By the time Fiona was two months old, I was, to put it kindly, a basket case. Well-meaning friends talked about the “baby blues” and predicted I would “snap out of it” as soon as I found my bootstraps and pulled on them. Nevertheless, I sank further into the squid-ink darkness of my depression. My chronically optimistic mother, who was by then looking after both children, agreed with my husband, for the first and last time, that I needed help. When I became incoherent—about the same time dehydration and weight loss gave me the skin of a ninety-year-old and the body of a twelve-year-old—my father, a doctor, quietly had me admitted to hospital under the care of a psychiatrist who was also a family friend. From her accent and her interest in my relationship with my father, I assumed she was a Freudian, but by that point, I was beyond caring who looked after me and where. I would have accepted treatment from Satan himself as long as he gave me something to help me sleep. Preferably all day. Preferably somewhere far away from my crying baby.
I ended up in the local psychiatric facility, and I got my wish—round-the-clock drugs and no baby. I missed my son, but there were routines to learn and group therapy sessions to attend. I learned that you didn’t have to get dressed, but that self-loathing increases exponentially with every day that you don’t get out of your pyjamas. I learned the secret of pouring tea from cheap metal teapots, a skill that remains useful to this day. I learned the fine art of lining up for meds. I learned which patients were harmless and which were likely to pounce on you as you came out of the shower. I learned that hospital dietitians can be capricious and cruel. I learned that clothes are important even in a mental hospital. I learned that if you reveal something right away in group therapy sessions, it encourages others to speak and you can then be silent. I learned that everybody, from the anorexics to the schizophrenics, from the chronic alcoholics to the guy whose wife had just left him for another woman, thought there was something really wrong with a woman who couldn’t look after her children.
For the first few days, I lay in bed, sleeping or weeping, waiting for the next round of medication or a visit from my husband, who vacillated between bewilderment and rage. He spoke often about how difficult his life was. The psychiatrist informed my family that I was suffering from an “agitated depression.” She told me to get out of bed, get dressed, eat something and prepare myself to have Fiona stay with me until I had bonded with her. Then I could go home. “How will I know when we’ve bonded?” I asked. “You’ll just know” was the enigmatic reply. The thought of my baby in a mental institution propelled me out of bed and down the hall to the nurses’ station, where, in an effort to fatten me up, I was fed oddly flavoured protein drinks of a peculiarly viscous consistency. In the evenings, while Fiona slept and everyone else watched television, I managed to complete an Icelandic sweater with an intricate cream-and-black pattern. Why I was allowed to have knitting needles in a psych ward remains a mystery to me, but there I sat, night after night, knitting and purling, counting the stitches, counting the rows, counting the minutes until my next pill.
One evening, a particularly tough female patient glared at me and said, “You’re one of them innaleckshuls, aren’t you?” It was the first time I had heard the word “intellectual” used as a pejorative, and I dropped a stitch in my rush to deny it. I was curious, however, about what had tipped her off, since I hadn’t exactly been dazzling my fellow inmates with my wit and erudition. “It’s your pants,” she replied. “Only innaleckshuls wear that kinda corduroy.” She wandered off, and I laughed for the first time in a month. That day at lunchtime, I took the next step toward freedom: I ate solid food. An unfortunate episode with some parsnips masquerading as french fries set me back a few days, but I persevered and was soon enjoying such delicacies as Jell-O with canned fruit cocktail and soggy tuna casserole.
When Fiona, ten weeks old and by far the cutest resident of the ward, disappeared from my room one morning while I was in the bathroom, I was as frantic as any “normal” mother of a missing child. As I searched the ward for my tiny daughter, it occurred to me that I must love her, after all. Why else would I care where she had gone and who had taken her? Why else would I feel that my heart was about to explode? When I finally found her asleep in the arms of the old fellow in the next room (no bonding problems there), I knew that I was prepared to eat whatever was put in front of me and spill my guts in group therapy if that’s what it took to get home.
Two weeks passed, then three. I was eating and sleeping and missing my son, who hated visiting the hospital. I went home on day passes and took my meds. Only one person, an elderly pediatrician, told me not to worry so much about bonding with my baby. No one suggested there might be a hormonal component to my condition. No one asked me about my miserable marriage. No one informed me that postpartum depression often disappears with the simple passage of time and the judicious use of appropriate antidepressants. No one told me I was a good mother. After I’d spent a month in the hospital, my bond with Fiona was deemed sufficiently strengthened, and I was allowed to go home. I was calmer (and heavier) when I left the hospital but still terrified, this time of losing everything I loved.
In the months following my release, I cared for my children with a passion bordering on the paranoid, certain that one day they would denounce me. I imagined Fiona standing in her crib in her pink OshKosh overalls, pointing a pudgy finger at me: “J’accuse.” But every bedtime story, every trip to the library, every messy meal, every new word, every sandcastle, every card game, every swimming lesson reinforced my sense that I could be a good, if not particularly patient, mother. I began to enjoy my children again and enjoy myself with them. My confidence grew, and two years after Fiona was born, I left my marriage, taking the children with me.
The years that followed tested my resolve on a daily basis. What I lacked in patience I made up for in tenacity. My somewhat perverse sense of humour became my greatest asset in the struggle to raise two children alone. When I made tough decisions, I knew that no judgment could ever be as harsh as my own. My son’s teenage years were particularly arduous—for both of us—but when I ask what he remembers about that time, he says, quite simply, “You were always there.” Not “there for me,” just “there,” which was often all I could manage. People sometimes ask me if I have forgiven myself for abandoning my children. I ask them if a mother with pneumonia should have to forgive herself for seeking medical attention. I was sick, I received the treatment deemed appropriate at the time and I eventually recovered. End—and beginning—of story.
Because of me and in spite of me, my children are amazing individuals who continue to challenge, educate, infuriate and delight me. My son has no recollection of my temporary absence from his life. My daughter is mystified and somewhat annoyed at the suggestion that we may not have bonded, since all evidence points to the contrary. In the two decades since my “lapse” in mothering, I’ve come to see that terrible time as a pivotal point in my life, an event that shocked me, defined me and ultimately inspired me to choose the possibility of joy over the certainty of despair. Every day I wear a ring inscribed with the words Amor Omnia Vincit—Love Conquers All. Most days I believe it.
They Didn’t Come
with Instructions
C.J. Papoutsis
When I was five, someone gave me a toy iron and ironing board for Christmas. That was in the 1950s, when we played with gender-specific toys—dolls, toy stoves and tiny plastic dishes—and little girls expected to get married, have babies and be homemakers.
My mother said that one day I would find a kind, generous man to look after me. We would get married, I would clean his house, cook and have babies. That’s what women did. It never occurred to me, or my mother, that I might not enjoy cleaning, cooking or babies, or that there might be other choices.
I did marry a kind, generous man. He came from Athens, Greece, with strong opinions about who in the family did what, but time passed and our roles became blurred. Laundry, housework and cooking got done—by whom didn�
�t matter after a while.
Growing up as an only child, I’d never had much to do with babies. My mother’s stories about the miracle of birth and instant bonding didn’t prepare me for reality. I bombed out of motherhood when the delivery room nurse gave me our daughter to hold, moments after her birth. My frail self-esteem crumpled when she scowled and pushed me away with the strength of a wrestler. The veins on her head stood out and her face turned bright red. She opened her mouth back to her ears and shrieked like a dentist’s drill with sporadic gasping noises. By the end of my first week of mothering, my main impressions were that babies were loud, smelly, sticky and felt as if they were broken. I also discovered that although my talents were many, non-stop nurturing and caregiving weren’t among them.
Our new family member forced us to live without sleep. Every night around eleven-thirty we bundled her up and hit the road in our drafty 1961 Buick Electra convertible. It had a hole in its muffler and sounded like footage from a Hell’s Angels movie. The little despot slept as long as we kept moving and started screaming again the minute we returned home and shut off the engine. Our landlord disliked our wailing baby and our raucous Buick, so he evicted us.
I had given up trying to pacify our daughter. My husband had no luck either. Everyone said she had colic, but nobody could tell me what colic was or what to do about it. Woodward’s Gripe Water was supposed to help, but dipping her soother in wine was the only thing that worked.
I lived in fear of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. If the baby wasn’t screaming, I’d jiggle the pram to make sure she was breathing. Then she’d wake up and howl for another two hours. The kid had me figured out. She knew I was frightened and incompetent. Her job was to expose me as an impostor, and she took her work seriously.
I cried, raged and hated myself. I felt like a tired, used-up loser in a saggy, stretched-out body and wanted my pre-baby figure back. My husband wondered who this woman from hell was and what I’d done with his wife. He loved me. We had a healthy, beautiful daughter. What was my problem?
I hated being a mother. Being responsible for someone’s life gave me anxiety attacks and a dependency on Rolaids. I was a spoiled, immature twenty-year-old and scared stiff something awful would happen to my child and everyone would blame me. Motherhood was the final exam; I hadn’t studied and got caught cheating. My emotions terrified me, but I couldn’t tell anyone because such feelings were considered unnatural back then.
When I arrived for my six-week checkup in tears, raving about suicide as a community service, my doctor decided I had “baby blues,” a euphemism for post-natal depression. He prescribed Valium. That’s what doctors did in 1969. Valium didn’t cure post-natal depression. I still had it. I just didn’t care.
Nobody told me that babies start growing teeth at three months with a whole new repertoire of symptoms. We tried teething rings and oral jellies, but an old Greek lady told me to dip my finger in brandy and rub it on the baby’s gums. There’s probably something in the Criminal Code now for people who do that. Brandy wasn’t an instant cure, but it gave me a chance to gather my frayed wits occasionally and may have saved our daughter from shaken baby syndrome, something we hear about often these days. She hasn’t become an alcoholic either.
It took me eight months to recover from post-natal depression. Just in time to get pregnant again. Our daughter was seventeen months old when our son joined the family. His arrival was less traumatic because our daughter had already broken us in. We had surrendered to sleep deprivation and were sliding toward full-on psychosis, but then this little guy liked to sleep and only cried when he had a good reason. My post-natal depression lasted three months. This time I took up yoga, not Valium.
Meanwhile our eldest, not to be upstaged by her baby brother, developed a red, scaly diaper rash that conjured up images of jungle body rot. She was allergic to the first two creams the dermatologist prescribed, and in a few days the rash covered her entire body. Strangers peering into the pram jumped back, demanding to know if she was infectious. It took three weeks to get the rash under control so we could take her out in public without attracting a crowd.
Our daughter was allergic to dust, animals, some drugs and many foods. My husband, who grew up hungry during wartime in Greece, couldn’t understand anyone, especially his child, being allergic to food and thought it was downright ungrateful to be allergic to medicine.
The year our children were four and five, we decided to give our first family portrait as Christmas gifts. Both kids woke up with pink eye the day of our photographer’s appointment. My husband thought we should admit defeat and cancel, but I spent all morning applying warm camomile tea bags to the children’s crusty, swollen eyes, hoping they might look human by picture time. A few distant relatives still remember us as those rumpled people with their two sad children squinting at the camera through red, half-closed eyes. It took us twenty-five years to gather enough courage to sit for another family portrait.
By the time our son was two, I’d been a homemaker long enough. Never good at repetitive tasks, I completely lost it over potty training. Spending two months teaching someone to pee in a container wasn’t mentally stimulating enough, so I got an entry-level government job, which was kind of like potty training but with pay. My first year working, half of my monthly salary paid for daycare. Since I enjoyed the social contact, I justified the economic disaster by calling it an investment in mental health. It was, except for the guilt. Dropping the children at daycare every morning made me feel I was abandoning them so I could have fun and get paid for it. It was like saying, Here, I don’t want these kids any more. You take them and I’ll give you money.
My guilt never went away. It roiled just below the surface, then washed over me without warning. When the children were older and we left them at school, I felt bereft when our little shapeless bundles of winter clothing waved goodbye from behind the chain-link fence in the schoolyard. They could have been poster children for a refugee camp.
As a supporter of the women’s liberation movement, I had earned myself the right to work full-time, keep a perfect house, cook gourmet meals and raise exceptional kids. I was a pioneer. One of the first generation of superwomen raising the first generation of superchildren. To ease my guilt and prove my kids weren’t disadvantaged because their mother worked, I nagged, tricked and bribed them to swim before they walked, read before they started school, excel at sports, play musical instruments, look good in designer clothes and graduate in the top 10 percent of their class, even if it was only kindergarten. I wanted to give them a head start in this cutthroat world, to give them a competitive edge—hopefully without pushing them over one.
When my mother cautioned, “Children whose mothers work spend all their time on street corners and become criminals,” I had to prove her wrong. Our kids were twelve years old before they ever crossed a street by themselves.
Our daughter started ballet lessons when she was three. Our son was a member at two golf courses when he was ten. They played soccer, hockey, basketball, baseball, volleyball—if it was round, they chased it, threw it, kicked it or hit it with a stick. Our kids had no time to daydream or gaze into space. Their lives were so structured that we only saw them in the car on the way to and from school, games or classes. We lived like gypsies, except instead of a caravan we drove around in an old station wagon full of ballet costumes, sports equipment, fast-food wrappers and half-eaten fruit. When our son’s teacher complained about the messy handwriting in his homework assignments, he told her, “I can’t help it, my dad takes the corners too fast.”
I loved my kids but never enjoyed them—their vulnerability intimidated me. I wanted to do everything right but didn’t know how. They didn’t come with instructions.
I had no idea what fear was until I had children. Fear for someone you love is a thousand times worse than fear for yourself.
Some people are born with a strong nurturing instinct. Some of us have to learn it. When I finally grew up and stopped beating my
self over the head for not being wife and mother of the year, I realized we had been blessed.
Our adult children are gifted in different ways; one is artistic, one is business-minded. More important, they are loving, kind and never miss a chance to laugh. How this happened is both a miracle and a mystery. You need a licence to drive a car, own a dog or buy a gun. Any fool can have a baby. Many have three or four. Some parents do everything right and their children grow up to be axe murderers. We had no idea what we were doing, and ours turned out just fine.
Glimpses
On the
Water’s Edge
Ingeborg Boyens
Monday morning at an aging public pool in Winnipeg. I am wearing a black polyester bathing suit, built for functionality if not style. The chlorine vapours envelop me as I walk along the pool’s edge, diligently focused on the business of not falling on the damp tiles. With one hand skimming the wall—nonchalantly, I hope—I pick my way through the neon-coloured Styrofoam “noodles” abandoned by the last aquasize class. As I walk down the stairs into the water, I feel its liquid coolness inching up my ankles … calves … knees … thighs…. In my imagination, my serviceable black suit is transformed into a diaphanous silk skirt pooling on the surface of the water. I slide in, elegance personified, as the water flushes away the pain and awkwardness of my former dry-land stumbling.
Dropped Threads 2: More of What We Aren't Told Page 13