Should I?

Then I got sick.

It was February? Maybe? Time slips and slides when mental illness sets in. In any case it was winter. I was lying on my side in the psych ward, facing the flat white wall. Tears leaking into my ears. I wouldn't say I was sad. Depression's not like sadness. More like death. Empty and silent and dull. Behind me, at the side of the bed, sat my mother and stepfather. My husband was sitting beside me on the bed.

"I can't," I whispered.

"What?" they said, leaning closer.

"I can't do it," I said. "We can't get the baby."

I was so sure, at that moment, that I was making the right decision. I believed, for that one life-changing instant, that I truly wasn't capable of raising a child, that any child would be better off without me as its mother. Lying there in a hospital bed, the idea of taking care of something so fragile as a child, when I couldn't even take care of myself, made my head spin. So I said no.

It was obvious: I wasn't up for that kind of responsibility. Wasn't reliable enough, was maybe too volatile to be trusted. Yes, maybe I had wanted it, but what about the best interest of the child? That day, I, like a whole lot of people, believed that mental illness really did disqualify me as a parent.

Now, I'm not so sure.

I have bipolar disorder. Bipolar is a mood disorder, a brain disease that, when uncontrolled, causes the patient to vacillate between manic and depressive episodes, with periods of stability in between. There are about 15 million adults in the United States with bipolar.

Bipolar has taken me on a wild and terrifying ride. For 20-odd years, my moods swung from uncontrolled manias that sometimes veered into psychosis to depressions that plummeted me into catatonia, the highs and lows cycling so rapidly I couldn't keep up. Like a great many people with mental illness, I resisted my diagnosis - who wants to believe they're mentally ill? - and with it resisted the medication that would make it manageable. And like about half of people with bipolar, I struggled with substance abuse for years. For someone with a mental illness, drinking and doing drugs is like pouring gas on an already smoldering fire.

My life for years was a rollercoaster - professional success, personal disaster, mania, depression, hospitalization after hospitalization. There is no question that, during those years, I should not have had children.

After running from the reality of my situation for far too long, losing nearly everything and everyone I cared about, trying six ways from Sunday to tell myself I could get a handle on it if I just pulled myself up by my bootstraps - I finally gave in and got the treatment I desperately needed.

And everything changed. I realized that, in fact, they weren't kidding - mental illness really is treatable. It's a chronic disease, like diabetes, and managing it takes effort, but it can be done - and millions of people do it every day. I got my illness under control by treating it aggressively with medication, therapies, changes to my lifestyle, and a host of little tricks of the trade that keep me stable, healthy, and highly functional.

This means that, in most ways, I've left behind the chaos of my earlier life and joined the ranks of "normal." People who manage their mental illness are all around you, and you probably don't know it, because they look and act just like you. They go to work, buy groceries, drink lattes, and have kids. That's what's funny - I imagine a whole lot of people would think I'd make a great mom, right up till the moment they learned I have a mental illness.

. . .

I recently wrote a memoir on living with bipolar disorder. I was signing books at a lecture. A woman came up to the table and, after saying all sorts of earnest things about how important it was to break down stigma, broaden understanding, and so forth, she suddenly gasped.

"Is that a wedding ring on your hand?" she asked. I looked down and indeed it was a wedding ring, so I said, "Yes."

"You're married?"

I said that I was.

"My God!" she said. "He must be an amazing man!"

Um? On and off, more or less.

"Well," she said, looking alarmed. "But you don't have children, do you? I mean, I would think you wouldn't want to pass on your genes."

I froze.

"Right," I said, and smiled, and signed her book, and she went away.

Apparently I hadn't quite made my point. Because after 45 minutes of going on about the facts that mental illness is highly treatable, that one can live and live well when one has it, and that my life as a mentally ill person is really quite average, she'd come away with: mentally ill people are so warped that it's a miracle anyone can stand being married to them, let alone allow them to inflict themselves on a baby.

The durability of the stigma surrounding mental illness is astounding. People still carry in their minds the image of the raving lunatic. The very fact that the question of whether mentally ill people should have children is a subject of debate points up a few assumptions that are wildly off base - that people with mental illness are all the same; that they're by definition unstable; and that people without mental illness are in a position to arbitrate the lives of people about whom they know precious little.

Mentally ill people exist on a wide spectrum - of severity of illness, of the extent to which it is controlled, of personality, of potential as parents. Some of us would be, and are, very good at parenting, some not so much. The decision to raise children is highly personal, and requires a clear understanding of who we are, what we're capable of, what we have to offer, and what we'll have to watch out for. That's true of anyone, mentally ill or not.

It's true that there are plenty of people with mental illness who just aren't equipped for child rearing. Not every mentally ill person manages their illness; some refuse the medication that would get it under control, some can't afford it or the insurance that would cover it, others have symptoms that resist treatment.

When people with uncontrolled mental illness have kids, those kids do feel the effects, and it's a serious struggle for both parent and child. But unless we want to skate dangerously close to the suggestion that those people should not be "allowed" to have children - a suggestion that leads ultimately to an argument for eugenics - "we" are not in a position to say that they can't have kids.

I would venture to say that many people start having children without deeply thinking it through, and without being particularly well-prepared. Who allows them to do this? Well, that's not really the question. We sigh and say, God, there should really be a test. But we're joking.

No one expects parents to be perfect. All parents have emotional lives, have flaws, have breaking points, have bad days, bad weeks, sometimes a bad year here and there. Parents work too much or lose their jobs. Parents without mental illness go through deep emotional struggles of their own, parents wish they'd never had kids, parents are occasionally terrible role models. Parents are human like anyone else.

And many people with mental illness - myself included - are as functional, and forgivably flawed, as the average parent. Yes, my bipolar is a significant facet of my day-to-day experience, but it doesn't stop me - doesn't stop me from working, loving, being part of a community and a family - and it would no more stop me from parenting well than diabetes would.

. . .

My father had severe depression, which wasn't treated until I was in my 20s. Growing up with it affected me. It was frightening to watch, but it wasn't nearly as important as the fact that he took me to baseball games, came to every soccer game and junior high musical, crowed over every A, instilled me with a powerhouse work ethic, showered me with books, told me I could be anything I wanted to be, and was always, always there.

The children we were planning to adopt didn't have that love in their life, and we wanted to give it to them. We wanted to read to them, and wipe their noses when they were sick, and let them draw on the walls, and sing them to sleep. There are millions of children all over the world who desperately need that kind of family, that safe place to be, that guidance, that enveloping love. And I decided, in a moment of radical fear and self-doubt, that I didn't have it to give.

I sometimes have this dream where I am holding a thing, and then it floats away, and I get this weird weightless ache in my arms. Then I wake up and listen to the silence. It is the noisy silence of the ghost of the 5-year-old I chose not to raise. Is anyone raising her?

You often hear people with mental illness who have children described as "selfish." There's the perception that someone like me would have kids only to serve my own needs. But maybe the decision I made was the selfish one. My arms are empty. And my burden is very light.

Marya Hornbacher is the author of three books, most recently "Madness: A Bipolar Life," now available in paperback.