In a New Year's Day post titled "The Struggle Is Real," actress and blogger Eva Amurri Martino, daughter of Susan Sarandon, shared some deeply personal news on her blog, Happily Eva After, regarding a planned break from blogging in the coming weeks.
The mother of two described her son Major's devastating head injury that occurred in November. The then-5-month-old was dropped on his head onto a hardwood floor by a night nurse, who fell asleep while holding him, resulting in a skull fracture and bleeding on his brain. After days of emergency treatment and testing, Martino (who also mentioned her "irrational" phobia of hospitals) writes that there was no permanent damage and that her son has been healing well since.
"Further MRIs showed no brain damage, and we were discharged by experts in pediatrics and neurology with as excellent of a prognosis as we could have ever hoped for," she said. "We were absolutely, divinely lucky that day."
Despite Major's positive prognosis, Martino believes she is suffering from a self-diagnosed form of post-traumatic stress disorder, which she thinks is also related to (an also self-diagnosed) postpartum depression associated both with the birth of her son and an accident suffered by her husband, Kyle Martino, when he fell from the couple's roof three weeks after Major was born.
"I’m going to focus on working with a therapist who can help me find better coping mechanisms than what I can come up with on my own, and who will hopefully help me understand a way forward," she wrote.
In an Instagram post on Tuesday, Martino wrote that she was touched by the kind responses, but that she also has faced judgment in the wake of her post.
"Thank you from the bottom of my heart to everyone who has reached out with words of comfort or to share their own stories the past 24 hours," wrote Martino on Instagram. "I'd like to say one thing, which is that Parenthood is not a competition," she said. "Nobody gets an award at the end of all of it for doing it the best or most perfect way. All that matters is how we make our children feel, how we feel about them, and how we feel about ourselves as parents."
She continued, "To those who have expressed judgment, cruelty, and criticism of me, my choices, or my fragility during this time — I'm not going to justify myself to you. But I sincerely wish that 2017 brings you enough self love and confidence that you no longer feel the need to tear down another person during their darkest moment. Peace, please."
