Tabitha Soren Suffering from Postpartum Depression, Headstrong Children

Poor Tabitha Soren. First her former colleagues at MTV get laid off; next, her husband, Michael Lewis, tells the world that she’s an emotional mess. According to her husband’s online essay in Slate today, the flame-haired former VJ isn’t faring so well after the birth of her third child:

One afternoon I find my wife standing in the kitchen preparing, once again, to cry. The pills they gave her [Ed: Huh? What pills?] instantly silenced the brain screams. She’s gone from being terrified that she’s losing her mind and that everyone she loves is going to soon die to being, occasionally, sad. I’ll come across her getting dressed or sterilizing baby bottles, standing as still as a lady in a Vermeer painting, with tears in her eyes. There’s no point in asking what’s the matter—you might as well ask a flat tire why it doesn’t have air.

In addition to bits like that one, Lewis uses the occasion of his essay to confess just how badly behaved his two daughters, Quinn and Dixie, really are:

Just four weeks after the birth of my son, both of my daughters are living, in effect, outside the law. They act as if they have nothing to lose, and, materially speaking, they don’t. They’ve behaved so badly, for so long, that everything that might be taken away from them has been taken away: TV, candy, desserts, play dates, special dinners, special breakfasts, special outings with parents. They are like a pair of convicts in a Soviet gulag with nothing more than they need to survive—and still they continue to subvert the authorities.

You go, girls! Maybe it’s just us, but we think insolence and stubbornness should be encouraged in young females, because it’s only a matter of time before the insecurities over looks, smarts, social status and boys will kick in, insecurities that will only deepen once puberty hits and then hover around like a bad drug habit well into one’s third decade. And then when that’s all well and done with of course, there’s marriage, pregnancy, postpartum depression, and husbands who compare you to a flat tire. “Living outside the law” is the least a young lass should do.