Holding On Until Wednesday: A Mother’s Story

By the time I showed up at my first – and only – therapy appointment in London, I was already extremely disconnected from myself. Filling in the form that asked me to rate feelings of depression felt impossible – how could I assign a number between one and five to something that felt so unquantifiable?

I had become so versed at masking and I was so inexperienced with therapy that I ended up treating the session like a job interview, as if the purpose was to make a good first impression. When the therapist concluded, “It sounds like you just had some baby blues and you’ve now come out of the haze! You’re doing great!” – I lapped it up. Of course I did – I desperately wanted to be okay, to be told I was okay, to be sure that everything would be okay.

At the same time, I left the office feeling uneasy and untethered.

Mental health was not something discussed in my family, despite my mother’s many psychological crises. Other than the family counseling sessions I had insisted on back when I had “run away” from home, where we did not dare discuss my mother’s – or anyone’s – mental state, therapy was not on the table. It might as well have not existed. Skepticism of therapy is cultural, to be sure — it’s not a part of most Asian families’ experiences.

In a particularly apt moment on Mindy Kaling’s “Never Have I Ever,” a Black therapist says to an Indian mom, “I didn’t think you were someone who believed in therapy.” The Indian mom replies, “I don’t. It’s for white people.”

Beyond the personal and familial barriers of mental health illiteracy and unfamiliarity, even if therapy had been something my family wanted to pursue, it’s unlikely that we would have been able to find what we needed. My father would have been navigating a foreign country’s approach to mental health — one that is specifically not designed for us. This experience is all too common: An alarming number of people who may wish to seek therapy simply can’t. There’s a dual-faceted inaccessibility: Logistics — like cost or language barriers — and a lack of cultural competency. It’s clear that our mental health is interwoven with our identities, and when therapists are unaware of those nuances, the care can be inadequate. (An American Psychological Association Report reveals that a staggering 86% of therapists are white.)

Not only that: Asking for help in a therapeutic setting can lead to unjust criminalization, especially for mothers of the global majority. There are so many people who need help and so few places to safely get it.

All things considered, I have been one of the lucky ones in being able to benefit from therapy to address my upbringing and postpartum mental health. Being born in the West, fluent in English, and financially relatively secure, I have had the privilege to access care – however imperfect it may have been – as I navigate years of trauma and motherhood.

It would be more than a year before I sought mental health support again. By then, we had moved to New York City and I had been a mother for 18 months. What I was feeling could no longer be categorized as baby blues, I was sure of that much.

The panic attacks were so terrifying and suffocating that I could no longer repress, deny, or pretend. I couldn’t sit still during a routine dental cleaning. I cried to my acupuncturist when she left me alone to relax in the treatment room, shouting out that I was scared. My nervous system wouldn’t allow me to sleep so I often ended up pacing or cleaning the apartment in the middle of the night.

Finally, I told my husband, “I think I need help.”

I called around to a few therapists and I made an appointment to see the first one who happened to return my call. My only criteria was immediacy. I ended up seeing him for nearly eight years. There was something about his stoic, somewhat stern demeanor that was beneficial to me: I think it was in some ways culturally familiar, a digression from the “I see your heart” or “holding space” language that dominates therapy and speaks primarily to whiteness.

As the weeks passed, it was intrinsically grounding to learn that I just had to survive and manage symptoms from one session to the next. I might have a panic attack on a Friday but if I could just hold on for a few days until my next session on Wednesday, I would be okay.

It’s the thought of the endlessness and aloneness of suffering that feels unbearable.

I was never suicidal. I’m not sure if the reason is because I had witnessed my mom attempt to take her life so many times and I had experienced the ripple effect of terror that caused us as family. I could never do that to my children and to my husband. But living through panic attacks and under the oppressive fear of panic attacks felt truly torturous.

I thought about the absurdity of the phrase “life’s too short.” Too short? No, a life of suffering feels too long.

Therapy helped me dissect and understand my psyche – past and present – and how I might be able to shape my future state of mind. I learned to separate myself as the thinker of thoughts and the feeler of feelings rather than as the thoughts and the feelings themselves. I learned about the timelessness of trauma – that the brain does not always recognize that the traumatic thing is not happening right now, and so it sends off warning signals by way of fight, flight, or freeze. I learned to start trusting myself as the narrator of my own life.

None of this is easy. Especially because we exist in relationships not only with ourselves but with our partners, families, and communities. We all have to navigate our collective reality, which is a living, changing thing. Mothers, especially, are constantly multi-tasking, compartmentalizing, and learning on the job.

The work may start on your therapist’s couch, but you must continue it in your own way. It helped me to think about nurturing my mental health the same way I try to show up for my friends: over a cup of coffee, offering my thoughtful attention with love, reserving judgment and criticism.

You can read more of Leah Kim’s book “Mom, Unfiltered: Maternal Mental Health and Finding Freedom Through Motherhood” by purchasing it online or from your local bookstore or online.