Two years ago, the choice was harder and made on an almost hourly basis. Maddy was still in the clingy, squirmy creeper stage, where she spent every waking moment trying to crawl, walk, or chew her way into extreme peril. Sleep was fractured most nights, since she never reliably slept through the night until she was almost two. Family was so far away that free help was hard to come by. Scott’s theater was struggling to make payroll, much less to provide nutty things like insurance and time off. While I can look back at individual stories I wrote with pride and firmly believe the writing helped keep me on this side of functional, the idea of working for the alternative press (or any press, really) had lost its appeal. It was time for a change. Our lives now fit us like too-small pantyhose, uncomfortable and riding up in weird places.
We decided to head north, back to the lands of our births. The single goal was to move some place near at least one of our parents. Scott dusted off his MFA and started to scour the Northeast for teaching gigs. I started to do more freelance work and fantasized about writing a book. After a few months, we found a state college in Upstate New York that wanted Scott as their technical director. Conveniently, they also had an adjunct slot open for me. The downside is that they made the decision about a month before we had to be there. It was a scramble to get houses on and off the market, packed, moved, unpacked, and settled in to. The short lead time left me with virtually no day-care options once we moved. Two days a week were all I could find coverage for, which left me two days of scrambling to figure out what to do with the Diva in a town where I knew no one. Add to that the stress of teaching for the first time and finding a new shrink/grocery/pediatrician/coffeeklatsch and you have the perfect ingredients for a breakdown.
Which, predictably, happened. The exact start date is hard to pinpoint. I know where the end is, which is about a week after my cat died. But the beginning is hard to wrestle to the mat. I spent most of the time leading up to the move in a state of shock, wandering about our Knoxville fixer-upper and randomly throwing things into boxes. Friends held a going-away shindig, but we had to leave the party early because we had more packing to do. It took until the wee hours to load the truck. Moving day came early when we chucked the last of our stuff in and drove off.
That was the plan, anyway. What really happened is that the truck got stuck at the bottom of our driveway, where it makes a nearly right angle onto the street proper. The trailer hitch embedded itself into the soft August asphalt. Our neighbor on the other side—the one who isn’t obviously crazy but does spend most of the fall practicing his bow hunting on Styrofoam deer in his backyard—crafted an elaborate series of levers and pulleys, in the hope that we could just perform a down-home truck angioplasty, popping that bad boy out of its nook. No luck. A tow truck was called, then another when the first wasn’t mighty enough to do the job. Three hours later, we were on our way, $150 lighter and already frazzled.
While the men, who included Rodney, an acquaintance of an acquaintance who we’d convinced to drive the truck while we followed with a car full of baby, plants, and cats, futzed, I sat in the now-empty living room and cried. Maddy toddled around our now-empty home, and it killed me that there was no way that she would remember this place, this dumpy little house that had become a part of Scott and me. When that became too maudlin, I packed her up and went for one last drive around the city to pay it my last respects. We drove past the hospital where she was born and I went mad. We drove past the office, where I no longer belonged. We drove through the Old City, where I lost a good deal of my hearing but saw many great bands. She fell asleep. I cried and drove.
By the time we got on the road—really got on the road—I couldn’t stop crying. I sobbed most of the way to Virginia, where we stopped for the night. The next morning, I cried to the New York State line while I sat in the passenger seat and knitted a belated birthday hat for a former coworker. I want to say that it was something about the scenery that made me quit crying, that there was something ineffable about suddenly being surrounded by the Catskills and the farms that felt like home. But I didn’t really think about that until much later. Honestly, I think I stopped crying because I suddenly realized that we would soon have to unpack the damn truck. Nothing like the prospect of hard physical labor to get your head on right.
The sheer busy-ness of that first week kept my mind occupied. But once we could find things like cereal bowls and washcloths again, I had time to dwell. I was truly alone again for the first time in many, many months. Scott was busy settling into his new job. I was trapped at home with a toddler to amuse, which meant I couldn’t get out and investigate the town. All of my time was sucked up with child care. When Maddy slept, I wrote lesson plans. While some of the other faculty wives with kids did their best to help, they had their own lives to worry about. I could feel myself receding, lost in a haze of sleeplessness and tears. I called my new insurance company to get a list of local psychiatrists. The waiting list for a provider my plan covered was eight weeks. And they say there’s nothing wrong with our health-care system.
Fall became early winter. I hung on. It wasn’t as bad this time, which isn’t to say that I was dancing a little jig every morning, but I was more or less functional as long as I kept my expectations low. Scott’s parents came down frequently and took some of the burden. It was a system that was working, at least temporarily. My hope was that I could shake it off by the time the snow started to fly. Then my cat died.
Of our three cats, the youngest is Satan’s cat, sent to test our resolve and patience. The middle one clearly belongs to Scott, meaning that my lap will do in a pinch but I am only a stand-in for when his person gets home. The oldest was clearly my cat. We’d adopted her from an Austin shelter. She was my best pal when Scott was away, when I couldn’t cope with being alone. She was my only friend for the first few days I lived in Knoxville. She wasn’t the best cat ever; even for a cat she was moody and frequently expressed her angst by peeing on everything of value. Still, we’d been through a lot together, this cat and I. But nothing—except, perhaps, human folly—lives forever.
I knew it was her time when we drove to the vet’s on a December night, not long before Christmas. It was snowing, the first real snow we’d had. She lay in my lap the whole way, not even lifting her head to look out of the windows. I stayed with her while the vet gave her the big pink shot. And that was it. The vet would keep her body in their freezer until the ground thawed enough for us to give her a proper planting. I wailed like a banshee to the grocery, where I had to stop first to pick up a prescription for Maddy. I ran into the head of Scott’s department and tried to pretend that my eyes weren’t swollen and red. I failed miserably. Scott made me dinner once I got back. And we joked about how haughty my cat had been, and how sweet when it suited her. Yet, I couldn’t stop crying, and I wondered if this was the beginning of the end again.
For a week, I felt as if someone had turned me inside-out and was rubbing lemon juice into my exposed innards, which seemed like an overreaction for a mere kitty. Conventional wisdom holds that such feelings be reserved for real tragedies, like tsunamis or terrorist attacks. Luckily, classes had ended and I didn’t have to think about being a professional. Also luckily, more space had opened up at Maddy’s new day care, which gave me some time to myself. I talked to my shrink. I took my drugs. I went out for coffee with a new friend. I cried a lot, but it got better. I still miss the silly cat, even a year later. It’s something that I can cope with, though.
Again, I wish there was a magic bullet I could point to, where I could say, Do this and you’ll feel better. All I can say is that you have to take it minute by sucky minute, until it doesn’t suck so much. And to not be afraid to find the help you need. Don’t become invisible.
History follows you, and medical records don’t lie. I want to say that the past is past, that once you get through it, you are free. But this is the kind of thing that no matter how deeply you bury it, it will always find its way back to the surface after some catacl
ysmic event, like fossils floating up after a flood.
Shortly before Maddy’s first birthday, before we left Knoxville, I found myself in the ER again. One bright summer morning I scooped up Maddy and my wallet and a grocery list. My hands were full as I slipped on my Birkenstocks. I opened the door with my elbow and hip, and started down our back steps, just like I’d done a billion times previous. What I hadn’t counted on was the baby’s singular desire to be on the ground, toddling about. As I was juggling list, wallet, and keys, she lurched like a rabid anaconda, which threw me off balance and down the steps. Somehow, I had the presence of mind to chuck her into the nice, soft flower beds rather than onto the patio bricks. For this, I am thankful.
I wasn’t quite as kind with myself. Somehow—details remain hazy—I managed to knock over a glazed pottery flower pot. One of the shards caught me in mid-shin and cut my leg open from there to ankle. Fortunately, the Hub was home and heard the thumps and the shrieking baby. He tore out, shoeless, and scooped her up.
“Are you okay?” He had to shout to be heard over her screams and was flipping her around to check for broken bones.
I started to say that I was, but then realized that my shoe was filling up with blood. I looked down. I could see the white of my ankle bone. “Um, no,” I said. “And I think I’ll need a towel.” Strangely, it didn’t hurt.
We limped to the car, me hunched over with a folded beach towel pressed against the gash, and drove the four minutes to the ER, the same damn one that I spend so much time in. It’s too bad that that hospital doesn’t offer frequent flier miles. I could be on my way to Bermuda by now.
After a brief slapstick routine in front of the doors as Scott tried to figure out how to find a wheelchair, park the car, watch the screaming baby, and tend his wife simultaneously, we made it inside. Once it was made clear that I was going to drip blood all over the nice clean waiting room, I was whisked to a treatment room. Alone. Scott and the baby were taken elsewhere to make sure she hadn’t been permanently maimed by her mother’s act of grace and poise. She wasn’t.
I, however, had to be stitched up like a Thanksgiving turkey. After repeated offers of painkillers, I finally relented when the stitching began, because that’s when it started to feel like my leg was on fire. Twenty-some stitches later, I was gauzed up, cleaned up, and inspected for other injuries. When nothing physical presented itself, I was told not to move, that I had to talk to a doctor before I could go.
So I waited. Initially, I was certain that my Spalding-doppelgänger would return. Instead, I was visited by a woman MD who couldn’t have been that much older than me. It’s always stunning when you realize people your age are actually in positions of relative power and responsibility. Clearly, I can’t be trusted to walk out of my back door, yet here was a peer who was dealing with life and death every day. Boggles the mind, it does.
“So what happened?” she asked. I explained about the flower pot and the baby-throwing.
She kept looking at me, like there was more to the story that I just wasn’t sharing.
“And then we came here?” I said, hoping that she’d pick up the narrative at that point. She didn’t.
“Is there anything else you want to tell me? Is everything all right at home?” It was then that I pegged to the fact that my file was in her lap, and in that file was the full four-part harmony version of my breakdown. And I realized that my injury could easily look like something self-inflicted by a person desperate to escape her life. It was then that I wished the nurses hadn’t washed off all of the potting soil that had smeared on my leg. I could have pointed to it as proof.
“Oh,” I said. “No. I’m fine. Really. I’m just clumsy.”
“How’s your mood?”
Considering that I had taken a heapin’ helpin’ of Vicodin, I could honestly say that it was pretty dang good, indeed. But I wasn’t allowed to leave yet, not until I managed to find the right words to let her know that there was nothing sinister afoot, that I was simply not paying enough attention to where my garden accoutrements were with regard to my big sandals. It took a while and I kept expecting her to break out a bright white light, so that she could sweat a confession out of me. She didn’t, and after half an hour, I was released to my husband’s waiting arms.
Like I said, history follows you.
It can be subtle, of course. Friends who witnessed the whole postpartum debacle spent many, many weeks treating me like brittle, flawed glass, ready to fly apart with the slightest chilly breeze. Conversations were filled with stuttering hesitations by both parties. I didn’t want to say anything that might make someone believe that I wasn’t okay. I could watch friends edit words like “crazy” and “depressed” out of their speech around me. I wanted to invest in a T-shirt that proclaimed to the world that if completely going off my gourd for a few weeks hadn’t broken me, no mere word would, but I could never come up with a catchy little slogan to express the idea. My friends got over it, eventually. Some of those relationships became stronger as a result, while some drifted away after the moment of crisis passed. Such is life.
My family, those who knew, at least, got over it, too. My mother was the one exception. She called daily for a while, then weekly. Each dialogue—monologue, really—became harder to bear and I was usually in tears by the end of it. If I didn’t know better, I’d say her rants were designed to push every last guilt button I had left, scripted to make sure that I knew that she was completely not responsible for what happened to me because I failed to take in thirty years’ worth of advice and kind mothering. That I knew that it wasn’t her fault, that everything that had gone wrong could be pinned on my shit of a father. That my mother did everything she could to help when the baby was born and that I am an ungrateful daughter who deserves to be miserable. That I had a nervous breakdown just to hurt her and because I didn’t let her cuddle me when I was a kid. That she grew up in the midst of dysfunction and couldn’t really be blamed for what happened after that. That I was the one who should never stop going to therapy but that she was completely fine, thankyouverymuch, and didn’t need to be on any meds. And on, ad infinitum. A sample:
“What did I do to make you hate me so much?”
We’re on the phone again. I’d been out of the hospital for three months or so by this point. Things were stable in our house. The crying fits were infrequent and usually triggered by situations—like a baby who inexplicably decides that daytime is for sleeping and night is for playing—that could make even the strongest man weep from frustration. Even the baby routine was finding its center and we were starting to enjoy her a little. While I’d always loved her, I was just now discovering her wonderfulness. Life was improving.
“I want to know why you don’t like me.” Again, my mother’s voice is cutting.
“I love you, Mom,” I say. If given a choice, rather than have this conversation, I would have happily gone through labor for a second time. Without the epidural.
“Why won’t you let me touch you? You shrink away when I try to hug you. Daughters aren’t like that with their mothers. If my mom were alive, I’d hug her all the time.”
And I start to explain, mentioning the baby elephant incident and how there were more tiny little betrayals and how they all worked to erode our relationship and how I don’t want to talk about it and that I know she did the best she could but it wasn’t enough and I’m crying and Scott keeps handing me tissues.
“But what was it specifically?” she asks. She wants a list of every hurt, every incident.
“Mom, I don’t remember anymore. I wasn’t taking notes.” In all the ways we are different, this has always been the most glaring. I remember patterns of behavior; she remembers incidents. Because I can’t cite the time and place of everything that ever happened, it doesn’t count, in her eyes.
“You didn’t have it so bad,” she says.
She’s right. No one ever touched me in anger. There was food and cable. I was never freezing. My basic needs were met. No
court in the land would call it abuse or neglect. I have nothing to whine about. I am ungrateful and ashamed for not loving her enough.
“You’re right, Mom.”
“You need to stay in therapy,” she says. And with that line I’m back to where I was, angry and tired and ashamed. I want to hurt her back, which makes me feel even more ashamed, which makes me want to hurt her more.
“I will if you will,” I say. I don’t mention that my shrink had recently moved me onto a once-every-three-month schedule, simply because sane and I seemed to be on speaking terms.
“I’m fine,” she snaps. “You’re the one with the problem.”
I can’t talk.
“None of this would have happened if your father didn’t shut down when you were born.” And we’re back on track again. Story #2 unfolds like it always does. My father was a shit when I was born. I want to scream “I didn’t marry him!” But I don’t. The muscles in my jaw are tight, like dams holding back the force of a flood.
“I release you,” she says when she’s done. “I want you to go live your life without having to think about me. I won’t call you. If you have something to say, you call me. I won’t ask about my granddaughter. If you don’t want me in your lives, I won’t be. I release you.”
I am a shrew who stands between my mom and my child (never mind that I’ve made it abundantly clear that she can visit the baby whenever she wants). I take her at her word, though. I’ve finally driven her away with my petty sulkiness. Despite the guilt, I am relieved.
The next week, she calls again, like nothing has changed.
The end came when I wrote about my postpartum experience for the paper. In the piece, I mentioned that my mothering models, from Hollywood stars splashed across the entertainment pages to my peers who didn’t have kids to my own family, left something to be desired. Moms exist at two poles. Either you are warm and nurturing or cold and toxic. There is no in-between. You are either the Madonna or Andrea Yates. The mail I received as a result of sharing my experience was extraordinary. So many women had been through the same thing. Some were still going through it and I was able to point them to help. It is one of the few stories that I’m proud to have written, so much so that I wanted to show it to my parents. My mother called minutes after she’d read it and promised me that she would never call me again. I spent the day crying, but wasn’t sure why. It was like being given everything you’ve ever wanted, seconds after you realized that you don’t want it anymore.
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