The Wrong Way to Save Your Life

by Megan Stielstra

  32

  At a routine postpartum checkup, the doctor tells me there’s a cyst on my ovary. She makes a grabbing gesture, wrapping her fingers around something unseen and ending in a fist. “Just cut it out of me,” I say. I am not thinking clearly. I am not thinking at all. The baby still isn’t eating well and I am still not sleeping and it’s dark in here. When I think of the word “here” I make a gesture toward my brain that nobody understands but me.

  We talk options. There’s a chance I could lose the ovary and immediately I’m thinking: Wait, what about another kid? Do I want another kid? Where would I put another kid? Who would hold another kid? How would I feed another kid? I can’t feed the first kid. “The medical odds of getting pregnant are fine with one ovary,” my doctor assures me. “We just need to be realistic.” I laugh out loud. Realism is not my strong suit.

  I’m not allowed to eat or drink anything the night before surgery. My body needs to be totally clear of fluids; I am given a pamphlet and the word totally is in all caps. By the time I get to the hospital I am so hungry I want to eat my own arm. We get to pre-op, fill out paperwork, and ask for the bathroom to make sure I’m totally totally clear. After that, I’m led to a prep room, handed the backless robe, and a very nice woman named Lois comes in with a plastic cup and tells me she needs a urine sample.

  “I can’t,” I tell her.

  “We just need a little.”

  “I don’t have a little.”

  “A few drops. You can manage a few drops, right?”

  I imagine I am the warrior Yu Shu Lien from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and I cut off Lois’s head with the Sword of Destiny. Then I go back to the bathroom. What follows is ten ridiculous minutes trying to conjure something out of nothing while Christopher gets out his laptop to “live tweet” this whole experience on a new social media platform called Twitter, which ended up being great because it cut the tension and proved helpful in later writing this account. Seemingly endless anesthesiologists come in, all saying the same things: What diseases are in the family—heart, skin. Are you allergic to anything—no. You’ll feel a burn when I put in this IV—yippee! That’s an interesting tattoo. What does it mean? And while all of this is happening, my doctor draws on my stomach in purple marker and Lois tests my measly pee in case I’m pregnant.

  “I just was pregnant.” I tell her. “I just had a baby.”

  “Are you breast-feeding?” she asks.

  I am silly from the IV. Tee-hee boobs.

  “Mama’s gonna have moonshine in her milk tonight!” somebody says. I remember laughing: at the moonshine, at Lois, at the anesthesiologists, at the paperwork. Things might go wrong. Sign this form confirming you’ve been told things might go wrong. “The surgery will take two hours,” my doctor explains. “Afterward, you can go home once you walk across the post-op room.”

  “How long will that take?” Christopher says.

  “Four or five hours,” the doctor says.

  “This will feel like four or five martinis,” the anesthesiologist says.

  I must have passed out because the next thing I remember is waking up. My first thought: I don’t want to be here anymore. So I get up and walk across the room.

  “That was fast!” says the recovery nurse.

  “Thanks!” I say. “I’m going to puke!”

  Christopher comes in with crackers and juice and Norco, and explains that I still have both ovaries; the doctor showed him pictures. I remember feeling relieved. I remember feeling fuzzy. I remember getting home that night and my friend Amanda was there with my son. She handed him to me and I cried, not because I’d been scared something would go wrong during the surgery but because surgery is a scary thing, period, never mind when there’s a new little person needing me to wake up the next morning and feed him and love him and teach him that sometimes—most of the time, all of the time—we are tested.

  32

  i need help.

  I stared at those words in my journal for weeks. Eventually I decided that help was too big, too much, too terrifying. I crossed it out and wrote a shower instead.

  I could do that. I could get up off the floor and take a shower.

  Remember those Herbal Essences commercials in the nineties where the woman has an orgasm while shampooing? It was like that.

  The next day, I wrote: i need to make the bed.

  I made the bed and wrote: i made the bed!!

  Two exclamation points, that’s how fucking huge this was.

  Next: i need to walk the dog.

  I walked the dog and wrote: i walked the dog!!

  Next: grocery shopping.

  i went grocery shopping!!

  coffee.

  i got coffee!!

  i wrote a poem!! a shitty poem!! but i wrote it!!

  i sang to the baby!! he likes big star!!

  i got the baby in the backpack thing!! i didn’t drop him!!

  we went to the montrose dog beach!! mojo is so happy!!

  there’s something weird with the baby monitor i can see our neighbor’s baby on the screen wtf??

  i went to buy pants!!

  fuck pants!!

  we did not watch the finale of the wire.

  we did not watch the 2008 presidential debates.

  we slept.

  we slept.

  we slept.

  Every day, I made lists of these seemingly small accomplishments until one day—and maybe this sounds ridiculous but I swear it’s the truth, a memory so tangible I can hold it in my hands—I walked into my son’s room and I saw him. He was beautiful and perfect and laughing and I saw him. I could live that moment from the movies where the mother holds her child and her heart cracks open and how can you breathe under the weight of all that love?

  33

  Barack Obama won the election and Chicago was a dance party. You could feel it: walking down the street, riding the L, strangers high-fiving. For months, I’d been living in a bubble: my baby, my job, everything inward. Stepping back into the world at this particular moment in history was a gift.

  I want to remember our country’s capacity for joy.

  He gave his acceptance speech in front of 240,000 people at the exact spot of the 1968 Democratic National Convention. “History gave Grant Park another chance,” said CNN, “as the scene of a peaceful and jubilant celebration.” I watched the setup from my office windows in the South Loop, the crowd filling the park. Then I headed home to watch with my family—blood and chosen.

  33

  I bent over the bathtub to pick up my son and my back snapped. Both of us hit the floor. He sat up and laughed, naked and dripping. His laugh was the most glorious thing I’d ever heard.

  I tried to sit up and discovered I couldn’t.

  33

  I was scared of the physical therapist. I might hurt myself again.

  33

  I was scared of the gym. I might hurt myself again.

  34

  I was scared of the yoga mat. I might hurt myself again.

  34

  I was scared to be touched. I might hurt myself.

  35

  I was scared to sleep. I might turn the wrong way in my sleep and hurt myself again.

  35

  I was scared of shoes. The arches could hurt me.

  35

  Christopher gave me an album called Into the Trees, by Zoë Keating. She’s a one-woman orchestra, a classical cellist who uses live sampling to build an entire planet of sound. One of the songs in particular cut into my heart. It’s called “Optimist,” written for her unborn son.

  What’s the song that saved you?

  In the many moons ago of pre-Internet streaming, I’d buy a CD for a single track. Nothing’s Shocking for “Summertime Rolls,” Blue for “Case of You,” Exile in Guyville for “Fuck and Run,” which I’d play on repeat ad nauseam until (a) I scratched the disc, (b) I lost the disc, or (c) whoever I was living with “accidentally” scratched and/or lost it, which honestly, I get. Other people
’s obsessions are infuriating. My husband—a man who stood on a beach and promised to love me forever despite my obsessions—recently took to social media for support: “Megan has listened to the same song nine hundred times in a row,” igniting several discussion threads including best practices for couples who work from home, superior brands of noise-canceling headphones, and “omg when I lived with her in [year] she did the same thing with [song] and now I can’t listen to [band].”

  This originated, I think, with Paul Simon. My dad and I logged countless hours driving between the town where we lived and the town where he worked, rewinding Graceland and singing our faces off. Long before I knew what a cinematographer was, I knew: “Don’t I know you from the cinematographer’s party.” I knew: “Aren’t you the woman who was recently given a Fulbright.” I knew: “Who am I to blow against the wind,” my hands making snakes out the window on M-52.

  “Girls Just Want to Have Fun,” rewinding till the tape tangled. “Everybody Knows” from the Pump Up the Volume soundtrack. “Me—Jane,” “Walk Away,” and this song by Muki that goes: “And I don’t want to know about evil/ Only want to know about love.” When my son was born we listened to “Thirteen” nonstop. It was the only thing that would get him to sleep. For new parents right now in the thick of it—I see you, your incomparable love and incomparable exhaustion and beautiful, terrified hearts—maybe give it a try? Big Star, off #1 Record. iTunes tells me I played it just under ten thousand times, the second-most-played track in my library.

  The first was “Optimist.” It’s all I listened to that summer, my unofficial theme song. Rocky had “Eye of the Tiger.” Judy Bernly had “Nine to Five.” Kira had “Magic.” The Kid had “Purple Rain.” And Rachel Marron had “If I should stay/ I would only be in your way.” But “Optimist”—that was for me. I listened to it on the L, back and forth to my day job in faculty development and my night job teaching writing. I listened to it at the park, chasing my then two-year-old son. I listened to it walking Mojo to the Montrose Dog Beach. I listened through the winter, gray and drudge and ice; on my way to doctors’ appointments, trying to figure out what was wrong; and in the Uptown condo we couldn’t sell.

  It gave me back a part of myself I hadn’t known was missing.

  36

  Caleb is very sure he’s Superman, which sounds cute except we live on the third floor and he keeps trying to fly. Last week he stood at the sliding balcony door in his red-and-blue costume, his nose pressed to the glass. “Mommy,” he said. “Let me out. I’ll put my arms out far; I’ll go high up in the sky.”

  36

  I spent two weeks at the Ragdale Foundation, an artist residency in Lake Forest. It was my first substantial length of time away from my son. I had plans that were so high-stakes, so high pressure: finish a draft of my book, get back into a day-to-day writing process, and something that I referred to as “conceptualize next project,” a phrase that nearly sent me into a panic attack whenever I looked at my to-do list.

  Know what I did that first day at the residency? Slept. For, like, eighteen hours straight. Then I binge watched season three of True Blood on my laptop—twelve episodes without stopping. Then I cried for the time I’d wasted. Then I cried because I missed my kid. Then I cried because Tara was mad at Sookie. In the end, I scrapped my plans, went for walks, stared at the wall, read a ton, and finished one short essay about postpartum depression.

  In every room at the residency, there are spiral notebooks where artists can document their time. On my last day, as I was packing to leave and berating myself for how little I’d accomplished, I flipped through that notebook, reading wisdom and advice from writers who’d worked there before me. Thrillingly, I found a name I not only recognized, but emulated: a poet and playwright named Coya Paz. She’d been there, in that very room! Sleeping and reading and creating, just a few months before! I dug into her words, expecting to find something about the projects she’d completed, or maybe some profound musings on the artistic process.

  Know what she wrote about instead? Sleeping. Staring at the wall. And—I shit you not—watching True Blood on her laptop, and what was up with Sookie?

  I shy away from giving advice to writers and to parents. We have different situations, different processes, different challenges and expectations. That said, I think what I learned at that residency might apply to all of us: Be gentle with yourself. The writing process is more than building sentences.

  36

  There’s an envelope taped to our bathroom mirror. A reminder, if you will. It’s addressed to the bank and, for now, it’s empty, but when things get really hard, we joke about mailing back our house keys and throwing in the towel. We’d been having that conversation a lot. Our home was worth less than half of what we paid, one the 11 million in the United States defined as underwater. Three years trying to sell, six jobs between the two of us.

  Here’s the truth: we were lucky. We knew where our next meal was coming from. Knock on wood, if one of us got hurt, we had insurance, at least for the moment, though who knows if we could afford the deductible.

  The question of walking away from our mortgage was about how we were going to live.

  Not if.

  Here’s a metaphor: a few years ago, my dad got attacked by a bear. Imagine it: the average Kodiak brown bear weighs fifteen hundred pounds. They are five feet tall with all four paws on the ground, and over ten feet standing on their back legs, which is what that bear did when she saw my dad. Look up: ten feet is as tall as the ceiling. The bear is as tall as the ceiling. She is scared, she is pissed, and there, in front of her, is my dad and she goes for him: fifty yards, thirty yards, ten—one swipe of her claws and my father might cease to exist completely. For years, he has prepared for this moment, pulling his rifle on rabbits, partridge, deer, caribou, all requiring singular, focused aim and the bear hits the ground with a bullet in her brain.

  On the worst days I wondered if it was easier being attacked by a bear. A nearly impossible shot, sure, but at least you know your target: here, between the eyes. Right now, in this time, this economy? I don’t know where to shoot. I don’t know who to blame. There are numbers and statistics and layoffs and something called, fittingly, bear markets. Google tells me they indicate a general decline in the stock market: “The transition from optimism to widespread fear.”

  That fall I came across a literary website called The Rumpus and, in it, a weekly advice column by an anonymous writer named Sugar (Cheryl Strayed). In a letter called “The Future Has an Ancient Heart,” I found this:

  You don’t have to maintain an impeccable credit score. Anyone who expects you to do [that] has no sense of history or economics or science or the arts. You have to pay your own electric bill. You have to be kind. You have to give it all you got. You have to find people who love you truly and love them back with the same truth. But that’s all.

  I went into the bathroom and pulled the envelope off the bathroom mirror. Then I went to the apartment search on Craigslist and typed in the word beach.

  37

  New neighborhood, new apartment: five miles north to Rogers Park where the streets dead-end into community beaches along Lake Michigan. Every morning I walk my dog down Tobey Prinz Beach, a block of sand at Pratt Boulevard named for the local activist who saved it from real estate developers in the 1950s. On Sundays, church bells ring at the Madonna della Strada Chapel a mile down the lakefront. “They sing in celebration of your memories,” the Internet tells me, “of your achievements, struggles, and hopes.”

  Here, we’re climbing out of the mess.

  Less screwed, less scared, still climbing.

  37

  Christopher wakes me up in the middle of the night to show me an e-mail from a celebrity whom we shall not name. He wants to tweet about the blog, but his retweets sometimes crash websites so he likes to ask permission first.

  I want to hug this celebrity.

  When he tweets about the site, traffic spikes. Our rent gets paid. Follower
s multiply. What was once a side project is now a possibility.

  It’s made me look very closely at how we use our platforms, whatever the size. The seemingly smallest gestures can mean the world to someone else.

  37

  December 14, 2012. Twenty children between the ages of six and seven and six grown-ups were shot and killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School. I sat in front of my laptop, watching Twitter—can’t move, can’t cry, breath locked. Every time there’s a mass shooting, I spiral—Columbine, Virginia Tech, Aurora—and I’m back to that day in 1993. Sometimes I imagine my dad. Sometimes myself. Sandy Hook was the first time I imagined my son.

  Not long after, Stephen Leith—currently serving a life sentence for first-degree murder—was interviewed about his opinions on gun violence. “I wouldn’t care if there was a background check on me,” he told the reporter. “I was a respected science teacher. I was a law-abiding citizen.” In other words, a good guy. A good guy with a gun—eleven guns, including the AK-47. “I figured at one time they would not be allowed to be sold, and I wanted one in my collection.”

  I called my dad and told him about the interview.

  “Fuck him,” he said.

  It’s the only time I’ve heard him use that word.