The Altar of Innocence, my first poetry collection, was published ten years ago. I think it took me about four years to write all the poems, and then I had at least four writers I trusted read the manuscript and make suggestions. But I knew from the start of that project what my cover design would be: one of the images from my mother’s dress design collection.
I think that the cover image speaks perfectly to both who my mother was and how we dealt with depression as a family. My mother was beautiful, reserved, and very ladylike–all qualities prized by society during her formative years in the 20s and 30s. Her dress is completely sheer, rendering the woman as vulnerable, while her lack of hands seems to symbolize her lack of power and agency. Next to the woman, under the title is a photo of me on my first day of elementary school. My hair was curled and my uniform and book bag were both brand new. In our own ways, both Mom and I were innocents caught in society’s web of unwritten rules. Mom was confined to a strict gender role and expected to handle any challenge the world could throw at a mother of four, and I was the dutiful oldest daughter, responsible, sensible, and docile–a quality my father always praised. Yet despite our compliance to the gender rules of the 60s, Mom, my family, and I were caught in a trap of shame–the shame of suffering from depression.
When I was growing up, we never uttered the word depression–we simply told people our mother was sick and needed to take naps. I remember Mom’s friends whispering about “those poor Bracken children” when we showed up at the swimming pool without Mom. I remember the confused looks on my friends’ faces when I explained why Mom put the telephone on a pillow while she took a nap and why the house was so dark when we got home from school. I remember Dad admonishing us not to talk about our mother’s “illness”. And how all of those things blanketed my family with shame.
I remember vowing as a teenager that I would never be like my mother. I was strong, I could handle life, and I could tough it out. Until I, too, felt the dark blanket of depression descend over me in early 1993. Like so many other times when I endured depression, my symptoms were physical rather than emotional. It was so unacceptable in my family to be emotionally upset that I internalized all of my anguish. This time, the pain was a searing migraine headache that came out of nowhere. Only later did I experience any emotional symptoms–telling myself Of course you feel down. you’ve had a daily headache for a year. Between 1993 and 2000, I would suffer the full range of symptoms that my mother had lived with–sadness, anxiety, apathy, and despair. No drugs or hospitalizations or ECT offered me any long-term relief. So there I was–trapped by emotional and physical pain–just like my mother.
I use The Altar of Innocence to tell the interwoven stories of my experience as a child growing up with a mother who never seemed to conquer her depression and my fierce struggle as an adult to find my way out of emotional and physical anguish. In sharing our stories, I promised myself to be completely honest about my experiences. My hope was to show all of my readers that suffering through depression was nothing to be ashamed of. And most of all for my mother, that none of her pain was her fault.
