Call me naive, but until you started to spout your accusations, I thought you and Dad had a perfect marriage. You laughed a lot together. You held hands in public. I never saw you argue. You complained about just about everyone else in your life, but you had never once complained about him to me. Your wedding anniversary was February 22, and on the twenty-second of every month, he gave you flowers and you gave him a card addressed to D.W.M.—Darling Wonderful Man. Neither of you had any real friends outside of each another; you were one another’s world.
“It was an unusual love affair,” Dad often says to this day; I put the emphasis on unusual now, but he still puts the emphasis on love.
Here’s one thing I remember: the earthquake.
The Northridge earthquake hit when Hannah was twenty-five days old. You were still in town. As our tiny duplex in family student housing shook, blinds swaying in the windows like hula skirts, Matt and I scooped the kids from the mattress on the floor that was our family bed—Arin in Matt’s arms, Hannah in mine—and stood in the doorway to ride it out. Both kids slept through the whole thing while Matt and I smiled nervously at each other over their heads.
You called from your hotel room after everything settled down.
“Someone was shaking my bed!” you yelled. You had never experienced an earthquake before, other than a gentle one that hit Chicago when I was a few months old and made my baby swing—my favorite place to hang out—wobble back and forth on its metal legs.
“It was an earthquake, Mom,” I told you. “A big one. Turn on the news.”
“I thought someone was under the bed.” You were silent for a moment, then said, “This phone is bugged—we need to be careful.”
“Mom,” I started, but I didn’t know what else to say.
After Northridge, there was a lot of talk about earthquake preparedness. Matt and I took heed and stocked the shed behind our house with bottled water and flashlight batteries and canned beans.
I don’t know what I could have done to prepare for your psychosis.
Another thing I remember: you kept talking about Santa Barbara, how you wanted to get to Santa Barbara. It was unclear what exactly you hoped to find there, if there was something specific, or if you were just drawn to the place on the map—you were cagey when I asked; it just kept coming up: Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, I need to go to Santa Barbara.
Hannah had her first post-birth checkup scheduled at our family doctor’s office, so Matt and I asked if you could pick Arin up at preschool. We were hesitant to do this—we weren’t that comfortable with you being alone with our son, but we weren’t able to make other arrangements. We wouldn’t be gone long, we reasoned. The preschool was just a couple of blocks away from our house; we left his car seat with you, but suggested you walk there and back with him instead. You’d always been a scary driver; I didn’t believe in guardian angels (you thought your mother was yours), but I wasn’t sure what else could explain how you hadn’t gotten in a major crash with your distracted, erratic driving.
When we got back from the doctor’s office, your car was gone. The house was empty, Arin’s car seat just inside the front door. Wherever you had driven with him—if he even was with you—you had done so without his car seat.
This was before cell phones, of course. We had no way to get in touch with you, no way to find out where you were.
“Should we call the police?” I asked Matt.
“I think you need forty-eight hours to file a missing person report,” he said.
“What if it’s a kidnapping?” I asked. Just saying the word “kidnapping” wrenched a sob from my gut. I ached for Arin with every fiber of my being. I ached for him so intensely, I felt like my heart was going to burst through my chest, my throat, my eyeballs. I tried to visualize where you were, how he was. Were you on your way to Santa Barbara? Was he scared? Was he safe? Had you even buckled his seat belt?
We called the police. How could we not? They put someone on it and told us to call if you turned up.
Three hours later, you came breezing through the door with Arin and a bunch of Kmart bags, looking happy as can be, completely unaware we had been in a total panic. I scooped Arin into my arms and cried and cried, so relieved to see him again, to be able to smell his sweaty little boy head.
“Where were you?” Matt demanded, and you looked offended that he would talk to you in such a tone.
You held up the bags. “We went to Kmart,” you said, as if this was the most normal thing in the world.
“For three fucking hours?!” Matt yelled, Hannah sleeping in his arms.
“There’s a lot to see,” you said.
“We thought you had gone to Santa Barbara,” I said, still crying. Arin was crying in my arms at this point, too. I couldn’t get enough of him, his pulse, his warmth, his solid little body—I wanted to fuse him against my chest. “We called the police.”
“You did what?!” You were livid. “You want to lock me away just like your father!”
“You could have left a note,” I told you. “We were terrified.”
“I’m the one who should be terrified,” you said. “If something happens to me, it’s not suicide.”
NOVEMBER 22, 2009
In our childbirth class, the instructor had us write an “ideal but realistic” birth story. In my story, my parents pick up Elizabeth at the airport on Thanksgiving day, the Hyundai full of stuffing and sweet potatoes and Tofurkey. After our meal, my mom and dad head back to Oceanside, and I start to go into labor; my sister and Michael and I take a walk to Gerard’s, our local market, to help move things along. The cashier who thinks Michael looks like Jim Morrison asks if the baby is coming soon. We tell her I’m in labor and she says we better get to the hospital; when I say we are planning a home birth, she wishes us luck and hands me a stick of purple rock candy from the box by the register as a gift.
My mom’s e-mail makes it clear we’re not all going to have Thanksgiving together, but I can’t worry about that right now. Pretty soon, the labor is intense enough, I can’t worry about anything but getting through each contraction. Labor has a knack for burning everything away—the outside world, modesty, the manhole cover in my throat. I find myself able to say exactly what I want (my thighs squeezed, hard), exactly what I don’t want (Michael getting in the birthing tub with me) without hesitation. It is a bit discomfiting to realize how radical and unfamiliar this feels.
Even with this clarity, though, I’m flailing. I thrash around in the water like a fish on a hook, sputtering and frantic, unable to find a comfortable place to rest. And I’m not progressing, even though the contractions are tearing me in half. In my “ideal but realistic” birth story, I am pretty calm except when I head into transition, but so much of this labor feels like transition; there isn’t a span within it when I don’t feel full of doubt, don’t feel like my life is in danger.
When Michael and I were instructed to come up with a peaceful image, an image we could focus on during labor, Michael suggested the picnic my mom had arranged for us on the beach in Oceanside a couple of months ago. She and my dad had lugged from her car a card table and chairs, a tablecloth, beautiful serving dishes full of pasta salad, arugula salad, fruit, cheese, and bread, along with salmon for herself and my dad, and set them up on the sand. We ate and watched the sun set over the water. It was an idyllic evening—my mom was gracious and generous, even to my dad, the air was balmy, the food delicious. My mom had hoped to see the green flash when the sun hit the water, but she wasn’t too disappointed when she didn’t; she deemed the night perfect, anyway, and it was. I try to go back there in labor, try to see the ocean undulating, the pelicans gliding above us, their great wings open; I try to feel the sand under my feet, smell the salt in the air, see my mom smiling and relaxed, serving up another helping of vinaigrette-kissed orecchiette, but I can’t seem to go there beyond snapshots. The whole scene gets swallowed by the wave of the next contraction, the beach and everything on it engulfed in darkness.
A sweet, acrid scent starts to fill the house; a scent I finally identify as burnt sugar. I ask Michael what it could be, and he says it’s something the Karens—my midwife and her same-named assistant—are making. I wonder if it’s cookies, maybe, or some special tincture that needs sweetening. They have been putting various tinctures and homeopathic remedies under my tongue throughout the labor; I can’t tell if these are making any difference, but I appreciate their ministrations. The Karens are wonderful—kind and no-nonsense. It turns out they and Michael have been trying to make the purple rock candy from my story, but the sugar won’t stick to the string they’ve hung inside a jar in our pantry; my “ideal but realistic” story isn’t sticking to its own thread. Still, just knowing they wanted to make the treat is a gift. The burnt sugar scent fills me like a balloon, buoys me through the next few contractions.
When my childbirth instructor read my essay a couple of weeks ago, she said, “This is just how it’s going to happen, I know it.” Somehow even then, I knew she was wrong. I knew I had skewed more toward the “ideal” than the “realistic” portion of the assignment. I knew I had romanticized the birth and everything around it. I have a tendency to do that, to gloss over the darker parts of my experience, to not share the messier parts of myself. To forget how easily things can burn.
Now, though, I am messy. I am pooping in the tub, pooping on the bed. I end up spending most of my labor on the toilet, where I feel more comfortable than anywhere else. I have been vocalizing for sixteen hours at this point, groaning with every contraction. By the time I reach the pushing stage and move onto Karen’s wooden birthing stool by the foot of my bed, my throat is raw, but I can’t stop, my growls turning even more urgent and animal. When I was in labor with Arin, the nurses told me to stop making sounds after I had been transferred to the hospital; they said it was taking energy away from my pushing. Being quiet seemed painful and impossible, though, as painful and impossible as it was to stop pushing once they decided to wheel me to the operating room. Strange how labor wakes up my voice, even if it’s mostly in nonverbal ways.
My sister encourages me over speaker phone as I push; she was unable to get a flight until tomorrow and is at a birth now, herself, but she calls as often as she can, sneaking into the bathroom at the Toronto hospital to talk to me or get updates from Michael. She is a disembodied midwife in the room, saying, “You’re doing great, Gayley, you’re doing great.”
I push for two hours. None of it feels good, the way it had been when I pushed with Hannah. All of it hurts, all of it stings, all of it feels like it is going to kill me. But I keep pushing, sure my tailbone will break or a vital blood vessel in my head will burst. I keep pushing, and eventually I feel a new fullness low in my pelvis, and I remember that this is about a baby, not about me, that this was never about me, that I am going to see my baby soon, and my sister is crying on the phone, and the Karens and Michael are all cheering me on, and I keep pushing and pushing, and some tarry meconium splashes out, which I try not to panic about, and now a head forces its way out of my body, tearing me like cloth, and an eye, one gray eye, slides open, one alert and knowing eye that makes us gasp, and now a body is coming out of my body, a bright pink body whooshing, and here he is on my chest, slick and wet and warm and silent, and my sister is worried by his silence—she hasn’t seen his all-seeing eye. She says, “Come on, baby, come on,” through the phone; she shouts, “Is he pink? Is he pink?” as Karen rubs him with a blanket, and he cries and cries, and we all cry, too, exhausted and ecstatic, humbled by his wild, fresh beauty.
This is how my “ideal but realistic” story ends: “Michael wraps his arms around both of us as we take our first breaths together as a new family. It is past midnight, no longer Thanksgiving, but it still feels like Thanksgiving to us. We are so thankful for this birthing journey and the journey with Asher that has only just begun.”
Aside from the date and time, this is the one part of the story I got right.
[ARLENE stands in front of her triptych, The Art of Misdiagnosis. The paintings are large, covered with geometric patterns. On screen, the swirls of paint look muddy, a bit shoddy, but she stands tall, looks proud. These are her masterpieces.]
ARLENE: I was inspired by Sol Lewitt when I was a docent at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, and in the year 2000, when I painted these pieces, we were having an exhibit of his, and he was one of the first conceptualist artists, the first to say the idea is more important than the art, so it’s the idea behind it that I picked up.
He also did something interesting: he wanted to prevent collectors from making money on his art, so he began painting on museum walls so it couldn’t be collected; it was there for the exhibit and then it was gone, and it was a very revolutionary idea. I believe it was in the late ‘50s that he began doing that, and I think the reason I was so drawn to it was the geometric shape. I thought, well, I’m not a trained artist; I don’t know how to paint; I can certainly make geometric shapes. So I’m totally self-taught, and what started coming out was, I think, the spirits of my family and the experiences and the medical misdiagnoses in the family.
BUZZ BRANDEIS (FORMER HUSBAND): And at the end of six months, she stopped. She did what she had to do and she was finished. And what she ended up with was a body of work, paintings that are hanging on her wall now that are truly unusual, lovely pieces of art, and I still don’t understand how that happened, without the training.
Mom,
Your reference to suicide didn’t jar me. Maybe it should have, but it didn’t. It didn’t seem anywhere in the realm of possibility. The only time you had talked about suicide before was to say that if you ever ran out of money, you would walk into the sea, just walk and walk until the ocean swallowed you up. It didn’t seem like a real threat—it seemed like your standard variety of melodrama. And, besides, this time you said that if anything happened, it wouldn’t be suicide. I was certain you would never do harm to yourself; you were the most self-protective person I knew. I was more worried about what you’d do to other people, namely Dad.
The police didn’t do anything. When we called to say you had returned with Arin, they dropped the case. They talked me out of requesting an involuntary psychiatric hold. “You wouldn’t do that to your own mother, would you?” the woman on the phone asked.
It reminded me of when I was assaulted in a movie theater in college—a man, the only other person in the auditorium, had buried his dick in my ponytail, yanking my head back as he pleasured himself with my hair—and the police officer I spoke with on the phone encouraged me to not press charges. He said it would be embarrassing for me to have a masturbation case attached to my name. I listened to him. I let him intimidate me into silence. Now, I stayed silent all over again. How could I think of doing such a thing to my very own mother?
You were sure Dad was orchestrating some way to lock you up forever, to keep you from telling the truth about his dastardly deeds. You didn’t trust any of us, and as I tiptoed around you, unsure how to deal with your delusions, my trust in myself started to erode, too.
NOVEMBER 23, 2009
My sister and mom arrive in the morning. I am in bed with the baby when I hear Michael answer the door; the bedroom is dim even though it is sunny outside—there is only one sliver of window high on the wall, which the owner has shaded with cloth napkins clothes-pinned to a dowel. I didn’t sleep much—even when Asher slept, I couldn’t stop staring at him, couldn’t stop thinking that if I did stop looking at him, something horrible would happen. We have two bassinets so we can sleep with Asher safely—one that attaches to the side of the mattress, the other a little foam contraption wedged between our pillows on the bed—but even so, and even after years of sharing a bed with my older kids when they were little, I worry that somehow I will roll on top of him if I let myself nod off.
My mom and sister both have their hands over their hearts as they enter the room. They walk toward me and Asher slowly, reverently, like they are walking down the
aisle at a wedding. Both of them have tears in their eyes. In the picture Michael snaps as they reach the bed, I am beaming up at my mom, unguarded, unafraid, and she is beaming back at me. I feel her love and it feels sweet; this moment feels sweet, all of us shifting to gaze at this brand-new person breathing on my chest, his gray eyes gazing right back at us.
“Do you want to hold him?” I ask my mom.
“Of course,” she says softly.
My sister scoops him out of my arms and puts him in my mom’s.
“Oh!” she gasps, face alight, as she receives him. She coos and bounces and sways her body so he won’t cry, and I imagine her looking at me the same way when I was a baby, comforting me with the same movements. I let myself be comforted by this all over again. I think back to my baby shower—more of a mother’s blessing—at my friends Nancy and Jenn’s house a couple of months earlier. My collected friends had massaged my feet, rubbed fragrant oils into my hands. My mom had brushed my hair, the first time she had done so in years, and it felt so sweet and loving, so motherly when I was no longer used to her being motherly, it melted my heart. My heart melts again now as I watch her cradle my new baby.
Then Asher closes his eyes and something shifts in my mom’s face.
“Why did he fall asleep?” she asks, panicky, and shoves the baby back into Elizabeth’s arms.
“I have to take a shower,” my mom says. “I have to wash my clothes. There is stuff on me a baby should never be near.”
After she leaves to clean up, I whisper, “She thinks she poisoned him, didn’t she?” to my sister. Elizabeth hands Asher back to me; I pull the neckline of my shirt down beneath my breast and he settles in to nurse. Even though I know my mom is delusional, I lean down and smell Asher’s head to check for fumes.
The Art of Misdiagnosis Page 5