Hasn’t Tyler Baltierra been through enough lately?
In case you haven’t been keeping score, he really, really has.
Things have been ridiculously rough for the past couple of months, as we’ve been seeing on Teen Mom OG and as he and Catelynn Lowell have been revealing on social media.
Last fall, he and Cate began trying for another baby, and she quickly became pregnant, but as we’ll see in next week’s episode, she had a miscarriage not long after they began announcing the good news to family.
We don’t know the exact timeline yet — we assume it’ll all become more clear as the season goes on — but it’s easy to imagine that the miscarriage led to her worsening depression.
In November, she made a statement about how she’d been thinking of various ways to kill herself, and afterwards she checked into a treatment center.
Tyler was extremely supportive of her decision, but just before all this happened, he sent his father, Butch, off to rehab for his lifelong struggles with addiction.
So all during that time, he was concerned about his father and his wife, he was dealing with all the emotions from the miscarriage, and he was also taking care of his and Cate’s daughter, Nova, by himself.
It can’t be easy for him right now.
And unfortunately it looks like some people are going out of their way to make things even harder.
OK, so Jenelle did an interview on a podcast last weekend with some people named Vince and Noel — this is the interview in which she admitted to doing drugs during her last pregnancy.
We’re not sure if they talked about Catelynn and Tyler during the podcast, but it looks like Noel made this post on Facebook last month:
As you can see, she’s making light of Cate’s depression, which simply is not cool, especially not now that Cate is having such a hard time with it.
Earlier this week, Tyler saw the screenshots of the post and tweeted them, writing that “This is the most ignorant, vile & insensitive thing I have ever seen. To mock my wife’s suicidal ideation & depression is just sickening to the core!”
He tagged Noel and the other people involved in the podcast and told them that “you’re part of the reason Mental Health has the stigma that it does.”
She defended herself by saying that she has depression herself, and that she uses that kind of humor to deal with it, which kind of makes sense.
But still, she doesn’t know Catelynn, and she was joking about her on social media. It’s understandable why Tyler was so upset.
After Tyler’s tweet, he and Noel had an exchange, and it seems like she deleted some of her tweets. Here’s a screenshot of part of one:
So that part where she wrote “Do you want to take responsibility for Cait’s mental health?”, that’s the part we’re going to talk about now.
She attached a shot of Tyler’s infamous comments about not wanting a “heifer for a wife,” which, yes, was obviously not his greatest moment.
And he responded with a lengthy statement of his own.
“I take full responsibility for what I say,” he began. “This conversation was constructively edited to appear more insensitive than it actually was. We have addressed this many times before, but I will explain it once again.”
Tyler said that during that conversation, Catelynn told him that “she doesn’t desire a ‘muscle headed tool’ because that’s not attractive to her & I responded.”
“We started a diet together,” he continued, “and asked to hold each other accountable to our commitments. We have been together for 12 years, so there isn’t too much we won’t say to each other.”
“Yes, I can be abrasive with my delivery. Yes, I can be ignorant with how my delivery impacts other people. Yes, I make mistakes. But I own up to them.”
But still, Tyler said, “to state that I am the cause of her mental health struggles is yet again, another very ignorant opinion.”
“Her mental health struggles derive from the chaotic and unstable upbringing we both endured. We are both actively working on those struggles.”
He finished by telling Noel that he understands she’s getting a lot of hate for her comments, “but attempting to play ‘tit for tat’ & scorekeeper with me is quite a pathetic approach to justify your insensitivity.”
It’s a pretty great statement, right?
And he’s definitely right — for anyone to try to say it’s his fault that Catelynn has depression is just completely ignorant and hurtful.
Good on him for standing up for himself, and for explaining that perhaps we don’t know the ins and outs of his marriage or Catelynn’s complex mental health problems.
It’s just sad that some people need that explanation.
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