by Katie Arnold
Every now and then, the storm eases and I burst out of my bubble. These are the days when I look back on the past six months and think, Wow, I was so fucked up. I think this means I’ve broken through to the other side, but I haven’t, not yet. I’m still just a temporary visitor in the land of normalcy. It’s only a matter of time before the maelstrom whips around and sucks me back in.
One warm morning in late March, I brush my hair and put on one of my slightly less moth-bitten sweaters and ride my bicycle to the coffee shop a few blocks away, to meet with a man named Alan, for whom I’d done some writing in the fall. He’d hired me to prepare a report on the sorry state of public school education in Santa Fe. I’d met him between trips to Huntly Stage, to go over my findings. Now he wants to thank me for my work and see how I’m doing.
The sight of him brings it all back: the creaky dying-ness of the fall, the decrepit grief plastered all over my skin. I think about the emails I sent him from Virginia, how composed I thought they sounded, how professional. My father is dying but I expect to be able to send you my research on time. I’d been so sure I was keeping my shit dialed. I was too busy to be sad! But I can tell by the way he’s looking at me now, with sincere pity, that I hadn’t, not at all. I’d been in the storm then, and I’m still in the storm.
Alan lowers his head and glances around the room. “After my father died, I talked to him,” he says. “It helped me a lot.”
I force a smile and avert my eyes. It’s nothing he’s done or not done, but I can’t look at his face without Dad dying all over again. I thank him for his condolences, wish him luck with the research, and pedal away.
* * *
—
I find my healers the usual Santa Fe way: word of mouth through the New Age grapevine. So-and-so knows so-and-so, who tried such-and-such, and it worked! Always when I get a new lead, my first response is great hopefulness. It’s only when I arrive for my first appointment that I become nervous. What if this person’s a nutjob? I shouldn’t spend so much money. I should be more discerning, but if I were more discerning, I wouldn’t be in this situation in the first place. I would know the difference between other people’s suffering and my own.
My latest hope is a woman named Abby, who practices somatic therapy, which helps patients tune in to sensations in the body as a way to reduce stress and anxiety and overcome trauma. Intensely shocking or upsetting experiences disrupt the nervous system, Abby tells me at our first appointment, and the irregular buildup of stress hormones manifests not just with worried thoughts but with physical discomfort—everything from muscular pain to dizziness to digestive troubles. Increasingly, somatic therapy is being used with success to treat veterans suffering from PTSD.
In my case, the shock of Dad’s diagnosis and the speed with which he died coincided so closely with Maisy’s birth that I didn’t have time to acclimate to either. All the fear and joy and grief are still whipping around inside me, like a traffic jam of emotions. This, Abby says, creates bottlenecks of physical pain in my body, including my perpetually stiff neck and sore back. The tingling I’ve been feeling in my fingers and toes and scalp isn’t a tumor or a stroke. It’s my confused energy looking for an exit.
Abby begins asking me questions about Dad, and every few minutes she says, “Notice what you’re feeling in your body.” I name them aloud: buzzing shins, an uncomfortable pinch in my neck, thoughts spinning through my brain like buzzards circling the farm. She gives me a few simple deep-breathing exercises.
In the first one, she instructs me to turn my head and look over my left shoulder. Then, very gradually, I turn it back until my chin is pointing over my right shoulder. The key is to move as slowly as possible. “Pretend you’re doing it in your sleep, and that your head is floating lightly on your neck,” she says. “Can you feel your breath deepen?” I can.
Next, she says, I’m supposed to yawn.
“Really?” I ask.
She nods. We’re conditioned to think that yawning in public is rude and should be suppressed, but it’s actually one of our bodies’ best ways of releasing stressful energy. “Let your mouth hang open and your chin go slack,” she instructs me. “Tuck your chin slightly in toward your neck. This will trigger the familiar yawning sensation. Then open your mouth wide, close your eyes, and let the yawn come. If you’re really feeling it, stretch your arms above your head.”
Yawning is reflexive, but yawning on command in front of someone you barely know is very awkward. I try to close my eyes, but I can feel Abby watching me, and I’m too self-conscious to let my mouth fall open. What if I have spinach in my teeth?
She must sense my discomfort, because she says, “It helps to try this alone at first until you get the hang of it. You should feel free to make whatever expressions you usually make when you yawn, whether it’s squeezing your eyes or hunching your shoulders.”
Before I go, she asks me to tell her about a moment of joy from my day. I think and think. I can’t think of anything. How can this be? I have a nine-month-old baby who laughs constantly and a bright-eyed two-and-a-half-year-old who’s learning a new word almost every day. I leave her office determined to pay closer attention.
The next morning, after breakfast, I read to Maisy in the playroom. She sits on my lap for two pages, then squirms off, an inchworm nosing her way across the floor. I open my mouth and wiggle my chin. Maisy studies me and does the same. The yawn starts tentatively, like it might not happen, and then it does, rippling outward, cracking my face wide open, taking over my whole body. I waggle my arms sideways, above my head; the yawn is a deep sigh filling me with air. I pick Maisy up, and together we twirl around the room. She squeals and flaps her arms. I know she is happy. I am happy. It is so easy, I can’t possibly forget.
* * *
—
The days pendulum back and forth, and my moods with them: peaceful, elated, enraged. Anger is unseemly when you have babies. They are precious and beautiful and they mean no harm, and I am lucky to have them. But I am not really angry at the babies, and I am not really angry at Steve, though sometimes when I look at him, all I can think is You got me into this. No, the anger is voluminous, an ancient, collective rage that’s bigger than me, bigger than Dad and his duplicities, maybe bigger than even anger itself.
By May I’ve reached a breaking point. On the recommendation of a friend, I make an appointment with a family psychotherapist named Kate. Her specialty is mindful parenting, which combines Eastern meditation with traditional counseling. At our first session, she hands me a questionnaire. When I’m done filling it out, she sits in her wing chair and studies my responses. I stare out the window. The questions on my lips are the same ones that always come to mind when I’m at the doctor’s: How bad is it? Am I going to make it?
When I meet her eyes, she smiles kindly. “You have moderate perinatal mood disorder,” she says. She explains that it was most likely brought on by an ill-timed alchemy of grief, fatigue, and hormones.
Now I finally have a name for the weird, surging fury, the listless blahs, the screeching impatience, the simmering rage, the occasional overwhelming urge to run away. Kate gives me strict marching orders: nine hours of sleep a night. Do whatever it takes and take whatever it takes to catch up on my sleep.
She shows me how to use my five senses to relax when I’m feeling anxious. “What do you smell, see, hear, taste, feel?” she asks. “Go through each one of your senses and name them, one at a time.” This will ground me in the present moment, which is not nearly so terrifying as the future.
In other words, pay attention.
Oh, that. I’d forgotten.
Then she says, “And I want you to lower the bar. It’s okay to be a B parent. It’s okay to be okay.”
This is harder to swallow. I’m hardwired to strive. Okay wasn’t always okay in our house. Yet I know she’s right: Even now, when I’m killing myself to overperform
, there are many days when I barely muster half-assed.
“When you find yourself impatient or angry, what are you resisting?” she asks. “Can you shift from the moment you wanted to the moment that is?” It sounds so straightforward, but I know that this will be the work of the rest of my life.
* * *
—
At the end of May, Steve and the girls and I fly to upstate New York to bury Dad’s ashes. His plot is next to his grandparents’, in a cemetery near Oneonta, where my great-grandfather was president of Hartwick College after World War II. Lesley is there, and Meg and her kids, and Merrill and Philip. Even Uncle Phil has made the trip from Wisconsin, where he’s lived for the past decade, accompanied by his house mother. At sixty-nine, he’s stooped and frail and seems in a daze. He did not get to see Dad before he died. “Is that Dave in there?” he asks, rapping his cane on the ground.
Dad’s hole is so small, and he is so small in the small carved mahogany box that his friend Philip made by hand. When Pippa bends down to place white roses on the urn, I think about all the things she’ll miss about her grandfather and won’t even know she’s missing: lying with him in the grass, shooting rubber-band airplanes into the sky. And I think about all the times I’ve left Dad, but especially the last time, scooping his ashes into a plastic ziplock bag in the kitchen at Huntly Stage, the strange weight of them, how chunky and granular they were. This leaving feels anticlimactic. The box is too small to hold all of him.
The next morning in the motel, the girls wake before sunrise. I hide under the covers, hoping they’ll go back to sleep, but Steve gets them out of their cribs and lets them wrestle around in an impromptu boxing match on the bathroom floor. Pippa is winning, Maisy wailing.
“Shhh,” I hiss, afraid they’ll wake the neighbors through the thin walls. Then I think that maybe if I don’t move, they won’t see me in the bed, won’t cry Mama, won’t need me for five minutes more. It dawns on me that maybe this is what Kate means by okay.
“Someday we’ll laugh about this,” I groan to Steve from beneath the comforter.
And Steve, in a pitch-perfect tone of weary resignation, in a display of perfect, lovable Steveness, replies, “Might as well be today.”
Later, as I’m changing Maisy’s diaper, she kicks her pudgy legs in the air and tries to roll off the table. She isn’t in a rush or perturbed or sad or impatient or distracted or exhausted. She’s just there, smiling and doing her best to squirm and strive while I do my best to hold on. This time I don’t even have to try: I yawn, big and wide, showing all my teeth. For a split second, my mind empties of all worries and I imagine a day far in the future, when I look back and remember this time as crazy and wonderful and maddening, maybe even magical.
Might as well be today.
14
The Thin Edge
PHOTO: KATIE ARNOLD
San Juan River, Utah, 2011
Now that I have a name for my condition—postpartum anxiety—I can feel it lifting slightly. Three million women in the United States suffer from perinatal mood disorders every year. I’m not crazy, I’m not alone, and there are steps I can take to feel better.
I develop a sleep system: I drink a mug of chamomile tea before bed and turn my computer off by 9 p.m. I wear wax earplugs (never rubber; they fall out) and a memory-foam eye mask that molds to my face and blocks all light. A humidifier purrs white noise in the corner of our room. Swaddled in my night cocoon, I can’t hear the dogs’ toenails clicking across the wood floor or the coyotes yipping or the girls cooing in their sleep, but I can hear them crying. When they do, I elbow Steve and he gets up without a grumble.
Even by twenty-first-century standards, I know I lucked into a highly evolved member of the male species. Steve cooks. I do dishes. We take turns going grocery shopping. I breastfeed, he changes diapers. He takes out the trash, I do the laundry. I work part-time at home, he works full-time outside. I bought the house, but for now he’s paying the bills. He plays Frisbee in the evenings, I run in the mornings. Our division of labor isn’t exact, and it isn’t completely equal—if anything, Steve’s doing more right now—but we balance each other’s blind spots.
I know this is mostly because of Steve, but I like to think it has just a little bit to do with Dad, too. “I feel compelled to give you my standard advice, about fathers,” he wrote me in an email a few weeks before Pippa was born. “Make sure they feel included. Don’t forget about them!”
* * *
—
Sometimes when Natalie and I walk, the subject of meditation comes up in passing. We talk about it casually, the way we might discuss the omelets we ate for breakfast. I’ve learned, for example, that in Zen Buddhism, meditating on a cushion on the floor is called zazen. When she was in her thirties, Natalie sat cross-legged in zazen for so long that she did permanent damage to her hip. Now she’s become looser with her practice, meditating in a chair, leaning against a tree, lying in bed. The few times I’ve tried zazen since Dad died, I either started crying, fell asleep, or became so filled with a nameless wrath that I wanted to run, screaming, from the room.
When I mention this to Natalie, she says, “That’s normal. You might like walking meditation better. Watch me—” and she clasps her hands behind her back, bows her head, and walks slowly down the trail, more slowly than I’ve ever seen her walk, more slowly than seems humanly possible. With each step, she presses her foot into the ground, rolls through to her toes, and lifts it up again, one foot after the next, swaying a little as though dancing to the world’s slowest beat.
“Breathe deeply and feel your whole foot on the earth,” Natalie says, without turning around. I try to copy her. I think I might fall over, but I’m also aware of the pine needles and pebbles beneath the soles of my shoes and the way the air glides in and out through my nose, in time with my feet. We walk quietly like this for a few minutes, and then Natalie says, “Okay,” and snaps back to her regular gait, like she has places to go. It would have taken us hours to make it down the mountain at that pace, but I like the idea that I might be able to achieve the same results as sitting—relaxation and peace—without actually having to sit.
A few years ago, Steve built a flagstone garden path around our house, and sometimes when the girls are sleeping I do laps in my bare feet. Steve and I call this going around the world. In my last life, before babies, I went to Africa and hiked over an eighteen-thousand-foot pass in Nepal and waded fast clear rivers in Patagonia and climbed ocean cliffs in Thailand. Now I walk in circles through our backyard. There’s something about the narrowness of possibility, the small effort required of me, that I like. I don’t have to think about where to go or what to do or what to wear; I just walk out the door. Sometimes I pause outside the girls’ bedroom windows and prick up my ears like a fox, listening for sounds of stirrings, feeling like a ghost in my own home.
One evening a few days later, when Steve is out playing Frisbee, I practice walking meditation on my way around the world. The stones are smooth under my feet, and I try to remember how Natalie did it: land on my heels, roll through my arches, press through my toes. Repeat, repeat, repeat. It usually takes me less than two minutes to complete the loop when I’m walking slowly, but now I try to stretch it to five or six.
“Walking is a way to taste impermanence,” Natalie told me on the mountain. At the time, this made no sense to me: Who needs to taste impermanence when you’re drowning in it? But now, as my mind empties of worry, I become aware of the breeze that will never repeat itself, another day in our daughters’ lives gone beyond our grasp, clouds drifting east over the mountains, their exact pattern impossible to duplicate, and I almost understand what she means. Impermanence is everywhere, the only true constant.
* * *
—
Kate, the mindfulness psychologist, gave me strict orders to REST. I wrote it down in my notebook in all caps and
underlined it twice. Lying low at home until the panic passes would be the normal, sane person’s response to acute anxiety. Unless, of course, you’re me, in which case you will go anywhere, do anything, and try anything to escape it.
For example, the river.
Friends of ours have invited us to join them on a rafting trip down the San Juan River in southeastern Utah. Some men give their wives jewelry after they give birth, but when Pippa was born, in 2008, Steve bought us an inflatable raft. It was thirteen feet long and bright blue, the color of the New Mexico sky, with a pair of long yellow oars. My “push present,” we joked, was a boat. But it wasn’t a joke, really. Steve and I had been doing river trips together around the Southwest since we met, paddling whitewater and running up side canyons, and we wanted to raise our girls the same way, outside, in the landscapes we love most.
When Pippa was ten months old, the age Maisy is now, we took her on her first river trip, for five days down the San Juan, fifty-six miles of easy Class I and II rapids. I’d been in full freak-out mode beforehand, but when we got to the boat launch, I saw a family with a baby draped over a cooler, sound asleep in his life jacket. The mother, in faded nylon river shorts and tanned bare feet, was loading gear onto the raft with one hand and feeding her toddler crackers with the other. Relief flooded through me. Maybe we weren’t insane after all!
“How old is your baby?” I practically screamed.
She glanced up and smiled reassuringly. “Ten months.” Then she added nonchalantly, “This is his second river trip. We took him last fall, when he was four months old.”