It Sucked and Then I Cried

by Heather Armstrong

And I remember thinking to myself that it was totally worth it; I was so glad we decided to shatter all semblance of Leta’s daily schedule and walk a mile up that gorgeous mountain where there was no hot water to make a bottle and no soft surface to take a nap. She was liking it even though she didn’t want to like it. I was Master of the Universe.

  And that’s when God decided to smite me with his sword of Screaming Leta.

  With no hot water to make a bottle and no soft surface on which to take a nap, we found ourselves assaulted by an inconsolable force of fury. On the side of a mountain. In the sun. By a lake. With pretty trees.

  I tried plying her with beef jerky and all ten of my yummy fingers. I tried walking her up and down the path while singing every song in the Morrissey catalogue. I idiotically tried to feed her a cold bottle with cold milk and a cold nipple and was met with a reaction that said, “You are a wretched fiend-mother. I would rather you offer me a witch’s tit.”

  And that’s when the anxiety attack hit, my mouth spewing forbidden obscenities in front of my mother and several innocent nieces and nephews. And I began running back down the mountain clutching Leta to my chest in an effort to shield innocent birds and squirrels and baby rabbits from the screaming sword of God’s wrath. Jon followed closely behind carrying all of our gear and speaking rational words of logical logic to guide us down the trail.

  About twenty steps into our descent God opened up the heavens and began to rain down upon my wickedness heavy golf-ball-sized hail. I managed to hold Leta close enough that her head was spared any pelting from the golf balls even though she tried every maneuver in her repertoire to pry herself from my grasp, arching her back and pushing her body away from mine. It was like she knew there were golf balls falling from the sky and she was trying to catch them with her mouth.

  Rain and hail and wind and screaming followed us the entire hike back down the mountain, and when we got back to the car she continued to scream until we could warm a bottle up in front of the heating vents. We were soaking wet and bruised from God’s game of miniature golf.

  That was probably the lowest point of the week, other low points being screaming matches between certain members of my family and the throwing of keys BY SOMEONE OTHER THAN ME! And then there was the constant fear that certain nephews might crush Leta’s skull by walking back and forth around her play area, except these nephews had never really walked anywhere in their lives, unless you could place stomping and thrashing in the same category as a leisurely stroll.

  We were so happy to drive home and sleep in our own beds, to dodge flying objects thrown only by me. Leta took two two-hour naps the day we got home as if to say, God thinks you deserve a break, Crazy Lady. No more enclosed quarters with my lovely family who all eat hot dogs with no buns, no more revving ATVs, no more hiking through hostile territory, NO MORE GRUMPY BABY.

  At the beginning of August Jon took several days of government-sanctioned Family Leave to watch over me as I tried a new round of hardcore drugs laden with side effects. By this point I had already tried Risperdal, Ativan, Trazodone, Lamictal, Effexor, Abilify, Strattera, Klonopin, and Seroquel. I couldn’t sleep, couldn’t unclench my jaw or hands, couldn’t imagine how I would get through another ten minutes.

  I was also terrified of the strain that this was putting on my marriage. Jon was in the middle of a huge project at work, and in order to get time off he risked the wrath of an unforgiving boss. I watched the lines around his eyes multiply when he would come home expecting a hug after a day of being belittled in front of his coworkers only to have me storm out of the house screaming, “IT’S YOUR TURN!” Or to discover that I had been so frustrated with the collapsible stroller that I had thrown it off the porch into the yard and then slammed the front door so hard that the doorknob had fallen off. Jon routinely came home to a broken house and a broken wife, and I often felt like I had broken his life.

  Taking family leave from his job had been his idea because he was done dealing with my unpredictable outbursts. Every day he brought up the idea that I should check myself into the hospital because he didn’t want to go on living this way, why did I? So that’s why I agreed to try new drugs, because I could see how I was slowly driving my husband away.

  I was already well aware of the terrible things the drugs could do to me and had on occasion read threads on a few message boards where people shouted OH MY GOD THAT DRUG WILL KILL YOU at each other, and in such a fragile state I didn’t need strangers predicting my death in all caps. I’d done the research and had rolled out of bed feeling like someone had scraped out my guts and replaced them with a colony of maggots. One of the drugs I tried had the potential to cause a deadly skin rash. A killer rash! That kills people! At the end of one of my therapy sessions I half-jokingly asked the doctor, “Who dies from a skin rash?” as if to say, “Who is such a pussy that they would fall over from a few red bumps?” For the previous hour I had detailed my elaborate state of pussiness, and I wanted him to be able to make a speech at my funeral about how I was able to make jokes about my condition up until the last layer of skin peeled from my body. “She was a funny girl, if not a total pussy,” he would say.

  The whole thing reminded me of the semester I studied in England my senior year in college. I spent a lot of time with a family in North London, a family with three young kids who could solve the world’s energy crisis with the force of their collective brain power. During my first dinner with the family the two-year-old girl explained to me that the vegetables were “delightfully organic as mum prefers it that way.” And then she smiled and looked off into the distance as if something had just occurred to her, perhaps the delightful solution to cold fusion.

  After dinner the mother took all three kids upstairs to prepare them for their nighttime bath, and soon after the six-year-old son came traipsing downstairs to make faces at me at the bottom of the stairs. He was completely nude except for a dog tag hanging around his neck. His father, who was sitting next to me, motioned the naked boy over so that he could come show me his penile disease.

  Blink.

  Blink. Blink.

  I was perfectly comfortable with the fact that the boy was nude as I had read about young boys and their nudeness in philosophy. But I was in no way comfortable or interested in getting a closer look at this young lad’s penile disease, and as he skipped closer I scrambled for a way to say to his father, “You know, he probably has a great penile disease and I’m sure you’re very proud of it, but can’t I just trust you on this one?”

  But how do you say that to someone? How do you actually utter the words “penile disease” to a distinguished British father who is obviously very happy to trot out his son’s disorder? And so I did what any other American would do in this situation and I screamed, “PENILE DISEASE? PENILE DISEASE??!!”

  Sensing my disbelief his father assured me, “Yes! A penile disease!” And then he informed me further that it was “indeed very nasty and grave.” And then he went on to describe how common these penile diseases were among young kids, all while the boy skipped closer and closer with his diseased penile. At this point he was singing a diseased penile ditty with the words, “I’ve got a penile disease! I’ve got a penile disease!” while clomping his bare feet to the rhythm, his diseased penile bouncing up and down. I wanted to die, or at least disappear and never again be confronted with the vision of a diseased penile clomping its nudeness toward my defenseless non-peniled self.

  And as the walls of the room were about to collapse on my dizzying, frenzied panic, as the air became harder and harder to inhale, the father reached down to his son, lifted up the dog tag, and showed me the inscription: “This child suffers from a peanut allergy.”

  Peanut.

  Allergy.

  A peanut disease.

  My world did an automatic flip-flop when I realized that we had been speaking two different versions of English and I said, “PEANUT? PEANUT DISEASE??” And his father, without missing a beat again assured me, “That’s what I
said. Penile disease.”

  I was so relieved that I reached down and hugged the nude non-peanut eater and bellowed, “I LOVE YOUR PEANUT DISEASE!”

  And he said back sadly, “I can’t eat peniles. They give me a rash.”

  During Leta’s appointment for her six-month immunizations we had to prepare her for a third round of injections. During her second-month and fourth-month procedures she cried for all of four seconds each time, but that time she bawled open-mouthed, pausing between screams with a silence that made each subsequent scream unbearable, like the eerie silence before a tornado picks up a double-wide and then throws the son of a bitch two miles across town.

  Tears puddled underneath her head on the white butcher paper lining the inspection table, and I hugged her arms and held her head in my hands as I let go of my own emotion and cried in rhythm with her tears. Even though I knew that every other child goes through this, I felt like they were picking on Leta and I wanted to punch the nurse in the nose. Wasn’t there a more gentle way to deliver the injections, perhaps a pill? Or maybe a blessing in the child’s general direction? Whose brilliant idea was it to protect the world from these diseases by JABBING BABIES WITH NEEDLES? Why were we covering light sockets with protective plastic coverings when doctors everywhere were poking infants with sharp, disease-infested objects? Parenthood makes no sense.

  Immunizations always messed with Leta’s sleeping habits and left her aching all night with a high fever. I’d been worried about this particular round of immunizations because we had worked so hard to get her to sleep through the night, and for almost two months straight she had slept at least eleven to twelve hours every night without waking up. The night of the immunizations, however, she was awake at 2:30, 3:30, 4, 5:30, 6, and finally 6:45 AM bellowing her discomfort in moans and wails and screeches. I knew that she was just a baby and she had no idea what she was doing, but this behavior led me to believe that she had inherited the Hamilton sick gene. This meant that when she was sick the whole world had to suffer with her.

  I got confirmation of her Hamilton sick gene when at 2:30 AM she made a horrible, ground-shaking gag noise as I tried to give her Infants’ Tylenol. It was a sound I recognized from childhood, a sound that used to echo off the walls in my house and bounce off the inner core of the Earth when my father was perched over a toilet and dry-heaving his empty stomach out his face.

  My father never vomited quietly. When he gagged he gagged with his entire body, his whole torso writhing and twitching to the cadence of dead souls coming out of his mouth in booming stereo surround. He would wake up the whole house in the middle of the night because the family wasn’t allowed to sleep when he was sick. That wouldn’t have been fair. It was the loudest noise of my childhood, louder than any severe thunderstorm or locomotive engine, until my brother hit puberty and assumed the legacy. There was no louder noise in this world than a sixteen-year-old Hamilton pubescent puking SpaghettiOs at 5:30 AM on a Monday morning. When my brother was sick all of Western Tennessee wasn’t allowed to sleep.

  None of us slept very much that night, which wasn’t that big of a deal when you consider the fact that I already had a sleeping disorder and didn’t sleep much anyway. While listening to Leta moan I lay awake thinking about how she had peed while lying naked on the scale at the doctor’s office—not just a little pee but a gushing fountain of pee, waterfalls of pee, pee that you usually see flowing out of the mouth of a sculpture in the middle of a public town square. I didn’t know whether to be embarrassed or to throw in a few pennies and make a wish.

  And then I thought about how we had this baby who was half asleep and moaning in the next room, a kid with flesh and blood and hair and a fully functioning excretory system. I had a baby who sometimes looked like me, who sometimes reminded me of my father. I didn’t care that it was usually mid-gag while waking up a good portion of the world’s Mormon population. Somehow that seemed fair.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Heather, Interrupted

  After weeks of threatening to leave Jon if he had me committed to a hospital, I finally gave in and committed myself. I told him that I wanted him to drive me to the hospital and sit with me as I checked into the psychiatric ward. I was afraid that if I didn’t go ahead and do it that I would experience some sort of nervous breakdown.

  My anxiety had only gotten worse since I started seeing a therapist three months earlier. It was so bad that it choked me every day, and sometimes I couldn’t even walk because my body was paralyzed with anxiety. I’d tried over ten different medications and each one had made my anxiety worse. The depression came and went and then came again, but the anxiety was constant. I could barely eat anything and couldn’t sleep, even though I’d tried every sleeping pill available at the pharmacy. I wanted to commit suicide if only because then I wouldn’t have to feel the pain of being awake anymore.

  I couldn’t believe that I didn’t feel better. I couldn’t believe that it had been three months and I DIDN’T FEEL ANY BETTER.

  I had to believe that going to the hospital would at least let me clear my head, or that it might actually provide an answer. I had to believe in something because I didn’t feel like I had any hope. The anxiety was so painful, and I couldn’t see an end to it.

  Six months after having all my instincts turn on and go haywire I still couldn’t turn them off, or even turn them down. Those instincts turned into demons that terrorized me from the moment I got out of bed in the morning to the hours and hours that I tried to sleep at night. I never had a moment of peace.

  I just didn’t feel better.

  When I checked myself in to the hospital I felt like a crazed kid at a concert who had, in a moment of sheer insanity, jumped off the stage in a grand, sweeping swan dive.

  The first night there was probably the worst night of my life. They didn’t have any beds in the unlocked unit of the facility so they stuck me in the least scary locked unit, the one whose occupants averaged over eighty-two years in age. Everything smelled of urine, including the plastic eating utensils. Everyone referred to me as “kiddo” and that was very cute and endearing and all, but I was LOCKED INSIDE A MENTAL INSTITUTION.

  The views out the windows of the facility were oddly beautiful. The building sat at the curve of a small hill overlooking the entire Salt Lake Valley. In one direction I could see sweeping hills and nooks and canyons dotted with green desert plants that looked like dusty velvet.

  In the other direction I saw an open field of lights and streets that seemed to extend for hundreds of miles, and it felt like I was hovering over the whole scene. I could see the Mormon temple from up there, or at least the buildings in downtown that surround and protect it. I imagine that Brigham Young was standing in a place similar to this one when he looked over the valley and decided that “this was the place” to settle the Mormons. By saying that I am in no way implying that he was a crazed lunatic. Not at all. Nope.

  Inside the facility, however, the lights were fluorescent and the food was plastic. Some of the food even JIGGLED. When I arrived on a Thursday afternoon I was in such a bad place that I couldn’t sit still to read a magazine, and the fluorescent glow in my room was flickering like a sequence in a horror film. All I could do was curl up in my bed and pull the covers over my head. I couldn’t believe I was there.

  I had given my story to at least three different people—an intake social worker, a nurse, and a doctor—so I thought that they understood that I had a severe and unbearable case of insomnia. I remember saying out loud three different times: “I DON’T SLEEP. EVER.” That night as I prepared to go to bed I asked someone at the front desk if they could give me something to sleep, and the guy on duty plopped down a pill that I had tried before, a pill that hadn’t ever worked.

  So I said, “This pill doesn’t work.”

  And he said, “This is the only thing I am allowed to give you.”

  Four hours later after trying and trying to go to sleep I wandered back out to the front desk and asked for so
mething else, PLEASE GIVE ME SOMETHING ELSE. There was a new girl at the desk and she checked my chart and informed me, “It says here that I’m not allowed to give you anything else. Sorry.”

  WHAT KIND OF THERAPY WAS THIS?

  So I didn’t sleep that night. Not a wink. And every time the girl from the front desk came to check on me—every fifteen minutes, with a flashlight, in my face, because I’m a CRAZIE!—I would sit up straight in bed and say, “HI! I’m STILL AWAKE!” By morning she was checking on me from the hallway and saying back, “Hi! You’re still awake. I get it.”

  Friday morning I finally saw my official doctor, an amazing psychiatrist who had been treating people like me for longer than I had been alive. He had read my chart—imagine that! He had done some research! On me! His patient! And within the first five minutes of talking to me he determined why and how the meds I’d been taking weren’t working. He had such a direct approach, almost like a bulldozer with a PhD, and I wanted to smother him with love. I could tell that he wanted to see me get better and knowing that he cared, even just a little bit, made me feel SO MUCH BETTER.

  I did my best to impress him, to make him believe that underneath the Crazie was a solid individual because I so desperately wanted to be unlocked. By the end of our session he had ordered me a transfer to the unlocked unit, a place where I could come and go without being followed by someone with a flashlight.

  Because I was under constant supervision, I was able to take therapeutic quantities of drugs immediately: 40mg of Prozac, 10mg of Valium, 2400mg of Neurontin. That amount of Neurontin could probably knock out an entire herd of buffalo, but because my anxiety was so bad, it did nothing but enable me to sit still. For the first time since Leta was born. It was a combination he had given to countless women who had suffered postpartum depression, one that had worked time and time again. I felt a difference within two hours, and if you ask Jon he will tell you that when he saw me that afternoon he saw Heather for the first time in seven months, not that awful woman who liked to throw keys at his head. I truly believe that my doctor in the hospital saved my life. I owe that man my life.