Swimming with Elephants: My Unexpected Pilgrimage from Physician to Healer

by Sarah Bamford Seidelmann

  Thus, with my life in crisis, I learned that I just didn't seem to be capable of faith or a belief in God—at least not then. I wondered if I would ever find some sort of divine comfort for myself. All I knew was that you either believed or you didn't.

  I just didn't.

  CHAPTER 5

  The Unraveling Begins

  Some people think that God is in the details, but I have come to believe that God is in the bathroom.

  Anne Lamott, Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith

  It was official. At thirty-six, after eleven years of, at times enthusiastic, fornication, the pink stripes lit up on the test strip. I was knocked up. We were already the fulfilled parents of our wonderful adopted children, George and Katherine, but the longing to experience a physical pregnancy had never left me. When I discovered I was pregnant, I was thrilled.

  I'd been pregnant a half dozen times before, but, each time, it had ended in an early miscarriage. And in fact, this time my labs were once again discouraging, so I wasn't surprised when I was told to expect another miscarriage. I waited and grieved. The week before I was planning on going out of town, my gynecologist suggested a D&C so that I wouldn't have to endure going through a miscarriage on vacation.

  While sitting in the waiting room to get my preparatory ultrasound, I did something weird. I put down the magazine I had been reading, closed my eyes, and prayed. “God, if you are there, please make this a real pregnancy, not just another miscarriage.” Well, God didn't whisper in response, and no visions came. I felt nothing. When summoned, I walked into the ultrasound suite and lay down. And, low and behold, they detected a heartbeat. I was truly shocked, as was my doctor. The procedure was quickly called off, and I realized that I was officially eight weeks pregnant. That was a sweet surprise. For the first time in a long time, I felt gently optimistic. I wondered—had God actually responded to my prayer?

  Months later, I found a huge, turn-of-the-century house in the classifieds—the same house in which I'd taken piano lessons at age nine from one of the kindest and most present adults I recall from my childhood. Could Mark and I make this place feel as warm and welcoming as she had? As we walked around with our Realtor, I could feel Mark jumping on board.

  “I can see us here,” he said, as he opened and closed a closet door. I could feel us invisibly coming together again. Mark was standing firmly alongside us instead of with his work, at least for the moment.

  A few months later, I stood, hugely pregnant, in the driveway of our new home—a splendid, 6,500-square-foot, shake-shingled, Italianate colonial. The moving truck was being unloaded. I was experiencing more than a flicker of doubt—more like a full-on doubt tazer. With two small children and a third on the way, and two all-consuming careers, why had I taken on this enormous house? It meant much more space, more work, more—everything. To make life even more interesting, I was induced for delivery a few hours after the moving van left.

  I took an all-too-brief six weeks of maternity leave, which I spent mostly “cluster feeding” our colicky newborn, Josephine. Cluster feeding (related to the incredibly useful noun clusterfuck) describes a situation when a baby seems to want to nurse for hours on end, leaving you wondering if she's not getting enough milk because you're a useless bunch of protoplasm not fit for lactation. I was already worried about my breasts because a plastic surgeon had once casually mentioned that I had “tubular breast deformity.” (I had to look it up, too.) According to my research, it basically means having NG (National Geographic) boobs and pitiful milk production.

  In every nonsuckling moment, I unpacked boxes and made plans for restoring our house from top to bottom. Most people might have thought that the house was fine as it was, but I had a glorious vision of what was possible. I wanted to restore the gardens to their former glory. More than that, I longed for it to bring Mark and me close again, as so many previous projects had. We could be such a great team.

  After Josephine's birth, Mark truly did cut back at work and started coming home earlier on a regular basis. But the new house hadn't helped to heal the marriage the way I had thought it might. The house was so big. What had we done?

  I'd also developed severe and unrelenting undercarriage pain. I had a hunch that I had developed what's called post-partum rectal prolapse. I found myself mostly housebound, with my maternity leave almost over. When I caught myself fixating on the liquor cabinet, I booked an appointment for a surgical consultaion. I needed to self-administer an enema before I got there and explained to Mark that I needed him to take the kids for five minutes. I figured five minutes would be enough to get the deed done—at least the tricky part.

  The need to devise a plan to give myself an enema made me realize how much our home life had become like a continual combat zone. “Mark, can you cover me? I'm going in!” Just as I began my “procedure,” I heard the first security perimeter—our bedroom door—being breached. I brayed for Mark as loudly as I could, but to no avail. A few seconds later, the bathroom door flew open, and Buttercup (the pug), Katherine, and George all skidded into the bathroom on stockinged feet. They all stared at me lying on the floor with a combination of fascination and grave concern. Buttercup tilted her head, and Katherine asked, wide-eyed: “Mom, what you doooing?” As liquid began to trickle out below deck, I felt myself crumple further into the cold tile, feeling its chilling yet solid embrace. I stared back at them weakly, blinking. A few very tense seconds later, Mark arrived breathless, with Josephine in the crook of his arm, and hurriedly cleared the room. That's when I began to wonder what was happening to my life.

  With the moving boxes mostly unpacked and my undercarriage pain resolved, I returned to work six weeks after Josephine's birth. By now, I had been in practice for six years since completing my five-year residency. So I was seasoned but exhausted.

  One morning, after I had presented my cases at the weekly conference, a colleague came up to me and leaned in intimately. I figured he was going to congratulate me on our new baby or welcome me back to work. Instead, he kindly whispered: “Your zipper is totally undone on the back of your skirt.” Mind you, he was reporting this to me after the conference was over, and I'd had my back to the room of mostly male colleagues for nearly the entire hour.

  On another occasion—despite a sign on my closed office door that clearly read: “Do Not Enter”—a colleague inadvertently barged in on me while I was pumping breast milk at my desk. I sat helplessly in my chair, with both naked boobs solidly sucked into two transparent plastic horns, while a small motor quietly milked me. This normally shy gastroenterologist was so focused on his task that he actually sat down in the chair across from me and began rattling off patient findings and clinical hunches before he finally recognized that I was completely exposed. He blanched, apologized, and beat a hasty retreat.

  A month later, I gave an encore zipper-down performance at another conference. This time, I didn't notice the problem until I was back at my office. I was unwittingly exposing myself on a regular basis. I finally gave up on street clothes altogether, opting instead for a uniform of zipperless blue surgical scrubs. My partners cocked their heads curiously at my new costume and asked whether I was covering surgery at the hospital. “No,” I replied, “I'm just wearing scrubs to avoid ongoing indecent exposure.”

  And then there were the days when the kids were sick. Now that they were a tiny bit older, I tried sneaking George and Katherine into my office when they were too sick for school or daycare. I made a nest for them in my walk-in closet with a sleeping bag and a pillow so I could mother them, bringing them juice and hospital cafeteria donuts. I left the door slightly ajar and checked on them as often as I could. They seemed happy with the arrangement, and I felt lucky to be able to do this instead of medicating them and sending them to daycare as I had done during my residency. Most colleagues who entered my office never even noticed they were there. For this, I was grateful.

  I wasn't able to conceal my identity as a mother completely, however. When I was at work, I
thought about our kids in every available moment, imagining how they were spending their day. Was George behaving himself so his teacher wouldn't be so exasperated? Was Katherine's cold bothering her? She'd been coughing all night, and I hated to leave her in daycare feeling sick. I felt torn every single day—wanting to be a loving mother, wanting to be an outstanding physician. My colleagues who were fathers each had a great woman at home to hold down the fort so they could focus on work. I envied their apparent leisure and their ability to stay fully dressed at the office.

  Josephine was a year old when another utterly irrational longing began tugging at me. I wanted a fourth child. Somehow, as crazy as things were, I didn't feel “done” yet. Mark balked at first, but slowly came around to the idea of adopting another child. Once we submitted our application, we were shown the paperwork and photos of Charlie, a child in Guatemala City who was being fostered by a faithful and loving woman while he awaited adoption. During the months while the legal process ground on, we received regular updates on his growth and development. Our approval seemed to be taking longer than usual to make its way through channels, however; so, in July, we all flew to Guatemala City to visit Charlie, now seven months old.

  We were able have Charlie stay with us at our hotel for a few days, and we met his foster mom. We all snuggled him and got to know and love him. Weeks later, I flew down solo and brought Charlie, now eight months old, home to be a member of our family forever. I cannot defend my logic or explain it, but, after months of waiting, when Charlie arrived, our family felt complete.

  Charlie possessed a calm serenity and was very affectionate. I wondered if it was just in him, or whether it was because he had spent his early months in such a nurturing foster family. They had given us a few dozen photos taken the night before he left the country. Each image featured a different child, teenager, or adult from his extended foster family standing in an open doorway holding Charlie in their arms with tears streaming down their faces. Some appeared devastated and others smiled bravely through their tears. Charlie smiled triumphantly in each picture. The first night he spent with us in Minnesota, he keened with terrible distress for hours until he collapsed and slept from sheer exhaustion. It seemed that being torn without warning from the familiar arms of those who had loved him had broken Charlie's heart.

  Yet, despite this, he began to show us love. He so enjoyed snuggling, resting his head on our chests and softly reaching out his hands to be held by those he had decided to bless. When we ran into an old friend who had adopted children from Colombia, Charlie toddled over to him and reached out his arms. Gregg picked him up and smiled at him, then spontaneously burst into tears.

  “This kid is really special, isn't he?”

  “He is,” I said, teary as well. “I swear he came into our family to teach us how to love.”

  Something in me shifted that day. I realized that I was longing to relish and enjoy our children—the magical and wondrous beings who'd come into our lives. I wanted to lavish them with love, bake for them, read to them, take them on adventures to the beach, to the movies, to the grocery store, and, above all, to be in their radiant presence.

  CHAPTER 6

  Breathing Lessons

  The more relaxed you are, the better you are at everything: the better you are with your loved ones, the better you are with your enemies, the better you are at your job, the better you are with yourself.

  Bill Murray, New York Times

  My younger sister, Maria, had been clinically depressed on and off for years, so I have some understanding of depression. Her most recent hospitalization ultimately led to a diagnosis of Bipolar II, something my mother also suffered from briefly in later years. From what Maria told me and what I observed, being depressed was a crushing, disabling, and sometimes terrifying experience. Though I was definitely irritable, however, I didn't think that I was clinically depressed, so I considered other possibilities. Maybe I was trying to do too much. And yet, Mark and I were physicians with four kids. Didn't I need to be doing all this stuff?

  Could I be depressed after all? Or manic? What if I were diagnosed as being depressed and urged to take an antidepressant? At the time, half my family was on an antidepressant that had allegedly been responsible for sending one of my more distant relatives into a full-blown manic episode involving wigs, convertibles, and public nudity. I was having trouble staying fully dressed as it was. I worried what drugs like that might do to me.

  When mental illness and addiction are a strong thread in your family, it's not uncommon to be haunted by the possibility that you, too, are on the verge of a mental breakdown or a dangerous dabbling of some kind. My awareness of my family history was good in some ways, because it kept me vigilant. But there was an anxiety that came with it. I stared into the mirror and wondered: Could I slowly be going banana pancakes?

  During the approximately three minutes I could keep my eyes open before falling asleep each night, I had started skimming spiritually minded books by Deepak Chopra, Martha Beck, Marianne Williamson, and Louise Hay. What they were writing about seemed so “pie in the sky” to me. Thoughts become things. You can heal yourself. The entire Universe is inside you. Happiness is a choice. Have faith. In what? Could I even trust this stuff? While on vacation, I listened to an audiobook of Deepak Chopra's Seven Spiritual Laws. Between the Sanskrit words and the foreign concepts, I could barely understand what he was getting at, but something in me desperately wanted to understand.

  At this point, getting me off my prickly perch seemed an impossible task. I was confused as hell, overwhelmed, cranky, and I needed a little magic. Therapy just didn't appeal to me. But I'd been hearing about something new that intrigued me—life coaching. I was skeptical but also desperate. A Google search led me to a website run by a Canadian woman named Michele. In her headshot, she wore a warm smile and had nicely coiffed brown hair. On one of my precious days off, we did a free consultation call. She sounded so shockingly normal and kind on the phone that I signed up immediately for sessions three times a month.

  I told no one about my life coach except Mark. Having a life coach seemed so horrifying to me. I'm a human being—wasn't I prepared for life by default? And I was having an awful time justifying the cost.

  Michele and I talked for thirty minutes every other week on days I took off, while George was in school and Josephine and Katherine watched Dora the Explorer in the kitchen. It was an intense relief to pour out my thoughts and feelings to her—to speak to someone who would not judge me, who was neutral and safe. Even so, I frequently forgot our appointments. My life was so overbooked that I could barely remember what I was supposed to do next.

  I shared with Michele what I couldn't tell anyone else about my life and my dysfunctional situation at work and at home. I told her that I worried I was asking too much of our kids by plucking them out of their beds in the early morning darkness to deposit them at daycare for nine and ten hours a day. They really had no choice. But didn't I have choices?

  As I poured out my heart week after week, I began to feel better little by little. During these phone calls, it didn't seem as if much was happening. For the first few calls, Michele just listened. Then she began giving me little assignments. I experimented with her invitation to “minimize contact with cranky, unhappy people.” Next, I slowly stopped spontaneously saying “yes” when my inner “nice girl” thought I should—like volunteering to take on extra cases at work when I was already busy. I also began taking my lunch breaks away from my desk whenever possible.

  Gradually, over several weeks, I became more aware. I began noticing the number of mini-Snickers I ate at work. I noticed how often I was holding my breath. I found myself literally gasping for air in my office after unconsciously holding it for long periods. I began at least to acknowledge, with less guilt, that my life wasn't easy. I wasn't a failure, but I had a boatload on my plate.

  I managed to find small ways to begin breathing again at work, and at home as well. At work, I practiced being e
xtremely present—dealing with just one thing at a time so I could enjoy it rather than constantly multitasking. It helped. At home, I began making little découpage collages using glitter, glue, and antique images of cows. These excited me—perhaps because of a shared lactational vocation. I also became obsessed with finding Victorian images of bears, chickens, rabbits, and other animals. It seemed a little odd.

  At night, after putting the kids to bed, I sat—exhausted, slumped over my glowing computer screen—poring over the images I'd started to collect, scanning them from vintage postcards. Anyone would have thought I was going mad. By 10:30, Mark was calling for me to come to bed as I intently studied a newly discovered Victorian rabbit in a blue-striped suit. These images delighted me, although I was unable to understand their purpose. But Michele confidently assured me: “If it makes you feel good, it's a good idea.” Apparently, the more time I spent doing what I loved, the better.

  The tiny worlds I was arranging and rearranging made up of wild creatures, insects, and flowers made me so happy inside. There was such exquisite beauty in each different species, from giraffe to caterpillar, and such mystery to the places where they lived—the ocean floor, the savannah, and the jungle. I loved layering them with beautiful colors and patterns to see the effect. Making—creating these worlds and giving them order—was just so deeply satisfying to me. Seeing a glass jar covered in delicate chartreuse tissue paper overlaid with a dark parrot tulip and a scarlet-winged butterfly made my heart leap with joy.