You see all of my children were born into a circus just like sweet Dumbo, the baby elephant. Aren’t we all in some way? Certainly our world, our families and our own minds can mirror the variety of acts in a traditional circus meant to amuse, distract, educate and mystify. And sometimes, like Dumbo in his premiere performance turned homicide case, an act can go wrong. Mr. Medici’s circus is a perfect metaphor for my life with premenstrual dysphoric disorder (PMDD)and premenstrual exacerbation (PME) of diagnosed anxiety and depressive disorder.
It’s interesting that in the beginning I kept identifying with Dumbo, the baby elephant. I asked my youngest daughter (age 13) the next morning if there was a character she most identified with and she thoughtfully answered with a nervous giggle,
“Dumbo. All of us girls are Dumbo.”
All of my daughters struggle with something that makes them feel different and want to “hide” a part of their dormant greatness, not unlike Dumbo and his ears. I winced inside a little yet relished her intuitiveness. That means I’m more Jumbo at this point in my life: the protective elephant momma with baby Jumbo Jr. in utero, who looks longingly and hopefully out of the caged bar window at flocks of birds flying freely. I do have to admit - that part did completely sear itself into my heart as I thought how many times I’d felt imprisoned by my faults and yet hoped for so much more for my daughters. Jumbo had just been bought by Mr. Medici from India; yanked into salvaging his circus and about to give birth to Jumbo Jr, sure to be a crowd pleaser. As for myself, one of the acts I’d been yanked into, at a younger age than Jumbo, was anxiety and depression. Later, it would take the PMDD turn and that same anxiety and depression would get worse cyclically, along with the strictly premenstrual symptoms of bloating, extreme carb-load cravings, foggy brain, irritability, tension, sailor-mouth and rage (at its worst.) But the first intimations of just the anxiety/depression combo began at about age 9..
The combination of anxiety/depression had a strange paralyzing power over my adolescence. It felt like I was muted and keyed up all at the same time and I had a hard time, especially in social situations, just being myself. I was much better with the anxiety at home but I remember wondering what was happening to me one morning over my Eggo waffle breakfast as I wished I could disappear and not have to endure another day at middle-school. I was now 12. And I had not yet started my period.
My period. THAT was sure to be a great day! Wait -who says that?! I did. I really did. My mom had ordered some discreet, rectangular boxes from the Stayfree company for my sister and I and we had found them in the linen closet back when we were 10 and 11. They were sealed only to be unveiled, we presumed, when one of us started “to become a woman.” But this surely would not do! We both wanted to open them IMMEDIATELY upon discovery. And so we secretly did. It was a magical Pandora’s box full of teenage mystery. There were pads, liners and a booklet on everything we needed to know to make “the change” effortlessly. We read it aloud, forwards and backwards, and it seems we were actually performing the narrative booklet. This menstrual circus act seemed manageable and maybe even fun as the kit designers and copywriters really knew their stuff! I mean we were told we could even SWIM during our periods if we learned to use tampons! What made these kits even more fun was the fact that, after each “period tutorial session,” we carefully repacked the contents and placed them back in the linen closet AS IF THEY’D NEVER BEEN OPENED. It was a very clandestine operation and I don’t know how we contained ourselves. It’s a little ironic to me how much I longed for the day when I would join Mother Nature’s Club of purse-toting young women. Our older sister didn’t seem to enjoy her period much but that didn’t dissuade us. We were armed and prepared; and a good thing too, because as it turns out, nobody really likes to talk about the menstrual cycle.
Friends apparently passed me by. My younger sister passed me by. I thought for sure something was wrong with me but all the teen magazines swore that anytime between 12-16 was “normal.” So you can imagine the euphoria that was mine when a month before my 16th birthday I saw pink. It was slightly anticlimactic but I was so relieved – and prepared!
While I realized that my moods could vacillate and change as a teenager, I wasn’t really in tune to any cyclical pattern until I began wanting more interaction with boys. Then I would notice that there were times when I felt more myself and comfortable socializing and then there were other times when I was frighteningly UNcomfortable and was almost rude in my aloofness. It wasn’t that I wanted to be aloof. I would actually force myself to keep up my regular schedule and be social. What it did make me do was be extra hard on myself, extra sensitive to perceived rejection and judgment from peers, and go into protective and defensive mode. This all seemed par for the adolescent course since every teen feels like “nobody gets me”. At least I hoped it wasn’t just me. I just continued to force myself to be where I wanted to be and do the things I really wanted to do even though they often scared me to death. I was involved with my faith community and the youth group there. I attended dances, early-morning scripture study before school and weekly activities. In school I had a few good friends who enjoyed music as much as I did. Choir class was a place where I found refuge and re-centering. I tried out for the school musicals and got a solo singing part twice. These performance opportunities were just enough to uncomfortably stretch me but thankfully not too main a part where I would implode with anxiety.
College would bring another circus-ring-level of excitement and anxiety into my life. I attended a large university with tons of students from all over the United States and world where 80% of us shared the same Christian faith. That was an important factor for me because my spiritual relationship with God was an anchor to me; especially since I perceived my moods were often vacillating. It was comforting that even though my social-anxiety made me feel very different than others, my faith was something I had in common with most everybody there. I met someone right away whom I ended up having one of those “best friend/maybe boyfriend” relationships with. We were together almost everyday which was really new for me. It wasn’t long though that my moods would begin unraveling periodically. One day I would be all in and another day I’d be irritated and disgusted with him. I was quite confused and confusing. My second year I began dating someone else and we really seemed to click. Again, I would start second guessing him and myself. Though initially crazy about him, and he me, I’d suddenly get sad and forlorn about things. We would be on and off again a few times in the next year. Our first break up sent me into a tailspin. I got super depressed and it was the first time I would seek professional help. That’s when I got my first diagnosis of depression with anxiety, had a psychiatrist prescribe me Paxil (my first SSRI), did one-on-one counseling and also experienced group therapy. Group therapy was a revelation to me; to see the things other peers struggled with. But the Paxil really did seem to save my life, as did my strong faith that I was a divine being having a temporary earthly experience. This was temporary.
But let’s get to the good part. The BIG TOP performance of my circus life: motherhood. See I had always wanted to be educated, find love, get married and stay home and raise my kids. I figured there were always opportunities to be involved in the community, to hone my interests, serve others and develop my skills and hobbies, all while being there in my home for my family. I did find my love and he saw the good, the bad, and the ugly parts of my mood disorder because I actually withdrew from my SSRI while we dated (philosophically, I hated the idea of being on medication.) That’s how I knew he was the one. He was steady and true. I actually worked full time our first year of marriage and then enrolled in massage therapy evening school while working days. I had done a trial of regular birth control pills a year before, which is another story, that did not work out for my brain and sent me into a tailspin. Since marriage I’d been on a once every 3 months DepoProvera shot and it was wreaking its own havoc. Almost instantly I’d felt so depressed I wanted to melt into the earth. Somehow I still got up to go to work and school but looking back I really don’t know how. I couldn’t wait to get off of that. I did, after a year, and - SURPRISE- we became pregnant. With TWINS. Mood-wise, it was a ring of fire in the beginning of the pregnancy, a walk in the park in the middle trimester (I felt really good), and a tightrope walk towards the end.
But motherhood was where I really started to feel like a burgeoning freakish sideshow. I feel like a variety of factors contributed to what would become the most trying years of my PMDD and PME (premenstrual exacerbation of my coexisting depression/anxiety). These factors were the 3-ring circus of hormone changes (postpartum, nursing/weaning, menstrual cycles), sleep deprivation and special needs parenting that would intensely dominate my life for the next 16 years.
Please don’t read that and think “Why did you keep having children?” But I get it if you do.
I have had 3 pregnancies and 4 children. I have found that life’s greatest joys also accompany life’s greatest trials. Just like in my marriage relationship, I knew I had something special to give and to receive, despite being imperfect. Everyone has strengths and weaknesses. It is only in the worst parts of my dysphoria that my mind tells me differently; that I somehow have MANY more weaknesses than one should be allowed to have, especially when married and raising children. That dysphoria is an awful, shame-loving beast, who, like Mr. Medici in the beginning of Dumbo, sees everything wrong with the way Jumbo’s “acting out” has affected his bottom-line. Jumbo, the mad-elephant momma, is whipped, shamed, chained up, boxed up and supposedly better off going back where she came from. Things get even worse for her under Vandevere’s “care” where her life comes to be worth only what curious voyeurs will give to bask in her killer reputation as “Kali the Destroyer”- so beautiful yet so dangerous. They know nothing of her tenderness and protectiveness for her child. They don’t bother to ask “Why would such a gentle maternal giant go so rogue?” Instead you can read the public’s minds…
“Such a shame.” And shame is what keeps most women from seeking real help.
Unlike Jumbo, a.k.a. “Kali the Destroyer” in the remake of Dumbo, (a nod to the Hindu goddess of destruction in the fight for justice), who was chained and caged for viewers’ safety while on display at Nightmare Island, I used the tools of self-imposed isolation and a public mask of calm competence as much as I possibly could to spare myself and others. This is like what a psychotherapist equates to holding a giant beach ball under-water. Ever try that one for an extended period of time? I fortified the physiological “human captivity” of PMDD by letting the shame of my biological/mental weaknesses prevent me from relating to and getting support from others. For all I knew, I was alone. And a freak of womanly nature.
There is something in my American culture that rewards those who are able to “seamlessly” emerge out of oppression and handicap. There is something even more powerful in my religious subculture that rewards those, especially women (because we are, by our nurturing nature, blessed with so many divine gifts and attributes), who can suck it up and persist through all manner of persecution, trial and natural disaster. Notice those are all OUTWARD forces acting on a woman, who, if protected and shielded by her faith in God, should be able to come off unscathed and triumphant: a heroine for her offspring and posterity.
But PMDD and PME act from WITHIN. They use the very thing women celebrate- creative power- and I especially celebrated at the age of 15, and every time I conceived and carried a child, to shackle. Our feminine hormonal patterns, our reproductive powers, could somehow be turned on between 8-10% of cycling women, including me. My greatest strength became my greatest weakness! I could miraculously bring forth life but the lethargy, mood lability, and mental darkness up to 18 days of every 27-30 day cycle, and post-partum and post nursing would make it difficult to consistently nurture it, let alone my own life. How could this be?
For me the answers would come slowly and gradually, sometimes with 2 steps forward and 3 steps back. I have come to appreciate and acknowledge that it is, and has been, a lonely heroine’s journey. There is still so much to be learned about the forces that contribute to PMDD/PME. How much better it would be to have medical and scientific companions in this cause! I was fortunate to have one physician’s assistant actually validate my struggles with my own hormones. She was no expert but she was open and supportive and willing to systematically rule out any contributing factors such as insulin resistance (I did have that at this point) or thyroid imbalances ( I did not). She gave me my first “Monthly Calendar of Menstrual Symptoms” in 2001 at the age of 32. I had already been in “captivity” for at least 14 years. Many years later social media would introduce me to the Gia Allemand Foundation, which is now IAPMD (International Association of Premenstrual Disorders) and the brave and vulnerable women who serve and find support there. It would take the tragedy of Gia’s suicide during her luteal phase to propel a few women to organize, support and educate.
Like the movement to understand and advocate for the physical and mental health of elephants in captivity, the story of the PMDD Warrior has been one of first sympathy and then empathy. For years small advocacy groups, who had sympathy for these very intelligent and social animals being broken by harsh treatment to make them trainable and able to “perform” unnatural tricks and tasks in close contact with humans, spoke for those who could not speak for themselves. The elephants themselves only got concern and attention once there were human casualties, such as what occurs in the movie DUMBO: a trainer or village person being killed. What caused the animal to act out this way? From there, research was done on what the difference is between wild and captive elephants. Carol Buckley, who co-founded a 2,700 acre natural-habitat elephant sanctuary in Tennessee, says this about elephants:
They are the same animal, in captivity and the wild. The difference is in their responses to experiences. Many captive elephants have been systematically brutalized by humans and, as a result, are shells of themselves. They are like prisoners of war, knowing that their day-to-day existence relies on their captors. (https://blog.nationalgeographic.org/2013/02/07/life-for-captive-elephants/)
Yes! Like elephants in captivity, we women with PMDD/PME are still women but often end up feeling like shells of ourselves! We are beautiful and we are strong. We just have physiological differences in our responses to our own personal and hormonal experiences. Over the years, as we vacillate between our productive and unproductive days and weeks, this wears on our health, our self-esteem, our careers and our most important relationships.
Pretty soon, if legislative and social pressure continues, there will be no more elephants in circuses. Because now scientific research supports that it is unhealthy. And current ethics dictate that it is inhumane in a civil society. They will be freed, like the famous Ringling Bros. & Barnum and Bailey Circus elephants, after 146 years of their show, to proper sanctuaries, following the lead of 36 other countries (https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/05/wildlife-watch-ringling-circus-animal-welfare-photography/). I hope that similar concern and measures will be enacted to protect and treat women whose brains are vulnerable to their own hormones and other aggravating factors. Healthcare providers need to be educated and equipped to diagnose and offer helpful treatment to both younger and older women who show up in distress. Funding for more research must go to women’s mental and reproductive disorders. Women in distress need social support to keep their self-worth, jobs and families intact.
To truly understand why an elephant in captivity might become destructive you need to know something of elephants in the wild and what human captivity and harsh training practices (in other words, a provocative environment) does to one. This same scientific curiosity and humanitarian compassion should be extended to a woman with PMDD/PME before judgment is passed. In most cases, you will not see women like me with PMDD at our worst because we tend to self-isolate on our really bad days. But with support, curiosity and compassion from others and for ourselves we can see both our great humanity and our divine worth. Like Jumbo’s flock of free birds seen through her barred window, that is my great hope for myself and for our mothers, sisters and daughters. It is why I emotionally hugged my girls after that movie and why I will warrior on until the prison doors are opened- and we find sanctuary.
