Welcome to My Breakdown

by Benilde Little

  At our third or fourth session, when I was questioning whether what I was feeling could be “just grief,” he told me yes. He said the overwhelming grief that I felt was completely understandable. “In some cultures a professional mourner is hired because the grief becomes too great,” he told me. I couldn’t help but wonder how a professional mourner would be able to lessen my own grief. Would they climb inside me and somehow excavate this pain?

  I saw James a total of six times. His method was prodding and Jungian, much like that of the first therapist, Dr. Chisholm, I ever saw when I was thirty and thriving in my career as a magazine editor and living in Manhattan. In those days, my only unhappiness was about my choice of men. I saw Dr. Chisholm once a week for three years, and our sessions were hugely beneficial. But with James, I knew that I didn’t have the stamina to delve into my subconscious. In our sessions, I could barely focus on what he was saying and instead found myself obsessing about the fee of $175 for forty-five minutes. I’d asked him his opinion about antidepressants, and while he didn’t come right out and say that he was against them, he said, “I believe talk therapy works.”

  I asked him if he thought talk therapy would work for what was ailing me, and he said yes. But I knew better. He was kind and clearly an excellent therapist, but his heavy, methodical approach was beyond what I could manage at that point. Another time, I would be all in for exploring the depths of my psyche, but not now.

  Not long after, a friend of a friend who’d struggled for years with depression and was eventually diagnosed with fairly tangled brain wiring, suggested I see her therapist, who was also a nurse practitioner. Diana* was a lanky Black woman from Mississippi, and after several weeks of me just sitting on her leather couch and crying like a lost child, we both understood that talk therapy alone was not going to work. I couldn’t get through a session without dissolving into sobs. My internal scaffolding had completely collapsed.

  Diana diagnosed me as clinically depressed and suggested that I might need medication. But even though therapy alone wasn’t working—and I was convinced it wouldn’t—for months I resisted the idea of taking meds. After six additional months, it was clear that I needed prescriptive help. I would’ve tried hot coals on my exposed flesh at that point.

  My depression didn’t respond to the first drug we tried, Prozac, even with the addition of Abilify. Next I tried Wellbutrin, but that just made me feel fuzzy and aggressive. I’d been on Effexor a few years earlier—when the severe ennui with a side of perimenopause first hit—and it had worked, but after a few years, I hadn’t wanted to take it anymore. Believing that consistent cardio exercise could be just as effective in treating my mild depression, I became a gym rat and weaned myself off Effexor. I was freaked by how severe the withdrawal dizziness was; that was why I hadn’t wanted to take drugs when Diana first suggested it—I didn’t want to become dependent again. But this time was different. I didn’t just want to be happier; I needed help so that I could perform basic life tasks.

  Cliff was also desperate for me to feel better. He knew that I’d always wanted to go to Italy, to Tuscany. A short while after my mother died, I managed to get myself to our annual Montclair Art Museum gala. I’d cosseted myself with a wide leather belt, wrapped around a floral silk coat. When I got there, I immediately ordered something that I never drink, a vodka martini. As I stood sipping it by the bar, Cliff went off to look at the silent auction items. I found out later that he had been bidding during the live part on an Italian villa—and he got it. Meanwhile, I stood in one spot, not wandering through the crowd, as I normally would have done. The only people I talked to were those who made their way to me. Most of them knew that my mother had died. They all readily shared their own stories of losing a parent. One writer pal, Dottie Frank, looked into my eyes and said in her South Carolinian drawl, “I’m so sorry.” She grabbed me into an embrace so powerful that I will never forget it. Her hug told me that she got the awfulness in full; that losing her own mother had been the worst pain she’d ever endured. I still think of her urgent, firm hug as my initiation into the motherless daughters club. We were now comrades.

  I had wanted to go to Italy for twenty years and now, as the trip approached, I couldn’t pull myself together. I didn’t want to go.

  “Let’s try something else,” Diana said.

  I began the prescription for Lamictal about a month before the trip. Usually it takes these drug about six weeks before they kick in and, given my nonresponsiveness to the other meds, I wasn’t all that hopeful that this would lift me enough so that I could at least go. Thankfully, it did. I was able to be present with Cliff and the kids, and experience the trip. The sunshine on the Amalfi coast on the Mediterranean was magnificent, as was the Hotel Caruso in Ravello, where we stayed for two nights. From there we went to the villa and stayed eight more days. After six weeks, I could actually smile without faking it. Every morning when I took the pill, I said a prayer of gratitude that such a medicine existed.

  Middle school is bar and bat mitzvah season, and Baldwin went to ten of them during seventh and eighth grades. I believed, as my mother taught me, that being exposed to other cultures and being open to people different from one’s self was one of the keys to a rich and meaningful life. When Baldwin would come home, after asking if she’d had a good time—the answer was always yes—I’d ask how many other Black kids were there. She’d look at me with an exasperated Why do you want to know that? look, and say, “Just me.” Sometimes the answer would be “The nanny and me.” This didn’t seem to bother her. She accepted this representation, or lack thereof, as the way it was. No judgments. I often learn from her.

  There was a time, during middle school, when Baldwin had only White friends. She had her first crush on a boy who was White.

  Cliff was alarmed.

  “She needs to be hanging out with some Black kids,” he would say regularly. I wasn’t concerned—well, not as much as Cliff was—because I knew she would find Black friends eventually. She’d open her circle as she delved deeper into herself. I knew we’d given her the tools.

  Close to the end of middle school, Baldwin told me that she didn’t want to go to our town high school. She said that after being über-social in middle school, she was afraid all that socializing would be an impediment to academics. This was a month after my mom had died, although while she was sick, I’d discussed with her Baldwin’s reluctance to continue in public school. My mother had advised me to let her do a year at the high school first, and if it didn’t work out, then to move her.

  I wasn’t so sure. The deadlines for the private schools that could’ve been a good fit had passed, and I didn’t know what to do. I was then only a month into my grieving season. I saw an ad in the paper for an open house for an all-girls Catholic school a few towns away. I went one evening and listened to the presentation, although looking around at the other moms and daughters, I knew that these were not my people. I convinced myself, however, that the school would be fine, that Baldwin would make it work. In my right mind, I would have fished out my keys from my purse and left before the end of the presentation. But I wasn’t in my right mind. I enrolled her.

  From the first day, after drop-off, at the “mothers’ coffee,” I felt like I was the new girl at the wrong school. Some of the moms were decked out like New Jersey Housewives—big Gucci pocketbooks, big gold jewelry, frosted hair extensions, and tanning-salon-colored skin. I tried making small talk with a few of them. Some tried to be friendly, but we each realized that our tribal tongues were just too foreign for us to be able to communicate. One, who lived a few towns from mine but had to pass through Montclair to get to where the school was in Caldwell, even suggested carpooling. I thought at the time that it was a sweet gesture, one that I knew I’d never take her up on, and later, when I saw her zipping through the parking lot in a Maserati, I realized she probably didn’t expect me to. A few others, decked out in Lilly Pulitzer or Talbots, were Catholic girls’ school alumnae and were happily spea
king in the same vernacular.

  The head of the school, a six-foot one-inch nun, was one of the scariest people I’ve ever encountered. The woman never attempted to look at me, much less say hello—well, not counting the time I went to get Baldwin after she called for me to pick her up because she wasn’t feeling well. When I arrived at the secretary’s office, Sister Principal was at the desk. I made a joke that she’d taken on a new job, even as my heart was beating overtime, and I’d just been in the car crying about Cliff’s prostate cancer. She glared at me. I shifted into business mode and explained that I was there to pick Baldwin up because she wasn’t feeling well.

  The next thing she said: “Well, if she called you from her cell phone, we will have to confiscate it because she is not allowed to use her phone at school.”

  “Wow,” was all I could say, under my breath. I wanted to call her on the insensitivity of her comment and to let her know that I’d just found out that my husband had prostate cancer. But I was too afraid of her—and having grown up with brothers and Newark bullies, I don’t scare easily.

  There were many other harsh interactions with administrators, some of it perhaps just the way of Catholic schools, I don’t know. Baldwin soldiered through. She had a great math teacher, and her English teacher was very good. The nuns she had for biology and religion were also good teachers and kind people. Of the school’s motto, “Empowering Young Women,” Baldwin used to say that they should’ve added, “after they squashed you into the ground.”

  Baldwin figured out her place in our country’s ethnic sociology during her year at Catholic school. In Montclair, in middle school, she could be just Baldwin. She didn’t need to explain herself. But many of the girls at her Catholic school were working-class and first-generation college-educated Italian or Irish; there were only six Black girls out of sixty in her freshman class. It was very different from Montclair, where the ratio is 35 percent Black and there was a vibrant mix of religious and socioeconomic backgrounds. After her first week, she asked me, “Where are the Jewish kids?” To her, “Jewish” was a culture, not a religion, even though she’d gone to enough synagogues to have learned some prayers. She tried making new friends, eating lunch with some of the girls and even attending a few football games at a brother Catholic high. She went to two house parties and came home early, horrified at the rampant drinking and sexual experimentation, and also after hearing that some of the girls planned to get married right out of high school, with no plans to go to college.

  She had her Jack and Jill friends to hang with on the weekends. She’d been in Jack and Jill since she was six and had always been ambivalent about it at best. One Friday, when I was driving her home from school, she said out of nowhere: “I love Jack and Jill.” After years of forcing her to go to Jack and Jill activities, I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. For her, it had done what it was founded to do: provide a safe, comfortable place for Black children with similar family values to be with one another. Most of the kids in the group spent their days at private schools, which at worst could feel hostile to Black students, and at best tolerant.

  Sometime in the middle of the school year I was having a glass of wine at the home of my neighbors Pete and Colleen. I was telling them about some of the crappy stuff Baldwin had been dealing with at school. Pete and Colleen grew up in one town over from the school and knew the kinds of folks who send their kids there.

  After they listened to me go on for who knows how long, Pete said, “It sounds like they don’t want you there.”

  It was a clarion call.

  “Yeah, I think they don’t.”

  When the year was half over, the school sent a contract requesting a commitment to return the following year. I didn’t bother to send it back. A few months later, they sent a short form survey asking why Baldwin wouldn’t be returning. I typed a four-page letter documenting all the awful things she had experienced. Not all of the awful stuff was reserved for her, but the meanness and the attempt to demean and belittle the girls was something I wouldn’t tolerate for mine. I’d worked too hard at building her up.

  I never heard a word back.

  Baldwin was happy to go to Montclair High after her disastrous time at Catholic school, although the weeks before she was to start tenth grade, she was so filled with anxiety she couldn’t sleep. She was nervous about the social scene. I was nervous about the academics. Our high school was a tale of two institutions: the kids who were on the AP/high honors track went to good colleges; the ones in the lower classes were left without much guidance. My concern wasn’t that Baldwin couldn’t be in those top classes, but whether she was going rise to the occasion and give it her best. She did.

  That is not to say the three years at the high school weren’t without a whole lot of bumps. I cried huge tears of relief at her high school graduation because I felt that, while she’d done the work, I’d had to be her advocate every step of the way, making sure she got the grades she’d earned in those upper classes, where too often relationships with the teachers were not supportive. I’d channeled my mother, rolled up my sleeves, and gone in there. It was fascinating to me how a teacher’s attitude changed toward a child when the parents showed up. With a Black parent and child especially, there was often an “Oh, you care about what’s going on,” or “Oh, I didn’t know Baldwin came from that kind of family.”

  It was exhausting, but I knew I had to do it. My mother had certainly done battle for my brothers and me and lots of other kids. But as Baldwin was preparing to enter public high school, I started having flashbacks and dreams about my own high school drama with bullying girls. In therapy I told Diana about it. She asked me if I’d encountered any of them recently. It had been many years since I’d seen or talked to any of my high school group. I had run into one of them in the mall late one night when I’d been searching for a pair of special tights for Baldwin’s kindergarten school picture the next day, and she had been on a similar mission. We’d hugged and chatted cordially, and then she’d said, “You know, everybody is mad at you because of your book.” She was talking about my novel Good Hair, which had been published three years earlier. I was surprised because I couldn’t think of anything in the book that would offend, because it was a novel and there wasn’t much about high school. She enlightened me: It was the part where Alice, the main character, talked about being in a sorority of obnoxious girls in high school. At the time I wrote it, I wasn’t thinking of the word in its literal definition. I only meant to convey that our presence was an affront to some of the other students, especially the girls. We were a pack who wore matching jackets, dressed in the most fashionable clothes, and did all the stuff that the popular girls do.

  Decades later, these high school experiences had left deep imprints.

  Suddenly I found myself back in “mean girl” world. I dreamed one night about being left out of a grown women circle of friends, a group I didn’t even want to be part of, but in my dream we were all living in the same apartment and they were all getting dressed up to go out together but no one had invited me. I analyzed the dream with Diana, and I realized that it reflected my anxiety about Baldwin, not me. Intellectually, I knew that I’d have to let Baldwin work out her own stuff, in her own way; that it was part of her growing and becoming her own person. But emotionally, I hated it. Hated the watching it and having to relive it. Diana suggested that the more I worked out my issues around self-acceptance—not giving a crap about what other people thought of me—the more I’d be able to help Baldwin.

  But Baldwin was learning her own important lessons independent of me, for example, how to code switch. When we went on our trip to Italy, we were wandering down one of the many tiny, curved cobblestone streets in Florence one day, when Baldwin spotted a leather jacket in a store window and begged to go inside. Before we had left home, we’d agreed no shopping. Europe was so much more expensive because of our depleted dollar, and there wasn’t much there that you couldn’t also find in New York. But when she tried on the j
acket, it fit as if it were custom-made for her. She had to have it, and Cliff bought it for her. She loved that jacket and wore it all the time when she got back home.

  Two years after she got the jacket, she walked out of her high school classroom and left it on the back of a chair. By the time she remembered it and went back to the classroom, the jacket was gone. She didn’t tell me for several days, hoping she’d find it. She even filed a report with school security. When at last she told me, I yelled at her, but I didn’t tell Cliff. I just didn’t want to hear him ranting about how irresponsible she was.

  She was now in her junior year of high school, and we’d begun college tours. Veteran’s Day weekend we went to DC. She was interested in George Washington and American. I insisted she look at Howard while we were there. We had an okay tour of GW, and a good one at American. Howard was closed for the federal holiday, so we didn’t get a real look at my alma mater. After a great stay with our friends Carmen and Maxie, who had recently moved from Montclair, we headed home on the train. When Cliff picked us up from the Newark Penn Station, he got out of the car to help us put the bags in the trunk. He randomly asked Baldwin why she hadn’t worn her leather jacket. We looked at each other and got into the car. I was silent, wanting to see how she’d handle telling him. She began with a long lie about how it had gotten stolen out of her locker. I said nothing, even though my stomach was churning as I listened to her lie. I abhor lying. I counted down in my head—five, four, three—before he began.

  “Why would you leave it in your locker? How could you lose a jacket? I never lose anything. I’ve had things for twenty years. You begged me for that jacket . . .”

  The next day Baldwin went to school and saw a girl wearing the jacket. The girl was three times her size on the bottom and had on bamboo hoop earrings with her name spelled out inside.

  Baldwin went up close to her and said, “Excuse me, but where did you get that jacket?”