Rona's Story

An excerpt from Beyond Crazy: Journeys Through Mental Illness by Julia Nunes and Scott Simmie published by McClelland & Stewart Ltd., The Canadian Publishers. Reprinted by permission of the publisher 2002. The full story appears in the above mentioned book.

Rona Maynard first set foot in a psychotherapist’s office when she was nine years old. She was in the third grade and, despite her obvious intelligence, had fared poorly on an aptitude test, leading a teacher to conclude that young Rona must be an underachiever. Soon, she and her mother were making weekly trips to a clinic, Rona [was] coaxed with toys into play therapy while Fredelle Maynard [her mother] sat in session with the doctor.

Decades later, Rona would return to psychotherapy with more fruitful results. But this was small-town New Hampshire in the 1950s, a time she refers to wryly as “the Dark Ages” of therapy. “My mother . . . talked in circles, by the sound of things, because the fact that her husband was an alcoholic was never addressed. And I played with a very sweet-natured woman who occasionally asked me questions about the toys. The only benefit of this therapy was that I got some undivided attention from my mother, who had to drive me to the clinic and drive me back every week.”

Maynard shares this childhood memory while seated in her large corner office on the eighth floor of a sprawling, ultra-modern office / retail complex in Toronto’s downtown core. From here, the label of underachiever looks patently absurd. She oversees an editorial staff of twenty-four people who produce, each month, the largest-circulation women’s magazine in Canada.

It’s early summer now, a busy time at Chatelaine. Women of all ages, sizes, and styles of dress – jeans, formal suits, one unlikely black-on-black skirt-over-leggings combo – are working together on the all-important September issue. Maynard herself is dressed loosely in black with a splash of colour from her purple-painted toenails. Her hair is pixie-short and her build is tiny as tiny can be. What stands out most about her, though, is her utter composure. At 53, she has poise down to an enviable art form.

Raised in an über-achieving household, Rona and younger sister Joyce were both precocious writers, winning prizes and publishing in national magazines while still in high school. No less was expected of them. Their Canadian-born mother, Fredelle, had a Ph.D. from Radcliffe – this in the 1950s! – and wrote books later in life. Father Max was an English professor who had once been an apprentice of Emily Carr; his landscape paintings can still be found in Canadian art galleries.

“My parents were passionate in their love of the arts and ideas; they were creative people,” Maynard says. “They were formidably articulate.”

Formidable, too, at keeping painful secrets.

“The alcoholic’s family is always a nest of secrets and deceptions,” Fredelle wrote in her second memoir, The Tree of Life. “Ours was perhaps worse than most.”
Joyce later wrote in her second memoir, At Home in the World, “There are two stories: the way life really is in our family, and the way we make it look to the world.” (Joyce is, yes, that Joyce Maynard, who wrote a cover story for the New York Times Magazine at eighteen, attracting the attentions of fifty-three-old J. D. Salinger and later the outrage of the literary community when she wrote about their tortured relationship.)

The two sisters responded, and struggled, in different ways. Joyce craved attention, and in her teens developed eating disorders. Rona, “remote, almost regal,” as Fredelle would describe her, retreated to her books, her guitar, and her collection of mournful Joan Baez records. From the age of nine she lived with her own unnamed affliction: depression. “The whole household revolved around my father’s needs, and I was a very, very quiet child,” she says. “I internalized everything.”

Maynard now believes her father’s alcoholism was a form of self-medication; his primary problem, she’s quite sure, was a lifelong undiagnosed depression. Young Rona’s moods would likewise go undiagnosed for many years.

The depression was never so severe that life could not carry on around it. At seventeen, Maynard left home for university; a year later she moved to Toronto; on her twenty-first birthday, she married; and at twenty-two she became a mother. The recurring dips in mood were more like a low-grade fever that leaves you, if not bedridden, then weakened and at times incapable of enjoying anything.

The worst of it came, as is often the case for women, with new motherhood. “I had a crashing depression after Ben was born,” she says. “And I didn’t know what was wrong with me, why I was feeling this way. Nobody I knew had a baby, so I didn’t have anybody I could talk to about this. My friends were bumming around Europe, very carefree, [or] going to graduate school.” Maynard, meanwhile, was spending her days alone with her baby in a tiny apartment while her husband was at work.

Those first months of motherhood – the sleepless nights, the isolation, and all the incumbent frustrations – would induce the worst depression of her life. Unfortunately, in the 1970s, postpartum depression was not widely recognized; Maynard had no idea why she was struggling. Much of what she was feeling, however, was textbook postpartum depression. “I’m told by people who saw me with Ben that I could be very tender and playful and loving, and I do remember a little of that. But I’m afraid that a lot of what I remember is just not really being there emotionally, just wishing he would go away. One day, when he was very tiny, just newborn, I remember thinking, ‘I’d like to throw my baby out the window.’ I wouldn’t have actually done it, but I was so unhappy. . . . It terrified me, but you couldn’t talk about those things. I thought I must be a pretty hard-hearted, unloving, incompetent mother to have such a thing even cross my mind.”

When Ben was three, Maynard took a full-time editing job, the start of a lifelong career in magazines. Her mood improved, but not for long. “I hid behind a mask of competence,” she has written, “meeting every deadline and making fettuccine from scratch.” Keeping her depression hidden would leave her physically depleted. Colleagues would later say they remembered her most often with a coffee cup in one hand and an Aspirin bottle in the other.

For many years, it had never occurred to her to seek help for her dips in mood. “I thought I was very tough and strong,” she says. “I don’t need anybody; I’m very independent. Nobody can help me anyway.” But in her mid-thirties, Rona Maynard finally took action. Working at home as a freelance writer, “it all started to close in again. I began thinking that I didn’t have a reason to live.”

She picked up the phone, called a women’s clinic, asked to see a therapist. “I decided I would have to get a life.” The clinic connected her with a psychiatrist she had once interviewed for a story. “I didn’t like her at all. But she was very effective,” Maynard says bluntly. “I felt that she was going to raise the bar for me. She had high expectations for me emotionally, and I didn’t for myself . . . I needed someone to convince me that I could aspire to more.”

Maynard’s mood improved rapidly with talk therapy, and without any prescribed medications. For the first time in her life, she turned to exercise, hitting the running track until her knees gave out. Her energy levels and self-esteem soared. She’s since switched to gentler pursuits: walking, yoga, posture work.

Through therapy, Maynard has learned how to take better care of herself, both physically and emotionally. Now, when she feels an occasional dark mood start to settle in, she knows how to stop it in its tracks. She still takes short “refresher courses” of therapy, targeting a specific goal or issue, whenever she feels it is necessary.

The therapy, the exercise, the long process of making for herself “a life worth living” has imbued in Maynard a new sense of her place in the world. And this is what pleases her most. “To me there is something miraculous about waking up in the morning and looking forward to my day,” she says, “and seeing challenges as things to overcome and learn from, not things that could crush me.”

Today, Rona Maynard is not remotely interested in the sometimes grim, sometimes angry details of her past depression. She’s been healthy for more than fifteen years, and what does interest her still is the path out, those individually constructed mazes we must find our own way through. “Depression is exceedingly boring,” she declares. “You have to find a way to deal with it, and that’s what’s interesting.”

And that’s why the woman who for decades kept secrets can today be found behind the podium at the venerable Ontario Club, speaking to a tony crowd at a fundraiser for a psychiatric research foundation. (She appears at any number of such worthy events.) Not so long ago, the well-heeled ladies and men in tailored suits would not have dared discuss such an unseemly topic at lunch. But here is Rona Maynard, editor of Chatelaine, framed by a swath of red velvet curtains, leaning into a microphone as she describes with good humour and fine detail the “terrible taint” of depression. The crowd, sipping coffee, is rapt. She tells them she has decided she hates waste. And that not talking about those years would constitute a waste.

So she talks. And she writes, hoping others will see in her story the possibilities that exist within their own.

“I know that only good can come of having more open discussions about what depression does to people’s lives. Not just the life of the sufferer, but the lives of the people around that person. I’ve seen this as an employer. I’ve seen it as a friend.”

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