• • •
My father was not an “absent” father. He was a physically distant father. After my parents separated when I was six, I only saw him a few weekends a year, on one or two holidays, and during one weeklong stay in the summer. For me, those visits felt strained and tricky, because he was my father, and I adored him, but I didn’t know him well and was trying to make a good impression. This unfamiliarity alongside the paramount importance of his station in my life confused me: I should know him and be comfortable around him—but I don’t, and I’m not.
I remembered life before my parents’ divorce as an outline, a pencil scratch here and there—sleeping on the prickly floor of our boat, riding over the Golden Gate Bridge in the jump seat of my father’s Porsche 930, the walls of our home and the porch jasmine—a slightly deeper mark on the day he cried and bought me a stuffed puppy from a pharmacy, and then my mother, brother, and I were gone.
How does one miss an outline?
After the divorce, my father would send me postcards of Marilyn Monroe because my favorite movie was Some Like It Hot. We would talk on the phone, too, but I never knew quite what to say. When we visited him, my brother, father, stepmother, and I would drive north on Highway 101 in his two-door red Mustang for what seemed like three weeks straight, taking a pee break at McDonald’s in Gilroy, where life smells like garlic, and, if we were lucky, stopping completely in Santa Cruz or San Francisco, but usually driving all the way to Healdsburg, in Sonoma County wine country.
While we drove north, we listened to Bob Dylan, Neil Young, the Grateful Dead, the Rolling Stones, Dire Straits, and Pink Floyd. We listened to hippie music or Republican talk radio. On one side of the Mustang was an NRA sticker. On the other was a Grateful Dead “Steal Your Face” sticker. My father did not explain this, but he explained all sorts of other things, and I asked a lot of questions. Nobody ever seemed to exhaust my arsenal of questions. Adults looked at me as if I were annoying; my mother often suggested we “play a five-minute silent game.” I unfailingly lost.
His place in Healdsburg was a fifth wheel trailer I appreciated because it was tidy, along the Russian River, and smelled of my beautiful new stepmother’s hair. We would spend our days at the river or at his fancy gym down the road, where we would shower in big tile stalls with glass doors and sit in a steam room that smelled of eucalyptus. Even though there were four of us in the fifth wheel, and my brother and I had to share the “living room” at the end, it was charming in its novelty. My father made us fried chicken and we watched National Lampoon’s European Vacation and Some Like It Hot and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off until I had all three movies memorized. Margaret never came out in the trailer.
Somehow it became a tradition that I would cook carrots on the trailer stove, by myself, which was of great consequence at age nine and ten and eleven. I cleaned, peeled, and cut the carrots—an eternal, thankless job—then cooked them on the tiny stove, while standing on a stool that took up almost the whole motor home walkway. I had to melt the butter and then put the carrots in the pan, but I couldn’t cook it too fast because the butter would burn. Then I had to add the rosemary, salt, and a little pepper. I remember feeling like I stood at the stove for hours, and that it was a mind-numbing and difficult process, but it was the only way I could get that crispy caramelized butter on the edges of the carrots. We called them “rosemary carrots” and my father asked me to make them for him every time we visited, because he said it was the most delicious thing he had ever tasted in his life.
But you can’t build a life on rosemary carrots.
• • •
It wasn’t these memories that made his presence at my courthouse union almost unbearable. It was the way I stood on San Francisco’s Pier 39 holding his hand when I was a little girl, or across the Bay at Sam’s in Tiburon, or at the docks in Sausalito, when I pointed and ogled at the yachts, telling him, “Dad, I’m going to get married on that one.” And he would laugh, and say, “Yes! You will!”
It was that he knew I held that silly dream, the one I now denied, was too tough for, tossed aside as if I could never be bothered with such girlish nonsense.
From him, I couldn’t hide in the shadows. Seeing him standing on that grass felt to me like I was crossing into womanhood, into a new family, without a proper goodbye. It simply made me sad. After the technicality, we went to dinner at a restaurant named after a duck. I drank two to seven glasses of wine.
In the photographs of the ceremony, I am holding Mac’s hands and gazing into his eyes, with Ava and my mother right behind us, and a lady from the courthouse wearing wide-leg slacks, a green holiday sweater, and thick black eyeliner. She’s holding a clipboard.
There are tears in my eyes. Of joy, I guess.
• • •
I soon learned as a married, stay-at-home mother that if I remained drunk about 40 percent of my waking hours, I really enjoyed it. That is not true. I did not calculate percentages. Also, I did not particularly enjoy it.
I would go to the store to “buy groceries for a nice dinner” and come back with a couple nice bottles of wine, for our nice dinner, which I would drink while I cooked. At our actual dinner I would have more wine and a cocktail or two. This made bedtime manageable, as well as motherhood as a whole. (They do not write this in the “new mom” brochure we get when they discharge us from the hospital, but perhaps they should.)
I drank for relief. I drank because from my first sip at sixteen, alcohol felt like peace, like coming home after a long and arduous journey. Anticipation of the day’s first glass was a rush of lifted spirits within me—energy, comfort, being—and by glass number two, I began to feel the way I thought I should feel all the time.
Drugs would do the same, but they required such commitment—two a.m. runs, transactions with people I didn’t know, dealers refusing to return my calls. After Ava was born, I was a drug dabbler. I was a fucking grown-up, after all, a mother. Of course I don’t want any blow.
Wait. Does somebody have it, though?
More realistically, what saved me from narcotics was that I lived on a ranch ten miles outside an excessively vanilla college town where “partying” looked like nineteen-year-olds doing keg stands, not bumps of cocaine in bathroom stalls.
And I wasn’t seeking drugs because I had alcohol, which was enough—mostly because it was reliable. You could get a bad baggie. You couldn’t get a bad handle of Grey Goose. Plus, everyone drank. I could cling to alcohol like it was my last breath of air, but as long as I hid my desperation, the world would assume I was functioning, motherly, even sophisticated. They would believe the polish of laughter and smiles, as long as I never looked too thirsty or excited, as long as I never explained that if uninterrupted drinking was on the horizon, if I knew alcohol would soon pour into the cracks of my psyche, soul, and heart, I could handle anything—even my stale days and too-young husband who left in the mornings, and the baby sucking my life dead and dry while making it infinitely more worth living and deep and clear.
I held on that way, by drinking, and the love. Her tiny dimpled fingers.
When Ava was about six months old, I thought I had found my own groove in the endless rhythm of motherhood, possibly even beyond White Russians and steadfast denial. I started exercising and writing again. I was researching graduate schools for a master’s in English, and found a friend my age with a baby.
But one morning while Ava napped, I sat alone in the ranch house, surrounded by toys and blankets and diapers, next to a baby monitor rumbling with gentle snores, and I opened an email from my brother. I clicked on a picture of him in a white doctor coat, grinning widely on his first day of medical school at one of the top universities in America. My eyes studied his proud, hopeful ones, the sprawling manicured lawns, the old red brick building of the hall of medicine. I thought of new school years, semesters in college—the pens (and how I always wanted fine-point blue), empty notebooks, literature on the shelves with its wild, disrupting ideas.
A
beginning. He was at his beginning.
I was at my end.
I retraced each line of his face and smile. Each second I looked, my heart beat faster. This man, my brother, who could make decisions and stick to them, who could not get pregnant by people he barely knew, or drink too much every fucking night. He did it. Growing up, I thought it would be me. I thought I would send that email, yet there he was, inarguably handling the world, while I sat immobile in a room I couldn’t navigate. I couldn’t even find its walls. I simply saw black.
If somebody had walked into that room at that very moment, I would have run upstairs when I heard the door open so they wouldn’t see me crying. If I couldn’t make it out in time, I would have swept my face with my hand and laughed about having just read something sad, but I would have disliked that lie because it would have made me seem like an overly emotional female. When others cried around me, I willed them to stop immediately because I felt compelled to say something supportive, but could only think of “Pull it together, please.” Or “Do you want a cocktail?” When sadness overtook me, I consciously pressed it into tightened fists, screams, and dramatic departures, but never tears.
There was nothing anybody could have said to fix it for me anyway, to give me a new way of looking at it, to patch up the hole in my brain or heart so I could pick myself up and carry on. I wouldn’t have even let them try. I wouldn’t have admitted how pathetic I felt sitting there, how small under the shadow of the photograph. I would have bragged. I would have said I was heading to graduate school soon. I would have squared my shoulders and acted like I had somewhere to go.
But that afternoon, in that chair, while I looked at my brother, my body shook and the tears came roaring against my will. This? It can’t be this. This can’t possibly be my life. Not now, at twenty-two. It was startling to cry like that. I could not remember having done it before. I wept in heaves until the baby cried, again, wanting to nurse, again.
I didn’t go back to thinking I had found a groove.
The days began to blur.
Am I dressed? Am I ever dressed? How long until Mac comes home? How long until I can go to grad school? How long until dinner? How long until motherhood is over, or at least until wine? If I weren’t here at two p.m. in my pajamas, I would be a lawyer, or writer, or something that mattered a little, at least. I would be young and hot. I would party. I would travel the world. I would do something. But I would not do this. I have to go. I have to get free.
And then, her sweaty head, puffy eyes, and rosy cheeks would send smiling warmth to my bones, and I’d think, I’ll never leave you, baby girl. Thank God for you.
Carry on. Change the diaper. Take a shower. Make dinner. Pour another glass.
I tried to tell Mac I was barely functioning. I tried to tell him my life was in ruins, that I was no longer me, or a person at all, and sometimes I wished I had never become a mother.
In response, he went to work.
Then he came home. We did it again and again and again.
On my twenty-third birthday, he rolled in from the slaughterhouse exhausted, reeking of goat guts, and I quickly realized he hadn’t planned anything as a celebration. I threw a spectacular tantrum before dragging us to dinner, where he nearly dozed off at the table, and my fit resumed. Under those conditions, though, he had no chance of performing adequately. He thought we were going to dinner. I thought we were fixing my life.
• • •
I tried to tell him I had been erased, even in body. I tried to tell him I was slipping. But he just looked at me. Always, he just looked at me. He looked at me while sitting on the floor or in a big easy chair, on the couch or in the car, on a park bench or at the pool table, or the bar. He looked at me and I couldn’t understand his silence. His downcast eyes. In the hell of the morning, I loathed him, and laughed at what we called “love.”
But later, as I poured an afternoon glass, I’d think, I was overreacting, and when I thought of him working down at the ranch, punching the hide off a sheep, cold in the winter bite, or walking across a dusty pen in 105-degree heat, I’d realize his silence was saying, “I wish I knew how to help you.”
He was twenty, and almost as empty as me. It made it worse that he was gentle and devoted to our family, that when he was home, he cradled our baby on his arm and never set her down, that he wasn’t cruel or philandering. It made it worse because I knew he simply did not have what I needed. He was there, with all that he was, but still it was not enough.
I tried to tell him, but I didn’t tell my mother. It didn’t seem like the type of thing one mentions to other women. Or men, actually. So I kept it to myself. Who would I have told anyway? And what would I have said? “I chose to have a baby and now I hate being a mother even though she’s perfect and the father is diligently supporting us?”
Also, nobody asked.
I thought if the doctors found out they would take my baby away, and I would be crazy and alone, and my daughter would be without a breast and the arms that craved her.
Sometimes as I walked down the stairs holding Ava, I envisioned throwing her body off the top of the balcony—not because I wanted to, but because the image slammed itself into my brain. When it hit, I would pull her hard against my chest and shake my head to get rid of the image. But I worried someday my arms would do it against my will, and as I held her against me I remembered that I could really, really never tell anyone.
So instead of telling people, I dressed her in European clothes I bought at discount stores, and took her to the park where we sat on blankets, and I was proud of us. I nursed her and fed her wholesome foods like avocado and zucchini I crushed myself, and didn’t let anybody watch TV around her for fear it would sizzle her brain right then and there like an egg on a hot sidewalk. There was no sugar in Ava’s diet, and she slept tucked against my body because she needed me and I needed her, and I could never get enough of her milk breath.
But when nobody was looking, I scrawled in my journal, in capital letters, in thick black ink, “I CAN’T GO ON” and “I FUCKING HATE MY LIFE” and “WHEN DID IT ALL GO WRONG?” I pressed hard on the page so it would go through to the two or three pages behind it, like a little kid learning to write, but actually I was begging the page to help me.
I had been running to paper for safety since I was a little girl, since the bishop’s wife handed me a journal after my Mormon baptism, saying, “You should write in this every day,” and I looked at those lined pages and thought, This is mine to fill up. This space is mine. I wrote every day, just as she said.
But it was only after I had Ava that the page did nothing, that I felt worse after scribbling the darkest of me into sad linearity, into neat reductions of grammar and diction and punctuation. It was only then that my words made me sicker, and left me deader, as if whatever was living inside me refused to be contained, ordered, or made into meaning. Trying to stretch it into lines left me frustrated, and lonelier, because every sentence ended in conflict, in paradox, in the whimper of a baby who needed me.
There was no resolution because the revulsion was not about her. It was me. It was all that led up to her creation and birth. It was the man who didn’t understand my grieving and the single bedroom we shared. It was all that and some dark thing I couldn’t explain, trace, or trap at all, like a curtain over the sun blocking the light. Nobody can dodge that pain, or the exhaustion of trying to breathe beneath it.
Still, I thought if I used all my strength to scream into the page, the black would move right out of me and get taken up. I remember shuddering while I wrote and pressing as hard as I could for relief. I lifted my head and squinted my eyes and waited.
It never worked. Except alcohol, nothing worked.
• • •
One day, while Mac was at work, Ava began fussing right after I put her down for a nap in the late morning. I stared at the monitor, then dragged myself up the stairs as her cries took over the hallway.
As I walked to her room, my thoughts were like a
train crashing through my mind, accelerating with every step. Always waking up. Jesus fucking Christ, she’s always waking up. Waking up and stealing my few seconds of humanity, of freedom. Waking up and making me face her and me and all that was going to be before this hell hit like a flash flood across a broken body, and I’m crushed but somehow not dead. MY GOD, CHILD, FUCK YOU—and when I got to her, I pinched her thigh, hard, to hurt her.
She wailed.
I cried out too, and pulled her body to mine before dropping to my knees. I gripped her against my chest, with her head in my hands and my fingers stroking her blond wisps of hair. I gasped through tears and begged her to forgive me, and in that moment I realized I did not care if they took her. I did not care if she was no longer mine, because she was better off without me. I had hurt my baby, my life, my perfect creation. I had hurt her on purpose.
I called the doctor’s office immediately and explained to the first person who answered that there was something wrong with me and I could not take care of my baby. I didn’t tell Mac I was going to call, because I knew he wouldn’t understand my decision to give our baby away. He was not brave. He would not let her go. He would tell me to lie. He would tell me to keep hiding who I am.
That very day, I went to the doctor’s office and told the nurse about pinching her, and the visualizations, and that my life was black-tar grief. I steeled myself in preparation for her words, “You know we have to take your baby, right?” I was ready to say goodbye.
Instead she put her hand on my knee and left it there as she said, “Oh, honey, you have a bit of postpartum depression. We’ll have you fixed up in no time.”
She shook her head and blinked like a doll. She seemed unreal sitting there, talking to me as if it was all no big deal. I got to keep the baby, because this is a thing that happens to some women after they give birth. Depression. That is its name.
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