Peaches Geldof, motherhood and how we still don’t get it

I spent the morning reading about Peaches Geldoff. Strangely, I’m having a hard time processing this one. She’s a pseudo-celebrity made famous by birthright. I really didn’t know much about her apart from the occasional tabloid headline. This doesn’t feel like a deep personal loss for me and yet I can’t shake this sense of profound sadness.

It’s always sad when someone so young and full of potential dies, of course. But her two babies are the real gut wrenchers. It’s the stuff of nightmares, after all, leaving your children motherless. Since becoming a parent nearly eight years ago, I can barely stomach the news some days. It’s physically painful to hear about a baby falling out of a window, a child being run over or a young mother losing her life.  Of course parents don’t have a monopoly on grief and you don’t have to be a parent to feel the weight of those kinds of loss. But for me, personally, these kinds of stories became much more difficult to bear when I became a mother. There’s an intense visceral response that takes my breath away.

So I thought that was probably it. A young mother with two sons under two-years-of age loses her life and it’s just the normal punch in the gut from fate and justice that I was feeling.

Then I read this New York magazine story. It talks about how Peaches seemed to have been in the clear after settling down and having her babies. She traded in the party life for the family bed and became a parenting writer (don’t we all) and big attachment parenting advocate. She seemed happy. She was a mother.

Note that we still don’t know how she died. Reports so far claim there was no suicide note and no narcotics on the premises. The official word is that it’s being treated as a sudden and unexpected natural death. There will be an autopsy and a toxicology report that will eventually provide answers. Some gossip sites are suggesting an eating disorder might be the root cause. She could have had an undiagnosed illness. We just don’t know.

Still, my hunch is that when an otherwise seemingly healthy 25-year-old dies, something isn’t right. But because she was a mother she was supposed to have it all together. Because she was a mother who quite clearly loved her children and was devoted to them, she must be okay. She looks so happy on Instagram!

Except babies aren’t miracle cures for deep-seated problems. Having two babies so incredibly close together at a relatively young age, like Peaches did, is crazy hard. There’s the revolutionary identity change, for one, when you’re thrust from party girl to being the one person your small baby depends on around the clock. The lack of sleep, lack of time to yourself, hormones, your changing body, postpartum mood disorders and the sheer monotony of it all can crack even the most well-grounded among us. The crying alone, my friends. That bloody crying.

And we know this already, right? Don’t we? I feel like we’ve been talking about postpartum depression for 20 years. We know that having a newborn is hard. And yet the mainstream image of a motherhood is still this safe and quiet, serene state where nothing is more fulfilling than wiping your baby’s ass and folding laundry for ten hours a week.

It’s not, okay. Motherhood as whole, but especially the first couple years with multiple children very close together, is messy. It’s dirty. It will break a woman. I’ve genuinely repressed at least six months worth of memories from those early days. This is kind of what I was getting at with my light-hearted post about Snooki the other day. Everybody was freaking out when she was pregnant the first time because she seemed so unstable. Now that she has a one-and-a-half-year-old and is pregnant with another though, no big deal, right? She’s a mother already. She can do this.

Again, I don’t know how or why Peaches died. It’s probably none of my business. I don’t know if she was troubled in any way or not. But I do know that the fact of her motherhood is no guarantee of anything.

It’s also a damn good reminder for us all not to abandon our own loved ones to drown in a sea of dirty receiving blankets and cold coffee. Even if they do look happy on Instagram.