By late afternoon, I’d been checked into the psychiatric ward. My admission records, which I have since read, reflect that I asked for the daffodils. I stopped talking altogether for the first few days, when I realized I’d been deposited someplace from which I could neither escape nor be with Dawn. For the first week or so, whether the product of drugs they gave me or the state in which they’d admitted me, I was like a bear in hibernation. Un-bearlike, I was wakened to eat, but I had no appetite. Trays were brought to my room but removed after being almost untouched for hours.
I dreamt. I don’t know if bears dream during the winter, but I dreamt of Dawn, always that I was losing her to some peril. She stood on a boulder overhanging the river and lost her balance and I couldn’t get to her in time. The walls of our little house started to crumble in an earthquake, and I couldn’t reach her on her bed. I must have cried out during one of these dreams because I have a vague memory of a nurse bringing me up to a sitting position, stroking my hand, her other arm around my shoulder, telling me in soothing tones that it was only a dream. I remember the physical comfort of easing into her arm, as if I were small again and she were my mother. But the next day, I could not even tell which nurse had rescued me.
After a time they induced me to get up for meals and join the other inmates in the cafeteria. A custodian held my elbow as I shuffled into the dining area. I could feel in the muscles of his arm and in the cadence of his steps that he was impatient with me, but I didn’t care. From all my time asleep, I felt dizzy when I first got up, and my own muscles must have atrophied. The cafeteria was a not unpleasant yellow hue, I remember that, and I was not the only slow one. There were many shufflers among us, and the food line moved at a torpid pace. It didn’t matter; I wasn’t impatient. I was the farthest thing from impatient. I noticed that there were other inmates, but I couldn’t describe even one of them. We didn’t look at one another’s faces, and we didn’t talk. Each of us served his or her own sentence.
At some point I became aware of the pill bearers, a retinue of ever-changing attendants who brought me some medication, one or more pills of varying colors and shapes in a tiny paper cup. With one hand the pill bearer handed me the paper cup and then the water cup from the other hand once I took the pills. I made the acquaintance of only one of them, a black woman with the lilting accent of Jamaica who, after giving me my pills, exclaimed that it had been over a week with no shower. She promised to return and give me one. To get clean, I needed to leave my room and go next door, where there was a shared shower, always locked. This remarkable woman – Radiance was her name – returned with a large towel. Supporting me by holding me under both shoulders, since my leg muscles had become useless in my prolonged idleness, she walked me to the shower room, unlocked it, and explained to me that a shower might help me to feel better (her common sense itself refreshing). She seated me on a bench while she turned on the shower and waited for it to reach a good temperature. Then she seated me on a plastic stool inside the shower stall after unstringing my hospital gown. She even asked if I’d like her to wash my hair, and as she massaged my itchy scalp I felt more human than I had since my arrival. Her touch was at the same time vigorous and gentle, and my nakedness meant nothing to her, or so it seemed, because I was indifferent to it. She came back often after that, taking me to the shower and telling me about her own children as she walked, washed and dried me. She is the only attendant I remember with any clarity.
Radiance embodied her name -- she had a broad, dark face with a huge smile of extraordinarily white teeth, and bulging eyes that emanated humanity. She was the only pill bearer who told me what she was giving me. I vaguely knew at the time that they tried me on different medications. Some made me sleepier; others made me nauseous. One day the color or shape of the pill would change, but no one except Radiance told me what she or he was giving me. Here’s your Abilify, she said.
“Abilify?” I asked. Even in my debilitated condition, I thought ‘Abilify’ signaled improvement. I wanted to be abilified. It made me expect instant improvement on swallowing it. Radiance must have discerned that, for my review of my records reveals that they tried Abilify only in the beginning, and that afterward I received Paxil. So she must have intentionally given me the wrong information, just to encourage me. I hope her supervisor never finds out.
I know now that it was some weeks before they even noticed that I had a severely hypothyroid condition; had they picked this up in the initial blood tests, I might have been spared the menu of heavy antidepressants they imposed on me.
Once I began a course of thyroid medication, each new day brought some tiny measure of improvement. I became an expert on reading these small signs. I could appreciate the leafing out of the maple trees outside my room, from buds to furls of tiny leaves, to full, new-green leaves. I developed the energy to dress myself rather than survive each day in the tie-on hospital gowns. I began to want to walk, to venture outside, even though this required advance arrangement for an attendant to accompany me. At first, I was surprisingly weak and didn’t mind the attendant’s hand on the back waistband of my jeans. Best of all, I developed an appetite. Meals created a pleasant rhythm to my day and sufficient diversion. I was in the fourth week before I’d recovered energy to feel the need for more activity. An attendant would take me to morning and afternoon crafts classes, where we cut and pasted illustrations from magazines onto cardboard and wove colored yarn and popsicle sticks into star-shaped ornaments for room decorations.
I was well into the second week before Patty and Doug brought Dawn to see me. Then the pattern of my days wove around Wednesdays at two and Sundays at one, when Dawn came to spend an hour with me. I would count the days until the next visit; I would wash my hair in the morning of a visit, create a drawing for her and center my day around her as my highlight. It was almost enough to know that the pattern would repeat. Mondays were tolerable knowing that Wednesday ensued. On the days I did not see her, I needed some variation on the slow pattern of the place; even the hour with the psychiatrist on alternate days created some structure to relieve the tedium. Patty brought me two books: The Power of Positive Thinking (which I managed to misplace within hours since it epitomized Patty’s admonitory nature) and The Color Purple (which – she said this herself – she bought because she knew purple was my favorite color). I consumed it in a day and a half, as if I had never read it before. In the library I found a Scrabble game and began to play both sides of it, trading seats with each move. I tried to train myself to remember the ‘other’ player’s tray of letters, but that required more memory than I possessed. The games tended to be low-scoring on both sides, a product of my drugged and underused mind.
In that rehab center I developed a passivity I didn’t recognize before as part of me, as well as a habit of silence, speaking only when it was necessary, in my psychiatric sessions. My speech became slower too, and after I returned to normal life, it remained slower than it had been before – so slow that I perceived some people regarded me as subnormal.
It’s no wonder that even today it is difficult for me to imagine myself as an authority on anything, however trivial or commonplace. Patty only intensified my doubts.
4
I used to be grateful to Patty every single day. When Dawn was first born, I lay in the hospital terrified that I wouldn’t even know how to hold or feed her. Dr. Lockhart came in and showed me how to swathe her, to wrap her so tightly that she looked like a little mummy. It made a newborn feel secure, he told me. When I did it, the blanket unwound in a minute. Patty told me it didn’t matter. All that mattered was to keep her close. Which is what I wanted most of all. Dawn lay next to me every single night that first year.
Patty and Doug took good care of her while I was in the hospital and then the rehab center. But when I wanted to take Dawn back home with me, the trouble began.
“When you’re ready, she’ll come back home to you,” Patty reassured me, when I signed the pa
pers giving her what I thought was temporary legal guardianship, while I was hospitalized.
I don’t know how many times she told me that since then. For the first year after I’d been out, I think I heard it almost every week. Patty allowed me to visit her home whenever I wanted, and to pick up Dawn every Friday for the weekend, returning her on Sunday after an early supper.
Four months into that routine, when I brought Dawn back to her home after my weekend with her, Dawn clung to my leg as I was about to walk out the door. “No,” she whined. I caught the wince on Patty’s face just before I knelt down to reassure Dawn that I would be back soon.
It was that small clutch on my leg that gave me my first ounce of courage.
“Patty, I think it’s time.” I looked up at her while I knelt in front of Dawn, caressing her back and running my fingers through her curls.
Patty’s face had NO all over it. “We’ll talk during the week.”
I stood up. I’m taller than Patty by almost two inches, and this time it felt good. But I didn’t want to have this conversation in front of Dawn. “Let me put her to bed.” I carried Dawn down the hall to the bedroom she shared with Ian and turned on the light. Patty followed.
“Where are your PJs, honey?” Dawn pointed to the dresser behind me. Patty opened the drawer and flung them onto the bed before withdrawing to the doorway, where she took up a stance with her arms crossed in front of her.
As I undressed my girl, she rested her head on my shoulder. “Toes,” she insisted when I pulled off her socks. I lifted her onto the bed and nibbled her big toes, while she giggled, and then I tucked them under the cover. “Bridge book,” she wheedled as she nestled onto her side, facing me.
“Do you have…?” I started to ask Patty, but she was already moving to get my book.
Patty handed it to me abruptly and left the room. “I am a bridge,” I began. “Every day I feel lots of little feet on my back, like a massage. I help the children walk to school in the morning and back home in the afternoon.” Dawn fell asleep before I had finished the story, but I kept reading until the end. I sat there for a while afterward, wondering if Dawn had created this little performance. She isn’t usually easy to put to bed, or quick to fall asleep.
I found Patty in the kitchen, taking dinner dishes out of the dishwasher and putting them away.
“I think it’s time for her to come back,” I said as gently as I could. “You’ve been so generous….”
“Karen, I did what needed to be done. You don’t have to butter me up. But are you sure you’re ready for taking this on full-time? I don’t want to have to do this all over again if …”
“It won’t happen again.” She threw me a skeptical look. “I’m stronger and healthy and I know what mothering takes now. I didn’t before.”
“It was more than that.”
“You want a letter from my doctor? I thought you knew me better than that.”
“I do, Karen; that’s part of why I’m…” A glass slipped from her hand and broke on the floor. She pushed me aside to get to the broom closet.
“Let me help.”
“No! Don’t touch anything,” she yelled at me.
“What’s…”
“Just leave. Now. I can’t talk to you now.”
On the way home, I marveled at Dawn’s complicity in my effort to bring her home. She was definitely ready. I began to wonder if Patty needed her too, that she wasn’t just protecting her from my supposed frailty. For what did Patty need her? She already had two children she loved. Why did she need mine too?
I called Patty early the next afternoon, when I thought Ian would be napping and Sandra still at school. She answered on the fourth ring, with a wary hello, seeing my number on her cell.
“Patty, can we talk about this? I think it’s time for Dawn to come home and you apparently don’t. Why don’t you tell me what you’re worried about? I want to put your mind at rest. You and Doug have been so wonderful – you rescued Dawn when I couldn’t take care of her. I’ll never forget that. But now I can and want to take care of her myself.”
I heard a stifled sigh, and dishes clinking in the background, but no words for a long time.
“Karen, how do I know you’re not going to go off the deep end again? I worry for her.”
I waited to answer until I could speak really calmly. “You don’t know, and I don’t either. But are we going to live the rest of our lives as if I’m going to ‘go off the deep end’ the next day? I don’t live that way and I hope you don’t either.” I almost added that she’d raise a fearful child if she did, but I bit my tongue. “Would it make you feel better to talk to my therapist?”
“Let me think about it. I want to talk to Doug.”
“Okay; talk to Doug.” I trusted him. After I hung up, I wanted to call him myself. But that would only aggravate Patty.
I called her again on Thursday, the day before I was to pick up Dawn again. “What did Doug say?”
“Karen, is that all you can think about? You don’t even know what’s going on around here. My whole family is down with the flu.”
“I’m sorry. Is there anything I can do? Should I take Dawn and Ian for the weekend? Would that help? Can I bring you anything from the store?”
“No. Dawn has a fever and shouldn’t go out. I went out this morning for groceries.”
“How high is her fever? Why didn’t you tell me?” As soon as the words were out, I knew I had violated our dad’s rule of asking one too many questions.
“A little over a hundred.” Her words turned cold. “Why didn’t you call?”
“Is she awake now? Can I talk to her?”
“She’s resting.”
“Why don’t you check and see if she wants to talk to me?”
“Karen, she’s sick. I want to let her rest.”
“Okay, Patty, you let her rest. I’ll come by in a couple of hours to pick her up.”
“I don’t think you should.”
“Patty, she’s my daughter. Unless she’s at death’s door, I can take care of her at my house this weekend. It’ll give you a break.”
“I don’t need a break!” she shrieked and hung up the phone.
When I arrived at four as usual (though on a Thursday instead of Friday), Doug appeared at the door in his sweats and showed me in.
“I’m sorry you are all sick. How bad is it?”
“Not so bad medically, but I feel achy all over and the kids are whimpering and we all have runny noses. I feel like shit, actually.” He smiled ruefully. That he could feel so sick and still smile at me made me grateful all over again that he was my brother-in-law.
“How long have you all been down?”
“Dawn came down first, on Tuesday, then Ian and Patty, and Sandra and I just today. Dawn’s actually getting better, doesn’t have a fever any more.”
He led me down the hall to her room. She was sitting at the foot end of her bed, dressed, her jacket next to her. “Mommy,” she said weakly. “Up.” Ian lay in the bed next to her.
“Hi, Aunty Karen.”
“Hi back; I’m sorry you’re all sick.”
“I’ll pick you up, sweetie.” As I bent down to kiss her, I could hear her stuffy breathing. I put her limp arms into the jacket sleeves, zipped the jacket and lifted her.
“Ian, I hope you get all better real soon.” He waved at me weakly.
I turned to say goodbye to Doug, but he had left the room. Patty was nowhere to be seen. I walked down the hall toward the front door, thinking I would see him or Patty in the living room or kitchen, but no one appeared.
I called out goodbye into the empty spaces. Maybe it was just because everyone was sick, but I had never left their home before without someone saying goodbye.
Dawn fell asleep in the car within a few minutes, her head drooped to the side in her car seat an
d snot bubbling out her nose. At least it was loose and clear. She slept, snoring, all the way home. As I started to unstrap her from the car seat, she awoke and reached up for me to carry her. She laid her head on my shoulder, her body limp. I nuzzled her, told her I’d try to help her feel better soon.
“Bafroom,” she whispered, as soon as we got inside.
“Let’s use the one inside,” I told her. “I’ll carry you.”
“No. I want the outhouse. Look for bats.” Sometimes we watched for bats swooping around outside. I carried her out and opened the door. As soon as she sat down, she started to pee. Usually, she giggled at the sound of her pee spilling so far down, unlike the toilets at Patty’s house. Tonight she had no energy for giggling. I even had to wipe her.
“I’m cold,” she complained as soon as we got inside. I felt her forehead. “You have a fever, honey. Let me take your temperature while I make you dinner.” I put the thermometer under her tongue and counted out loud to one hundred while she sat still and waited. Meanwhile, I heated macaroni and cheese on the stove; it was what she wanted the first night she was with me, every week.
The mercury line stuck at one hundred and two. I put a blanket around her and set her at the table. One little arm emerged from the blanket, picked up a few macaroni and put them into her mouth.
“Fork,” I reminded her. She picked it up listlessly and started halfheartedly eating.
“Can’t,” she said after a few mouthfuls. “It hurts my throat.”
“How ’bout if I heat some milk and honey?”
When it was warm, I tasted it to make sure it wouldn’t burn her. When I put it in front of her, she looked at me balefully, her eyes like dull marbles. When I lifted the glass and put it to her lips, she smiled. She wanted me to feed her. She took little audible gulps and winced at each swallow. I felt the sides of her throat under her ears and sensed they might be swelling.
Raising Dawn Page 3