I live in fear that my daughter will inherit my depression
She was curled up on the flfloor beside my bed, playing with the dog so she didn’t have to look me in the eye when she asked. “You and Daddy have depression. Am I going to have depression, too?”
My daughter is 11, all hormones and aching joints. Her body and her whole outlook on life is in flflux. She’s begun to express fears of things that until recently she seemed not to know existed. Death. Terrorism. Climate change. A discussion of the polar ice caps ended in tears. Talk of the presidency sometimes sends her to her room, the door slamming behind her. Are they signs of depression, I asked my psychiatrist, or signs of growing up?
What I wanted to ask was “Have I doomed my child to repeating my life? Was I selfifish to have a child, knowing I could pass this along? Is it OK to have kids, knowing the risk?”
Genetic testing before pregnancy has become increasingly popular. For less than $200, companies such as 23andMe offffer at least a broad-brush look at DNA to guide would-be parents as they debate conception vs. adoption.
Hi. My name is Janet, and I’m a recovering perfectionist.
Yes, my high standards have taken me to great places: I was the salutatorian of my high school class, I graduated from Palm Beach Atlantic University with honors and as their Female Athlete of the Year, and 99 percent of my high school students who have taken an advanced English course with me received college credit for it. (Yes, it kills me that 1 percent did not.)
My high standards have taken me to dark places as well: I developed an eating disorder in college, and I stayed far too long in a marriage our counselor described as “dead for decades.”
I’m not a full-blown perfectionist, or I would have been valedictorian, right? But I do have perfectionistic tendencies — mainly, striving for flflawlessness, being overly critical of myself, and caring too much about others’ criticisms of me.
Perfectionism is a negative trait posing as a positive one — and it’s taken me decades to get a handle on it.
We should be fifilled with joy, not stress and anxiety. We should let our high standards positively motivate and push us to succeed, not let our imperfections and failures infect us or defifine who we are.
Throughout my life, I’ve witnessed good women who have been needlessly unhappy because of their perfectionistic, controlling ways. I knew I had these tendencies myself and have been fascinated with this issue since I was a teenager.
In my 30s and 40s, I read scads of self-help books, and in my late 40s, I worked with a therapist
continued on Some fertility doctors offffffffffffer preimplantation genetic testing during the in vitro fertilization process, screening the lab embryo for diseases and genetic abnormalities so parents can decide whether to proceed with implantation and pregnancy.
But what about conditions that don’t show up on genetic tests at
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