Having a Baby Fixed My Mental Health

Motherbaby bliss is extraordinary, but is it sanity?

LG Campbell is a renegade botanist, midwife, mom, and proud rank and file member of the Radical Moms Union. We discovered her issuing poetic declarations and arguments in our comment section and we’re excited to share her singular voice with you.

Just a few years ago I missed my father’s funeral because I was on an involuntary psych hold. 

Today, I am, by and large, happy. In between now and then I had a full term pregnancy and a baby.

Doesn’t motherhood drive you crazy? 

Is happiness mental health?

How did I even get here? 

One of my earliest memories is watching my father walk into my birthday party carrying a yellow smiley face balloon. Remembering the moment, the texture of his smile, the rare vulnerability of it, still makes my heart feel heavy. I went into a little crisis, frozen in my fluffy lavender dress.  

What was the point of pretending to be this happy? 

Why implicate this plastic object, this landfill bound specter, in our tragic farce?  The task of feigning an appropriate reaction overwhelmed me. Panic rose in my throat. I wanted to cry, but wondered if the image of a little girl crying in her birthday dress would make this scene worse. 

I thought of this moment a couple of months ago, at my baby’s first birthday party. My mother in law walked in holding a smiley balloon identical to the one my father had brought two decades before. She was beaming, sly with pride about the decorations she had acquired and generally enthusiastic about the occasion of her grandson’s birthday. Wow, I thought. How fortunate that someone has made a balloon that captures exactly how I feel about my baby’s birthday. I will show him the balloon, in the hopes of impressing upon him some small fraction of the happiness he has brought me.

There is no question that my kid makes me really fucking happy. But is this happiness what qualifies as mental health? 

I sometimes wonder if a particular formula company uses “mental health” as a euphemism for “immediate feeling of comfort and gratification”.  American culture, or specifically anyone who has a product they would like to sell to you, often conflates the two.

I think we all share the intuition that mental health is more than immediate joy or relief. Mental health, like physical health, is something robust. It is an ongoing pattern of resiliency, groundedness, and self control. It is the absence of illness (suffering or delusion), but also the presence of wellness. But that brings up the question: What is that wellness? In our minds eye, is the vision of wellness, a woman? Or even a mother?