Women's Work

by Megan K. Stack

  One Friday night Tom shooed me out of the house to meet a few friends for dinner. We were four women journalists: one who’d vowed to stay childless; two mothers; one woman pregnant with her first child.

  Conversation, inevitably, turned to the effects of children upon career. Insert horror stories: the ones who mother too much and the ones who don’t mother enough.

  “Tell me again why this is supposed to be something I want?” Our resolutely childless friend’s eyes gleamed with candlelight and schadenfreude.

  “But there are so many good sides,” earnestly interjected the other mother.

  They turned to me—how about you? And, as usual, I heard myself begin to speak without any clear idea what would emerge from my mouth.

  “I feel like I’ve disappeared from the world,” I heard myself say. “Like I’ve sunk way down to the bottom of the ocean and there is no way I’ll ever manage to swim to the top again.”

  Silence sat at the table for a minute.

  “But this image of being sunk down,” said the other, earnest mother, wrinkling her nose. “It makes it sound like you’re depressed.”

  “I guess so,” I agreed. “But I’m not conscious of being depressed. I’m not sad. I think I’m just exhausted.”

  That night I went home and started an essay called “How to Disappear.”

  “You disappear in layers, falling softly through the silt. Vanish first from the workplaces, from the hotel lobbies and press conferences and luggage belts. Next you disappear from dinner parties and cocktail parties and house parties. You are still in doctors’ waiting rooms; you are full of rolling baby; you are serene and smug. You’re too tired, anyway; you’d rather fall asleep at home; and then it gets too heavy, too hot, and then you just don’t care, you are overcome, wrestled to earth by biology. But even then you are in the shops, on the sidewalks. Later you will be nowhere but darkened rooms. Later you will creak through Facebook like a ghost, brushing past the other people who don’t exist anymore anyplace else. The others who have disappeared—mothers, mostly, and the unemployed, the ill.”

  I never finished.

  * * *

  ————

  I went to the vagina doctor to discuss my existential dread. It felt awkward, but I could think of no other remedy.

  Imagine a murk of anxiety. Imagine you are so tired your face feels like permanent putty and you cry at the slightest provocation and, in general, you are about as raw and crumbly as the flesh of a pale white mushroom with its skin rubbed away. My head rang and chimed. I slipped into waking dreams and semi-hallucinatory states. I heard echoes of sounds from hours earlier. I wandered into rooms only to forget what I’d been looking for—this happened over and over again until I’d burned an hour pacing back and forth, and then I’d weep in sheer frustration. I found myself walking down the sidewalk with no idea when I’d left the house or where I was going.

  But the worst part was the lingering fear. I was scared all the time, scared to my bones, scared every single day. I was scared of the fear itself—that it would soon block out my rationality and reason and I would end up in a Chinese mental hospital where, on top of being crazy, I would be unable to explain myself. I was so afraid of getting locked up and separated from my baby that I hid from everybody, even Tom, the extent to which I’d lost control of my faculties.

  I asked my mother why I felt so awful. Sweetheart, I just don’t know, she said. It’s so different from my experience, she said. I’m so sorry, she said.

  I asked my mother-in-law. The children were always my bright spots, she said. I never expected it to be easy, she said.

  Every new mother I knew was tired and worried. I didn’t know how to tell the difference between normal-bad and bad-bad.

  With nobody left to ask, I turned to the oracle of excess and exaggeration, transformer of scratchy throats and bad moods into cancer and mental illness. In other words, I submitted my troubles to Google. Women should visit their gynecologists if they suspected they might be suffering from postpartum depression, Google replied.

  That sounded odd, but far be it from me to know who helps new mothers with anything. After all, I reasoned, the root of hysteria is “womb.” There is a special kind of low-grade insanity that has historically been linked to the female organs. This idea feels, all at once, misogynistic and unpardonable and, just maybe, I now thought, true.

  Sitting in a plastic chair by the gynecologist’s desk, rubbing my hands nervously under her quizzical gaze, I told her I was feeling anxious, fighting dread, and that I wasn’t getting any sleep at all.

  From her fumbling half sentences and bewildered pauses, I inferred that I shouldn’t have come to her with my emotional troubles. I was embarrassed. Damn those websites! This doctor could read ultrasounds and interpret labs and deliver babies. She offered birth control and Pap smears. My psychological state was beyond her expertise.

  Still, she tried. She told me that she also had an eldest child who didn’t sleep. He was now some horribly advanced age (six? seven?) and still cost her many nights of rest. Having raised this demoralizing specter, she wrote a referral to a psychiatrist for postpartum depression screening.

  “Just to rule it out,” she added encouragingly.

  Unlike the immaculate white main building, with its cappuccino bar and whimsical indoor tree and cascades of sun through the skylight, the hospital’s psychiatry unit was an ill-lit and dilapidated brick building resembling the segregated schools I’d written about in Louisiana. Shatterproof windows protected the receptionist from maniacal patients such as myself. The waiting room was musty and mournful, with cracked chairs and a few dirty magazines.

  The doctor was a dowdy-looking man in his latter middle age. I told him I hadn’t slept in months. I explained that I didn’t know whether I was sleep deprived or depressed or even whether there was any difference.

  The doctor labored to follow my language. I repeated, slowed down, and reworded.

  “I do not understand,” he finally said. “You have your husband and your baby. Your husband is working. You live a good life, in a nice apartment. You have an ayi to help. You are not”—he gestured in the air—“on a mountain somewhere, alone with your baby.”

  This declaration took my breath away, for I had, coincidentally, been tormented by precisely this image—the baby and I alone in the dark, in a mountain cave, wind whipping our backs, wolves sniffing after our blood. Having to keep him alive by myself, in desperation, in the wilderness…

  “But that’s exactly how I feel,” I cried. “In my brain, logically, I know it isn’t true. But I can’t get rid of this feeling. And it’s so terrible.”

  I was choking back tears. I hated admitting to all the ugliness in my mind while he stared at me blankly.

  The psychiatrist pulled from a desk drawer the oldest, thickest laptop I’d ever seen. He clicked some buttons and produced a computerized card game. I was incredulous, but obedient. I played on the computer for nearly half an hour. The game involved matching or memory—I can’t remember anymore.

  Afterward the doctor studied my scores and frowned.

  “Your mental function is very seriously impaired,” he announced. “This result, uh. It does not correspond to a person of your professional background.”

  “I told you, I haven’t gotten any sleep—”

  “I think you have postpartum depression,” he continued. “I am seventy-five percent sure. To be one hundred percent sure I need to see you again. I cannot make the diagnosis in one meeting.”

  He told me to come back in a week. He prescribed an immediate course of psychotropic drugs and sleeping pills.

  “But you said you couldn’t make a diagnosis yet,” I said.

  “That’s right.”

  “Then how can you prescribe me these pills?”

  “The sleeping tablets will help you,
” he said.

  “It’s not that I can’t sleep. It’s that my baby wakes me up all night. Besides, I meant the other pills. These antidepressants.”

  “They will make you feel better,” he said.

  I’m not opposed to antidepressants. But I’d never taken them before, and their appearance now felt too quick.

  I’d come to the psychiatrist, of course, knowing drugs were the most likely outcome. I’d steeled myself to accept the diagnosis along with all suggested treatments. I knew I was in a terrible predicament, and so I’d warned myself to shut up and take the pills. But when the time came, I couldn’t do it. The prescription came without explanation, discussion, or alternatives. There was no mention of side effects or options.

  I didn’t like it. I didn’t like it so much that a sluggish shadow of myself, languishing half dead under the rubble of my broken brain, stirred itself back to life. I walked out of the psychiatrist’s office without saying good-bye. I kept walking out of the crummy brick building without stopping at the front desk to make another appointment. I walked all the way out to the street and put my arm up for a taxi and rode home. This rusty but real defiance grew a little stronger with every step.

  It wasn’t the drugs themselves, but the slipshod carelessness for my psyche that I couldn’t accept. The admission that there was no diagnosis, but anyway just take these pills. No, I told myself. Not like that.

  By the time I got home, I was angry. Something about this middle-aged man who had squinted through his glasses at me like I was a rare zoo creature had stirred me to fight. Our linguistic gap, in the end, felt like a metaphor for his remove. He couldn’t hear my words, he couldn’t catch my meaning, he couldn’t diagnose me.

  But he could quiet me with pills.

  “There has to be another answer,” I stormed to Tom that night. “This can’t be the answer.”

  “What do you mean?” he said.

  “If a woman is in an intolerable situation, the answer is not to drug her so that she can tolerate it. The answer should be—should be—to change the intolerable situation.”

  He nodded sympathetically.

  “I hear you,” he said. “So what are you going to do?”

  “I’m going to find another way.”

  And I did.

  * * *

  ————

  Maybe, I decided, I was looking at the problem backward. Perhaps my tortured mental state was, in fact, a normal response to a traumatic birth followed by an unendurable lack of sleep.

  I turned my attention to Max. If I wanted to clear my head, I needed to sleep. And if I wanted to sleep, he had to sleep. Sleep training had been a bust, but maybe there were other options. I did some research and found a pediatric sleep specialist in Beijing—an Australian Chinese doctor who ran infant sleep clinics and was preparing to write a book on baby sleep. People said she worked miracles. I booked an appointment.

  After that, it was appallingly easy. Two quick appointments and everything changed.

  We learned that the baby needed more solid food during the day; he was waking up from both hunger and habit. We also learned that there was a third way, a sort of commonsense middle path in between sharing a bed (which none of us, including our light-sleeping baby, wanted to do) and making Max “cry it out” alone until he passed out from exhaustion. She gave us a foolproof method of comforting the baby when he cried, then putting him down awake to fall asleep unassisted.

  “The thing is,” the doctor told us, “you really have to buy into this, or it’s not going to work. You have to do everything exactly the same way, every time. But, if you do, I promise you it will work.”

  And it did. It worked. Max learned to put himself to sleep.

  The doctor also brought Tom into the nursery, encouraging him to put the baby to bed and respond to his overnight cries. “You’re depriving your baby of an important source of comfort,” she said. “His father.”

  Within a few weeks we had the mythological baby who fell contentedly asleep in his bed at seven p.m. and slept straight through to seven a.m. Once the worst sleeper in the building, our baby was now the best.

  It was hard to digest how easy it had been to fix, and how close we’d been to help all along. I was relieved, but I also felt stupid. In fact, other mothers had advised me months ago to seek the advice of this particular doctor, but I hadn’t paid attention. I’d been disillusioned by silly books promoting useless theories, sticky gripe water, and cumbersome white noise machines. I’d grown cynical of anything that advertised sleep solutions.

  Maybe I’d embraced the misery of early motherhood as some sort of penance—the inevitable price that must be paid for a child so perfect and a love so full. Or maybe I was just too exhausted to distinguish a helpful doctor from a snake-oil saleswoman.

  The first few nights of Max’s unbroken sleep, I bolted awake at odd hours to cries that weren’t there. But gradually my nervous system unwound itself and I, too, began to sleep. Then I slept like I had never slept before. I crawled into bed, sometimes, before the sun had even set.

  After a few nights of solid sleep, I felt so energetic I upped the ante. I joined a gym and resumed the hard, sweaty runs I’d dropped when I’d gotten pregnant.

  Slowly my head cleared. The thrum and clamor drained from my ears. And, most important, the dread dissipated.

  One morning I rode my bike through the sunshine to buy fresh fruit at the farmers’ market and felt the first warm wind of summer on my face. At a literature festival I said something quick-witted and a little bit mean and realized, with an adrenaline rush, that my personality had not been lost forever.

  It was still there. I was still there. Still here.

  I had my baby, and I was still here.

  But it had taken the better part of a year to get there.

  Chapter 6

  I baked a cake of carrots and raisins and frosted it with cream cheese, cut dripping chunks of watermelon, and tied a helium balloon to the arm of Max’s high chair. I did these things eagerly, thinking that just as romantic love spends itself in sex, this maternal love sought physical expression in the icing of cakes and scrambling of eggs and straightening of covers. I worked at other things so I could make money to pay others to do these tasks, I mused, only to snatch them back again in random spasms of love.

  We lit a candle and sang “Happy Birthday” to our first child, for the first time. Max sat straight, glancing from face to face and resting his plump forearms on the high-chair tray with leonine majesty. He didn’t understand, but he liked it plenty. He approved of the guests—his three favorite people. He crowed over the leaping candle flame. He gobbled watermelon until his chest was sticky with rose-colored juice.

  Tom crouched and hovered, taking pictures from every angle.

  When the time came to blow out the candle, I held Max’s dimpled hand and whispered his wish into his ear. We had been one flesh, we had lived and almost died and gone crazy together, and now I wished on his behalf because he had no words.

  I blew the flame away. Max clapped along for company.

  The birthday was finished; another year opened before us. Tom rushed off to work. I laid Max down for a nap. Xiao Li swept up the crumbs and stored the leftover watermelon in the refrigerator.

  While Max slept off the revelry, I picked up the camera and flashed through the pictures. That’s when I realized that Tom was missing from every frame.

  It happened fast; nobody was paying attention. At least, I wasn’t paying attention. Maybe Tom had hoped I’d seize the camera and shoo him into the frame, or that I’d ask Xiao Li to snap a few shots of our family, battered but joyful, posing behind the birthday cake.

  But I hadn’t. The pictures depict me, Max, and Xiao Li. This makes them awkward. We never framed them. The images were not planned, nor what we particularly wanted, but in retrospect they c
ontain a certain documentary truth. That first year, in my memory, was populated by me, Max, and Xiao Li.

  She wore a T-shirt and cutoff jeans that day, and gamely stuck a sparkly party hat on her head. While Max smeared cake over his cheeks, she squatted at his side and giggled. She beamed with a simple, obvious happiness—not her baby, but a baby she had tirelessly tended, had reached a milestone.

  And Tom—his face is not captured. He was there and not there. Making it all happen, but absent from the action.

  * * *

  ————

  After that, I started angling my camera to crop Xiao Li out of photographs. I’d always balked at posting pictures on Facebook or emailing them to family if they depicted Xiao Li. I was embarrassed to admit she was there. I didn’t want to advertise the fact that we hired other people to do our housework, that we didn’t clean up our own messes, that we lived in neocolonial comfort with a locally hired domestic underling. Nor was I keen to admit that I was, perhaps, not a fabulously competent artist and mother who managed to do it all—when you factored in Xiao Li, you could argue that I was hardly doing anything.

  What’s more, Xiao Li’s presence diminished my newfound sense of commonality with far-flung friends and family. My adult life—the travel, triumphs, and traumas—had mostly been alien to the people I loved. I couldn’t discuss with my cousins or childhood friends the maddening campaigns to get an Iranian visa, or the weirdness of getting drunk on a winter morning with a killer in the Caucasus, or the crushing loneliness that filled my gut when I woke up in a hotel room and couldn’t recall what country I was in.

  I could, however, chat happily for hours about the constipating effects of applesauce on infants or the travails of flying with toddlers. Parenthood had furnished me with something I hadn’t even known I’d been missing: a major life experience in common with my loved ones.