Get Me Out of Here

by Rachel Reiland

  Perhaps he had discovered the same answer I was beginning to realize about the meaning of life: there is none. Life was a cruel hoax, and he had opted out. An act of ultimate wisdom. The heroism of facing The Truth.

  As I sat in shaded darkness, the window unit still humming in the background, I began to ponder if death might not be the answer for me as well. Why raise my hopes just so they could be dashed again? Why not allow Tim and the kids to move on with their lives?

  I started to speculate on how I could end my life in a way that would leave Tim and the kids none the wiser. A disguised suicide that could just as easily be an accident. A car wreck? A carefully staged fall? A car wreck seemed the best option, driving off the road in a way that would not injure anyone else but myself.

  I hadn't yet settled on all the logistics but was feeling a strange sense of calm at making a major decision when Jeffrey came running inside the house.

  “Mom, you've got to come out here,” he cried breathlessly. “There's a lobster in the yard!”

  Melissa followed.

  “Yeah, Mommy, a lobster! Come and see it!” she said as she tugged on my shirtsleeve.

  I had to admit a lobster in our yard would be a strange sight. I followed them to appease my curiosity, vowing that I wouldn't be distracted from my plans to die.

  As it turns out, the “lobster” was a crawdad, most likely escaped from the neighbor's fishing boat parked on the driveway next door. I was amazed at how much the little creature resembled a lobster. A few of the other neighborhood kids had already assembled, circling around the newest addition to the block. Jeffrey and Melissa were beaming with pride. “Can you get us something for it?” Jeffrey asked. “It needs water or something. Otherwise it's gonna die.”

  “Can it be our pet, Mommy?” Melissa begged.

  Thousands of dollars spent at Toys “R” Us, yet none of those toys were as fascinating as a slimy, shelled creature with snapping claws. I had to smile. Had life ever been that simple for me?

  I retrieved a rectangular casserole dish from the kitchen and a big cup of water. With Jeffrey in charge, the cadre of kids set about making a comfortable environment for their new friend—a pile of mud for it to crawl on, surrounded by a moat to keep it cool and moist. Melissa came over and hugged me, beaming with joy and admiration. “Thanks for helping us make a house for our pet, Mommy,” she said. “You're the best mommy in the whole world!”

  My plans for suicide were quickly unraveling. Dr. Padgett was right. Suicide, in whatever form, would completely destroy these kids. There had to be another answer.

  When Tim came home from work, I confessed.

  “The suicidal thoughts are back,” I told him bluntly.

  He paused for a moment, obviously surprised.

  “How long have you been feeling this way?” he asked, a quiver of worry in his voice.

  “I don't know. A few weeks.”

  “Have you told Dr. Padgett?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “I didn't want to bother him with it. I didn't want to bother you either. You've all been so good to me that I didn't want to let you down.”

  “Like killing yourself wouldn't let us down?” he exclaimed, then quickly resumed a calm demeanor, not wanting to upset me. “Rachel, that's what he's there for. That's what I'm here for. You've worked through so much. Don't you think you ought to try and work through this too?”

  “What if I'm like this for the rest of my life?” I asked him, tears in my eyes. “What then? I'm really sorry you had to marry somebody like me, Tim. I really am. You deserve better than this.”

  “You have an illness, Rachel,” he said emphatically. “An illness. I wouldn't leave you if you had cancer or diabetes, and I'm certainly not going to leave you because you have an illness of the mind and not the body. If I wanted to be with someone else, I would be. But I don't. I want to be with you. And if I had it to do all over again, knowing all of this, I would still marry you. In sickness and health. We can get through this. We really can.”

  Sobbing, I fell into his arms. One thing was certain. If I had to do it all over again, I would have married Tim too. Maybe he was right. Maybe we could make it through this.

  Dr. Padgett, although clearly concerned, did not appear to be thrown off stride by my admission of how I'd been feeling.

  “What do you think it could be?” I asked him. “I've been racking my brain, but I can't find an issue. I'm really scared. I came so close, and now all that peace and serenity have gone away.”

  “What medications are you on right now?”

  I had expected him to ask the routine question: “What do you think?” Instead he was acting like a medical doctor rather than a therapist. I was surprised.

  “Desyrel. Three hundred milligrams.”

  He got up and reached into his desk drawer, pulled out a prescription pad, and scrawled the trademark chicken scratch of the physician. He handed it to me. I couldn't decipher a word. How did pharmacies manage?

  “What's this?” I asked.

  “I'd like you to try a new medication. It's called Effexor. It's relatively new on the market, but the clinical tests have shown it has minimal side effects.”

  “Do you really think drugs are the answer here? Maybe there's some issue we need to explore.”

  “Sometimes if you take an antidepressant for a long time, it begins to lose its effectiveness. A new one might help.”

  “You mean you think this is all because the Desyrel has stopped working?”

  “I think it's a strong possibility.”

  For some reason I began to cry. “Am I going to be on drugs for the rest of my life? Don't you think that's a cop-out? I mean, other people seem to manage their whole lives without these drugs. Am I going to be a borderline for life? I don't know if I want these drugs. I don't want to be an emotional cripple.”

  “Rachel,” he said firmly. “You're thinking black and white again. This is a temporary setback. And, in this case, I think it's purely chemical. The progress we've made hasn't been undone. And, no, I don't think that you'll need to be on medications for the rest of your life. But for right now this might help you get through a tough time.”

  “What does that say about my self-discipline?” I lamented. “What does that say about my ability to handle things on my own? I don't want crutches.”

  “There's nothing to be ashamed of,” he said gently. “You haven't failed. Let's go ahead and try these and see what happens.”

  When session was over, I shoved the prescription slip in my purse. I contemplated swerving off the interstate but dutifully drove to the drugstore to have the prescription filled.

  My body was shaking a bit, but I felt good. The phone rang a few times before Tim answered.

  “Just thought I'd call and say hi,” I chirped exuberantly.

  “Hi,” he answered, surprised at my newfound cheerfulness. “What's up?”

  “This stuff is amazing,” I rambled. “I could run ten miles right now. I could clean the whole house in an hour. It's just incredible! Kind of like the first blast of cocaine, except it lasts and lasts. And it's legal. Do you believe it?”

  Tim chuckled at the other end of the line. “Maybe you've found a new discovery. It's great to hear you so happy—glad you're enjoying it. I'd love to talk, but I've got a prospect coming in five minutes, and I have to put a few papers together. I'll see you at five.”

  “I'll see you too!”

  While Dr. Padgett smiled at my account of my Effexor buzz and expressed concern about my inability to sleep, he assured me that this burst of energy and hyperawareness was a temporary side effect. Despite the frustration of not being able to sleep, I was a little disappointed that the fun and giddy aspects were destined to fade. Common sense reminded me, however, that Effexor was not a recreational drug, but an antidepressant.

  With a mild sleeping aid Dr. Padgett prescribed, soon the initial manic effect of the drug wore off. Within three weeks, I resumed a
state of equilibrium. The darkness and the suicidal thoughts were gone, and I began to settle into the state of contentment I'd felt in April and May.

  I wasn't sure how this chemical combination worked. But I was glad it existed. It reinforced that mental illness, depression, was indeed an illness with a physiological basis. It wasn't a sign of failure. I wasn't a failure.

  I wondered why mental illness was surrounded by such hopelessness, shame, and stigma when treatments—sometimes as simple as a prescription—worked so effectively and could transform a person's life.

  Long ago I had been taught my father's solution to emotional problems: pull yourself up by your bootstraps and move on. Psychiatry, he'd insisted, was nonsense. Believing this myth, I had resisted seeking help, had been driven away from it by my shame, until I, too, had been on the brink of becoming yet another tragedy. Another Kurt Cobain.

  Mercifully my will to survive had superceded my misguided pride and distorted shame. The right people had come into my life at the right time, and I was spared long enough to learn the lesson of hope. As long as a person was still alive, help and hope were there if the individual dared seek it.

  I vowed that whatever happened in my life after therapy, however full my life might become, I would never forget where I had been and the lessons I had learned. To make sure I could always appreciate the new light of day, I vowed to never forget the pain of the depths of darkness.

  For some reason, God—or fate, or destiny, or whatever one might call the controlling forces of the universe—had decided that I would be given the gift of hope. I knew then that as bleak as life could become, I would never again seriously consider suicide.

  Somehow, someday, I would share this message of hope. Maybe someone, feeling the pain of hopeless desolation, could take heart, see that anything could be possible, and choose to live.

  Whatever I might do to spread this message, if it could spare even one life, kindle the flames of just one second chance, it would be worth it. After all, many, many people had joined forces to do the same for me.

  Chapter 30

  The summer of 1994 was hectic enough that my twice-weekly sessions with Dr. Padgett became more like the icing on the cake than the main course. Tim and I were both busy with our businesses. He was putting in night and weekend work, and I was now devoting about twenty-five hours a week to my accounting practice. Both Jeffrey and Melissa were playing T-ball. Tim and I were in a coed softball league. During the busy summer, therapy became a place I could relax and unwind from it all, with less focus on introspection about the past and more discussion on my present and future. Sometimes we just shot the breeze.

  The first day of June was a landmark date in our lives as I walked to the mailbox to ceremoniously deliver the bill payments. I was now caught up with Dr. Padgett's invoices. We'd paid the last installment of the hospital bills we'd financed, and our credit cards, once looming in the $10,000 range, now all carried a zero balance. Since both of our cars were paid for, the only debt Tim and I had now was the mortgage on our home. As a bonus, there was still money left in our savings account.

  We went out to dinner to celebrate our newfound solvency. Given the financial strain therapy and hospital bills had placed on us, becoming virtually debt free was as much of a success to us as if we'd been outright wealthy.

  Summer passed into early fall, and the church choir resumed its schedule. I loved being back with the group, and I felt emotionally strong, physically healthy, and closer to these people than I had ever been.

  It was now my turn to cook for the meals chain, my turn to offer a shoulder to cry on, my turn to be the support person others could lean on as our intertwined lives marched on. I relished the role. For all the generosity these people had so selflessly given to me, I liked being able to return it in kind.

  Each Sunday those of us in the choir had an excellent view of the congregation. During the course of a long-winded sermon, many of us covertly entertained ourselves by baby watching, occasionally flashing a silly face to bring a smile from a little one. Most of us were still of childbearing age but already had kids. Some women had children approaching high school and college; others had children enrolled in the parish school. A few younger women had babies or toddlers.

  At one time or another over the years, it seemed, one of us could be found juggling a squirming infant our husbands could no longer placate as we held our music and sang. And, more than a few times, when a particularly cute cherub had delighted us in church, afterward we'd discuss our “baby cravings.”

  One day during Mass I watched a young mother rock her child, a tow-headed infant. I wistfully recalled when Melissa had been that young. As my entire life had changed over the course of therapy, she, too, had steadily grown and changed.

  When I'd first entered the hospital, she'd been barely two years old, still in diapers, speaking in baby talk. Now she was in kindergarten, the baby fat all but gone, still calling me Mommy but once in a while shortening it to the more mature “Mom.”

  Although Jeffrey's birth was more a result of fate than planning, once he was born Tim and I had decided that we wanted three children spaced two years apart. Melissa came right on our planned schedule.

  With the emotional and financial burdens of my illness, however, we never did try for the third one. Undoubtedly Tim would have been willing to have a third child in a heartbeat but respected my feelings that the timing just wasn't right. Was it too late? I was thirty-two years old, well within the low-risk range of pregnancy. The worst phases of my mental illness had passed, and I was feeling good both emotionally and physically. I was healthy enough to have a child, I thought. With the debts paid off and Tim's business in particular becoming more firmly established, we were in a good financial position.

  As I sat there, the cravings became an obsession as I remembered what it was like to be pregnant, to hold a newborn in my arms for the first time, to have it accompany me everywhere snoozing soundly in a pouch.

  By the time Mass was over, I had decided. I was going to have a baby.

  Tim's eyes lit up at the news of my decision. We even discussed turning the attic into a bedroom for Jeffrey and using his current room as a nursery.

  The joy of new life. The promise of the future. Everything seemed to fit in a perfect scenario. I couldn't wait to tell Dr. Padgett.

  “I'm going to have a baby,” I announced proudly at our next session.

  “You're pregnant?” he asked, eyes open wide, obviously surprised.

  “No, no,” I said. “I realize I have to quit the medications first. But we decided that we're going to try and have another baby.”

  “I really have to advise against it,” he said bluntly.

  His words stunned me. As a surrogate father, I thought he'd greet the news with the same joy as a surrogate grandfather. Here was a man who was so loathe to give direct advice he would barely tell me what time it was, and yet, on this matter, he was suddenly vested with a strong opinion. Things were not working out as planned.

  “Maybe it's none of your business!” I snapped back, irritated that he'd burst my bubble.

  “I'm speaking in your best interests, Rachel. I don't ever recommend that a patient of mine try to get pregnant during the course of therapy.”

  “So what are you saying?” I demanded. “That just because I've been mentally ill I can never have another baby? What gives you the right to butt into my personal decisions?”

  “First of all, I didn't say you could never have a baby—just that being in the middle of therapy is not a good time to do it.”

  “I'm almost done. And I've decided to get off the medications.”

  “It isn't just the medications. That's a separate issue. It has to do with emotions, unresolved issues.”

  “I've managed to be a good mother to my first two, haven't I?” I retorted angrily, disliking his implication that I was not emotionally stable enough to have another child.

  “And it's been hard as hell, hasn't it? If you
choose to have another child, it should be at a time when you are emotionally ready to do it, when you're doing it for the right reasons.”

  “I love the two I have. I loved them as infants. Isn't that reason enough? Why else do people have babies? It's natural. This isn't a therapy issue.”

  “I recommend that you wait until a year after terminating therapy to have a child.”

  “A year? A year before I can have a child?”

  “A year before you try to conceive one,” he clarified, which was even worse than I'd thought.

  “How long could that be? I don't want to have a baby when I'm forty. I don't want my kids to be ten years apart. I can't believe you're saying these things!”

  “You need the time for you right now. You need to resolve the final issues and put some closure on therapy.”

  “Issues like what?” I retorted in frustration. “I've been through every detail of my childhood with a fine-tooth comb. I'm feeling better now. I'm okay.”

  “For starters,” he said in the same firm tone I had given him, “we need to explore why you suddenly feel this need to conceive.”

  “Because I'm in my thirties now. My kids aren't getting any younger, and neither am I.”

  “Any other reasons?”

  “It's none of your damned business why I want to have a baby!” I exploded in tears. “Tim is my husband; you're my therapist. This is Tim's domain, not yours. I don't have to discuss my reasons with you.”

  “Pretty major life decision to not want to explore it, wouldn't you say?” he said as he raised his eyebrows.

  I hated that look.

  “Okay, Dr. Know-It-All,” I quipped sarcastically, my arms folded across my chest. “What do you think my reasons are?”

  “For starters, I think this baby could be a way of running away.”