unholy Q corrupt grief; grievous corruption 060504 ... ovenbird Once, a long time ago, she told me the story of what happened when her fourth baby was born. They kept trying for a boy. It was so important to them that they have a boy and after three girls they had nearly given up. Though thank goodness for the girls, in the end. She was wrong, she admitted, to think that a boy was necessary. But her fourth child was a boy, and he was what they had been waiting for, and that’s exactly when the devil comes to you, you know, when you’re finally holding the thing you’ve been waiting for. The devil finds his way into the world when you think you have everything you’ve ever dreamed of. He feeds on joy turned to despair. And so, as she was holding her newborn son, the devil began to speak to her. He told her to kill the child. When she was out in the yard with a chainsaw cutting back hedges, he told her to kill him. She would sit outside her baby’s room, slumped onto the floor, crying, wondering if the devil could make her do such a thing, terrified that she would hurt the boy she loved so much and had prayed for for so long. What torment to hold so much love while feeling you could be made an instrument of its end. She checked on him over and over again, to ensure that he was safe, that she hadn’t, somehow in a dream, harmed him. And she prayed. She prayed every day to resist the devil and his evil machinations. She knew this was the greatest test of her faith. The baby grew. And the devil’s voice became fainter until she could no longer hear it at all. In the throes of my own postpartum mental collapse I suddenly understood something. Psychosis. What she experienced was postpartum psychosis, but it was undiagnosed and untreated, and she spent the rest of her life believing that the devil had urged her to kill her child. She carried that until the day she died. The guilt and fear and trauma. I knew, at least, that the terrifying thoughts in my head were conjured by my own misfiring brain. Intrusive thoughts. That’s what the psychiatrist told me. But knowing their clinical name didn’t save me. I had to wage my own war against them, finding a way to send them back to the hell they came from. Would it have mattered if I called them messages from Satan? Either way I was at the mercy of their brutal urgings. And I prayed too, when everything felt hopeless. I prayed to die in the night and I prayed to disappear and I prayed for sleep and I prayed that, somehow, I could be the mother my baby deserved. The devil found me, and then, as he had before, he left. He left me broken, but alive. And I wish I could travel back in time to tell her it wasn’t her fault, and that she should have received care beyond sprinkles of holy water and the dark confines of a confessional. We all deserve so much more than we are given. We risk our lives to be mothers. No one sees that, how we’re on our knees, willing to die so our children can live, willing to live though our souls have withered, willing to go to war with the devil, knowing we might lose, and not knowing how much it will cost to win. 260522 what's it to you? who go blather from