that in all cases, she tried to validate the woman's experience. She tried to provide a sense of safety, to help the woman discover her own fears o that she could be present emotionally for her child. She listened. This is a form of love- a space between people, for confessions and hopes and flaws, and for the seed of solidarity to germinate.”
― Sarah Menkedick, Ordinary Insanity: Fear and the Silent Crisis of Motherhood in America

“That Sunday night of Elena's third birthday, I wept beside her in bed. For her, but more, I believe, for myself: for a resilience I never knew I had, and that I believe all mothers possess, however they choose to express it. We are not soft, docile icons, mute and passive virgins: we are fucking fierce. Motherhood requires a tremendous bravery that I never recognized or celebrated before I was forced to come into it, shaking and stunned. It leads women to march, to protest, to fight, to enact change, to persevere at great risk to themselves, to challenge the very foundation of society.
After the placenta had been buried, we set the rock atop it, and we all walked back to the house. Elena jumped on a mini trampoline, my niece went to recover from all the overqrought midlife emotion on the couch, my parents made lunch. I washed the blood from my hands, thinking about the oak, the rock, the placenta. Buried there is the truth of what it feels like to be so susceptible and broken-open, and also to say: I can do this. I will do this. I contain this, thirty-two miles of capillaries, a new tree of life. Mutter, madre, mater, material, moeder, modder: the mud, the material, the making at the heart of everything.”
― Sarah Menkedick, Ordinary Insanity: Fear and the Silent Crisis of Motherhood in America

“It seems that the first obligation mothering places upon a woman,' writes psychoanalyst Jana Malamud Smith, 'is the demand not just that she attempt to keep the child alive, but that she accept the fact of living closely with death.' American mothers tend to respond to this inherent fact by going into overdrive on the American belief that death can be fought with righteous fervor: with organics, sustainably made wooden blocks painted with non-toxic vegetable dyes, a 4-1 preschool teacher ration, bathtub spout covers. What is lost, thinking always of risk, aiming always for zero risk, is not measurable. There are no statistics, no charts, no metrics. There is a gecko in a cage with a heat lamp for a sun. There is a dog who has never been let off leash. There is no rain in the mouth. There is no solitude, no wandering to the edge of the woods at dusk. There is no unwashed fruit eaten with dirty hands. There is no mess. There is no staking of oneself, one's small life, against the hugeness of the world. There is no sharing a meal with a stranger. Jane Hirshfield wrote, 'As water given sugar sweetens, given salt grows salty/ We become our choices.' The greatest deception of the obsessive pursuit of zero risk is that we have no choice. We choose, often under immense pressure. And when we choose imagined safety every single time, we gradually give up what makes life worth living.”
― Sarah Menkedick, Ordinary Insanity: Fear and the Silent Crisis of Motherhood in America

“Many mothers don't want to appear vulnerable, both our of fear of being diminished, infantilized, or threatened with unwanted interventions, and because they know they are almost solely in charge of keeping a new human being alive. Who the hell has time for vulnerability? It is a profound testament to the strength and resilience of women that so many of them suffer from debilitating fear, sadness, and confusion and yet they soldier on working, taking care of their families, getting the myriad everyday chores done. The fact that they're asked to do so, to carry and bear alone not only the child but the chemical and biological shifts, the solitude, the loss, the grief, the complex questions of their own transformation, reveals a society that values mothers only as passive, docile, keeping their motherhood safely tucked in the sentimental cultural space reserved for it. The idea is not to study the mother, to listen to her, to recognize her in her fullness, to explore her becoming, but to keep her contained: prevent her from causing harm, encourage her to follow the rules. Anxiety is an excellent weapon for containing women; it needs only to be gently stoked in the context of pregnancy and women will weaponize it against themselves.”
― Sarah Menkedick, Ordinary Insanity: Fear and the Silent Crisis of Motherhood in America

“I used to think my biggest vulnerability was actually being vulnerable.” She’d shut vulnerability down. But now, she said, “Lo and behold, I’m learning that my vulnerability is my greatest strength.”
― Sarah Menkedick, Ordinary Insanity: Fear and the Silent Crisis of Motherhood in America

“For what is at stake is fundamentally a woman’s femininity: just as the white Victorian woman unhappy with a life of petticoats and socializing might have had her uterus injected with tea in an attempt to bring her in line with the ideal female of her time, the twenty-first-century mother who is struggling to stay steeped in ever-patient love and fun might need psychiatric internment to accept proper intensive motherhood. Thurer summed up the progression of the twentieth century nicely when she wrote, “[Experts] have invented a motherhood that excluded the experience of the mother.”
― Sarah Menkedick, Ordinary Insanity: Fear and the Silent Crisis of Motherhood in America

“Motherhood is both the dominant weapon of patriarchy and the chink in its armor, by dint of a single fact: men cannot be mothers. The edifice of oppression that boxes mothers into a stifling, isolated, fear-ridden niche, warning them to stay calm and gentle and quiet, offering syrupy promises of fulfillment, is constructed upon men’s desire to contain what they cannot possess.”
― Sarah Menkedick, Ordinary Insanity: Fear and the Silent Crisis of Motherhood in America

“The anthropologist Mary Douglas has suggested that in order to understand how risk works in the contemporary Western world, one has to substitute the word sin for risk. The concept of sin was used to homogenize Christian cultures, to keep potential rebels and iconoclasts in line, and to separate the pure from the soiled. Now, Douglas argues, risk operates in much the same way. Risk offers a secular cosmology that delineates appropriate behavior, maintains moral order, and prescribes a precise set of values. In the United States, these values include the sanctity of the child, the perfectibility of the child, the sacrificial nature of motherhood, and the responsibility of the individual for maintaining his or her own “wellness.” Risk is a way of policing and reinforcing these values. We chart the lines of social purity and transgression with the chalk of risk, and when disaster strikes, we blame the individual for not hewing closely enough to them.”
― Sarah Menkedick, Ordinary Insanity: Fear and the Silent Crisis of Motherhood in America

“Maybe it changed the wiring in my brain,” she acknowledged, and so the self that had saved her was now inextricably wound up with the self that had nearly destroyed her.”
― Sarah Menkedick, Ordinary Insanity: Fear and the Silent Crisis of Motherhood in America

“She was fierce and pragmatic, and every time I talked to her I felt tenderness and healing at all the cracked places, as if she made them glow.”
― Sarah Menkedick, Ordinary Insanity: Fear and the Silent Crisis of Motherhood in America