by Peter Dalton

Created on: May 06, 2009   Last Updated: May 07, 2009

Bipomoms

Mothers with bi-polar disorder can be or not be good parents. Just as those that haven't been diagnosed with some malady du-jour. I am not making light of any ones suffering, just our endless need to categorize and treat with pharmaceuticals anything that we don't feel is "normal". I am not saying that some with this affliction cannot be a danger to themselves and their children. Yet that can be found throughout the general population as well, I just don't feel we can lump them all together and say, you have this chemical imbalance, thou shall not breed. Who judges and who would enforce this edict. As we all know it is not an exact science. A rich and affluent bipomom would just be eccentric, a middle class female would be a medicated bipomom, while a financial challenged woman would just be a rotten mom and locked in jail for child neglect. No med or slick mouthpiece, and we all become that child's parent via child services. Unfortunately the genetic legacy that is passed on to the child is the chemical Karma we all pass along when we combine our DNA with another's and cast it out into the world. Good future customers for the pharmaceutical companies provided they are lucky enough to be born into a family that has at least one functioning parent and the bipomoms escapades haven't been so damaging that there is no money left to buy drugs. But on the whole moms and dads just muddle along doing the best they can given the tools they have available. Chemical imbalance or not.

However I always get concerned when we try to make a judgment and generalize whether or not people with chemical imbalances, or what ever the new theory is about this behavior pattern, can be "good" parents. Now if it is judged that bipomom's are unfit mothers by the majoritus tyrannous (fake Latin inserted for scholarly effect), just what do any of us intend to do about it. I recall a failed Austrian painter and his buddies had some pretty straight forward idea's on the subject and implemented them with zeal. Generalized judgments and zealous beliefs often lead to such misguided programs. See world history if you have any doubts about this. Now bad things happen, people get hurt, and it is a sad fact of life. Sure we want to avoid such calamities and hind sight always makes us feel there was something else we could have done. But we can't. We can only invest our love and support rather than try to pass judgment and fix things and people proactively. You can never be sure. Maybe

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