by Abby Maslin
Hopeful anticipation begins to give way to a new reality, the aforementioned new normal. It is time to reckon with the facts: we cannot slip seamlessly into the life we left behind.
* * *
In his poetic French tale, The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry writes, “Le langage est source de malentendus.”
Language is the source of misunderstandings.
Inimitable words for a future tattoo. Or, at the very least, a wise saying for a rainy day.
The fighting begins within days of returning home. Strange, pointless arguments I can hardly recount the next day, let alone follow with clarity in the present moment. Some days I am tempted to record us on a microphone, just so TC can hear how very illogical and unreasonable he sounds. But such is the nature of brain injury. It is inconsistent. A good day depends on so many things: twelve to fourteen hours of restful sleep, a minimal amount of external stress, a little exercise (but not a fatiguing amount), and absolute consistency in schedule, interactions, and expectations. In short, it is an impossible scale to balance, particularly with a two-and-a-half-year-old, a full-time job, and the grind of daily city life to manage.
We have entered a new phase, the one we are destined to occupy for the indefinite future, the part that takes place after the hospitalizations and the circus of attention and the touch-and-go emergencies that tire you to the bone. This is the phase where we must learn to live with brain injury, to accept it as a permanent, unchangeable fixture of our new lives. Sort of like inviting one’s fussy mother-in-law to move in. Necessary but painful. Full of complication.
In fact, many aspects of the past year now seemed easier in retrospect. For one, it was a lot more efficient to get things done when I had only myself to consult as a decision maker. Being back at work full-time, back among professionals, and assigned a challenging class, no less, means relegating many responsibilities to TC, namely caring for Jack.
I have to relinquish the control, but for some reason, it’s harder than I imagine. I don’t want to be responsible for everyone and everything, and yet the idea of releasing my iron fist is equally unbearable.
With TC now Jack’s primary caregiver, I can no longer make unilateral decisions about our child.
“Is that what you’re dressing him in?” I can’t stop myself from asking in the morning, watching TC struggle with the zipper on Jack’s tiny sweater.
“Yeah, why?”
“Oh, nothing.” I shrug with just a tad too much casual effort. “It’s just that I already picked out an outfit for him.”
For the past year, I’ve been Jack’s go-to parent, his joined-at-the-hip, cuddle-in-the-morning, take-your-requests-here preferred parent. And I’ve gotten used to it. To be loved and needed in the way Jack loves and needs me feels healthy and natural, especially in contrast to my role as a caregiver. If I’m being honest, my relationship with Jack is the most satisfying one in my life.
But it is time for me to loosen the reins and take a step back. TC and Jack need an opportunity to rebuild their bond alone. And so it’s worked out quite conveniently that Jack was accepted to preschool two days a week and that TC can tailor his speech schedule to care for him the remainder of the week.
“Are you sure you can handle this?” I ask TC again and again, uncertain about the giant leap in responsibility our new schedule demands from him.
“Noonie,” he insists, “I have to do this. I made it alone in Canada, remember? I’ll be fine.”
And yet, how can I trust his assessment? One of the most difficult challenges after a brain injury is the loss of awareness. What if TC thinks he can handle Jack and then something happens? What if he has a seizure or gets confused or falls and hurts himself? What if something happens to Jack?
At work, I live in fear, my cell phone never more than two feet away from where I’m standing, always turned on, ready to spring into action in the event of an emergency. If something happens to Jack, won’t it be my responsibility? And even if everyone assures me it isn’t, won’t I feel just as guilty as if it were? Can I even survive if something happens to Jack?
The thing about brain injury is that no one fucking knows. No doctor can tell me with certainty whether TC is responsible enough to pull off his fathering duties. No one can tell me whether I’m worrying too much or too little or about all the wrong things. Every day of this new arrangement requires an act of faith: that my brain-damaged husband can wake himself up, get dressed, and navigate his way in a busy city from point A to point B without my assistance—with a toddler in tow, no less. Given all the things I was doing as his caregiver just recently, it seems foolish to assume he can carry it all off. But perhaps faithless to assume he can’t.
So far, however, it’s been a success. The mile walk to and from Jack’s preschool has become TC’s new exercise routine. During the hours at home, he fills his time mimicking all the activities he learned in Halifax: reading and summarizing newspaper articles, speaking into his iPad’s dictation app, and compiling a personal dictionary of all the new words he’s relearning.
Twice weekly, he gets himself to and from outpatient speech therapy at the National Rehabilitation Hospital by using an Uber. If he has any spare time beyond that, he coordinates with his friend Patrick to begin listening in on professional conference calls about energy.
TC has designed a challenging but well-oiled schedule for himself. The only thing that isn’t going well is us. If us is still a thing.
The problem, in large part, is my expectations. Now that TC is capable of so many things again, I can’t help but expect that our relationship will be stronger too. After all, if he can dress himself and make his own doctor appointments and care for Jack, it seems only logical that there’d be enough TC left over for me too. But the thing I want is still beyond his reach. I want a partner, someone who understands my thoughts, someone with whom I still share some intimate and intuitive connection.
I bring myself to a psychiatrist downtown in search of help.
“I feel as if I’m in the aftermath of a natural disaster,” I explain. “It’s as if I’ve spent the last twelve months building a tourniquet around our lives, trying to prevent it from bleeding out. And now the bleeding has stopped and the dust has settled, but I’m looking around and all I see is rubble.”
“Hmmm.” She nods thoughtfully, jotting on a legal pad for what probably comes out to be fifteen dollars a word, given her steep hourly fee. “What you need is something to take the edge off, the kind of antianxiety pill that performers like to take before they get onstage. Something very low dose.”
I don’t disagree. For the first time, I’m ready to admit I do need medication. When TC stopped antidepressants nearly six months ago, the transition off them was relatively seamless. The pills served a good purpose for the time he needed them, but they weren’t a permanent solution. Now, as I feel myself circling around the well of depression I experienced the winter earlier, I feel adamant it’s not a place I can afford to visit again. If warding off misery means taking some low-dose drug that might also improve my public-speaking abilities, I am all in, ready to march to the pharmacy.
Lexapro, as it turns out, is not for me. On the first day I take it, I am amazed by the difference in my mood. I feel different. Exaggeratingly different. I giggle at work all day. I make joke after wisecrack joke with my friend JoAnn in the back of the room while we are supposed to be participating in a professional development session (no doubt the drug is to blame here). I felt bright, enthused, energetic, and just the slightest bit manic. It is pre-Abby for sure, but a bolder and more obnoxious version. I don’t like it.
After a week, I tuck the bottle of pills into the back of my nightstand and never touch it again. I’d rather feel too much than feel nothing real.
That’s not to say antidepressants aren’t a wonderful thing. But the Lexapro can’t change the circumstances of my life, the how-do-I-manage
-this-brain-injured-husband gig I still need to face. And it can’t fix my loneliness. For as much of a miracle drug as it may be, it can’t teach me how to feel what I want to feel with TC again. Or how to make my expectations match my reality.
CHAPTER 22
September 2013
There is a tradition during every fourth inning at a Washington Nationals baseball game. It’s called the Nationals Presidents Race, and it involves four of our nation’s most famous commanders in chief—“George,” “Abe,” “Tom,” and “Teddy”—in mascot form, comically running the bases. It’s fun and predictable and aimed at kids, but no one is crazier about the Presidents Race than Kate Sullivan.
My mother sits at the stadium, elbows resting on her knees, on the edge of her seat, calling down to the field. “Woo-hoo! Go, Teddy, go!” A colorful silk scarf that she refers to as her “chemo cap” protects her newly bald head from the September sun as Jack climbs back and forth from my lap to TC’s.
It’s a long-running gag, of course. Teddy will never win. Well, maybe not never. But hardly ever. In all of Nats history, Teddy’s smoked his competitors only a handful of times. My mother, however, will never stop cheering. She’s been a die-hard Teddy fan since long before he was a beloved sports mascot. So high is her regard for our nation’s twenty-sixth president that my first name would have been Theodore if I’d been born a boy. Instead, I was named after her favorite first lady.
With my dad in the hospital following an emergency bowel obstruction surgery a few weeks earlier, baseball is a happy distractor these days. However, this is the first game I’ve attended since TC’s injury. Like other landmarks in the city, including Turtle Park, that grassy triangle where TC was assaulted, Nats Park is one of the places we’ve made a concerted effort to reclaim.
I don’t know how long our family will stay in Washington, but I do know that neither TC nor I want to spend a moment of our time here haunted by the dark days of last August. Every morning I pass Turtle Park on the way to work. It’s become so common, such a routine fixture in our “new normal” lives, that I don’t often find myself struck by its significance. Back in the early weeks of TC’s hospitalization, I remember how I purposely crossed the sidewalk, unwilling to walk the same path he’d traveled that night. But now that we’ve been back in the city for more than a month, I am unfazed by the existence of these landmarks. TC feels the same.
I’ve noticed that we share an approach for dealing with this particular aspect of the trauma. We’re both the type who prefer to tackle things head-on instead of burying them for later. Although we’ve never articulated it out loud to each other, we seem to be operating via the same philosophy: don’t let the bad shit own you. Figure out how to own it instead.
There are those who think we’re crazy for returning to Washington. Not just strangers, but people we’re close to, people who know us well. I understand their viewpoint, and I appreciate that, for the most part, it stems from a desire to keep us safe. I’m sure we appear like gluttons for punishment, returning to the literal scene of the crime, but D.C. is our home. If we let the bad thing take this most important thing away from us, we’d hardly be owning it at all.
“Damn!” My mom groans as Teddy saunters sluggishly toward home, yards behind his opponents. “Oh well. We’ll get ’em next time.”
I turn to TC and smile, my happiness hitched to my gratitude for a moment that resembles normal.
With his left arm wrapped around Jack’s bouncing waist, TC smiles back.
* * *
At first, our fights are stupid, mostly petty misunderstandings that seem to get under our skin, like picking out Jack’s outfits. But I soon realize any simple conversation has the potential to quickly unravel and become hopelessly confusing. “Do you want me to take the trash out?” I ask one evening after work.
“Yeah, I did,” TC responds, leaving me to wonder whether, yeah, he’d taken it out, or whether, yeah, he’d like me to. With no way to clarify other than to carefully repeat the question, trying to reorder it and adding additional context—“There is trash in the kitchen. I will take it out if you have not.”—I find myself sounding like one of those people talking to foreigners in a loud, overly enunciated voice. Simultaneously screaming and using hand gestures to get my message across.
“Huh?” he responds, perhaps more confused by my reframing of the question.
“Never mind,” I reply, preferring to avoid a potential argument by just taking charge of the trash situation myself.
But getting out of a conversation I’ve already initiated is oftentimes harder than staying in it. “No, tell me again,” he insists. “What are you asking?”
He means it genuinely, hoping to gain clarity for himself, but the constant asking, reasking, wording, rewording, clarifying, reclarifying is mentally taxing after a long day at work with twenty-four fourth graders who also require their own brand of asking, reasking, wording, rewording, clarifying, and reclarifying.
“It’s nothing,” I repeat convincingly. “I just wanted to know if the trash—”
“I already took it out,” he interrupts brusquely.
* * *
If it’s that much trouble trying to resolve the tiny things, the big-ticket issues are out of the question. For although I very much miss having someone to share the details of my day with, the thought of trying to explain the little intricacies that make up my work relationships and the interactions with my students is daunting. And probably not worth the effort it requires.
With little we can actually talk about, our evenings at home begin to take a predictable form: dinner together at the table with Jack, our eyes, ears, and limited energy focused on what he has to say and share. Bath and bedtime, then off to our own corners. Me, in the bedroom, lesson planning for the day ahead. TC, on the couch, usually asleep by 8:00 P.M. or skimming some magazine.
It’s lonely, this living together but separately. And lonelier still, hearing TC engage in polite conversation with neighbors and family but too exhausted to have it with me. To be fair, I’m exhausted too. I might push harder, might try to close the wedge growing between us, but the idea of talking at someone who can understand only a fraction of my words makes me feel lonelier than I already do. I don’t need TC’s blank face staring back at me to remind me I’m on my own now.
* * *
We have a job, TC and I, and it’s simply to keep swimming, to smile and say, “Thank you for all you’ve done,” to each of the happy neighbors we encounter on the street.
“TC’s looking so great, Ab,” people remark all the time.
“Yes, I know. Things are going so much better,” I hear myself say. It’s true, but after the year we’ve had, the barometer for better is laughably low. And my description is not the whole story.
There are things I cannot talk about with other people these days. Ugly things. Uncomfortable things. Things I’m afraid will make people look at TC differently. Things that will destroy the preferred narrative of our love story, the narrative I’m rooting for as well.
I have worked too hard putting our lives back together to acknowledge the reality: from the outside, we may seem to be occupying a life of normalcy, but inside, we’re still hurting. And who, after a year of being sucked into someone else’s tragedy, really wants to hang around for year two?
Luckily, the job of a schoolteacher doesn’t afford much time for personal reflection during the day. From start to end, it is a mad dash of recess duty, copying lost homework, responding to parent e-mails, and putting out one tiny fire after another (“Ms. Maslin, Antonio’s supposed to be out this game! Make him get out!”). So even though Alyson, one of my best friends and a fellow fourth-grade teacher, and I have plenty of interactions during the day, are generally focused on the triage issue of the moment: which kid used a curse word on the playground and are the materials ready for this afternoon’s writing lesson?
In many
ways I appreciate the distraction. In the classroom it is hard to remember the details of whatever screaming match ensued the night before. Had I really told TC to “man the fuck up”? Had he really slammed the door in my face? None of that mattered as I was reminding kids for the fifteenth time that week, “Backpacks get hung on hooks under our cubbies, not left on the floor!”
Even if I did have five minutes at school to shoot the shit with Alyson or JoAnn down the hall, would I really want to open that dialogue with Loved the vegan muffins you brought in this morning. Also, I’m miserable because I might as well be married to myself, but I can’t leave because a) I still love my husband, and b) it might literally make me the World’s Worst Person.
I have a flock of good friends, each of them in loving, committed, happy marriages with wonderful, stand-up men. They are accomplished women in accomplished relationships, and now, being back in this environment, I feel like the outlier among them, desperate to keep my place in the pack. I have no reason to suspect my friends would respond to my honesty with anything other than compassion, but pride keeps me silent. Hurting on my own.
With no quick-handed description other than my “year off” to refer to my absence in the classroom, I channel what minuscule amount of post-caregiving energy I have into a very diverse and demanding group of students. There are precocious gems like Landon, whose father is a NASA scientist and whose IQ is probably thirty points higher than mine, and Sloane, whose mother is a press reporter for the White House and who, at nine, is already well on her way toward acceptance at some Ivy League institution. There is Mary—Mary with her French lessons and violin lessons and unbelievable artistic aptitude—making me wonder what in God’s good name I have to offer to a fourth grader who is already writing French poetry.