Maternally Challenged

If I Only Had a Brain

ECT will definitely alleviate depression, I'm here to tell you. It works. Unfortunately, as with just about anything medical, it has side effects.

It's Saturday morning, and my husband and I are lounging on the bed reviewing the week. He says, "Yesterday, Emma called me at work--I guess you weren't home--and said that Sophie had logged off the computer and that Aunt Nonny needed the password. I don't know where you were."

"Yeah," I said, wondering the same thing. "Sophie turned off the computer by mistake. Emma told me about it when I got home." And all the time, I'm thinking: where was I? where was I?

"I was pretty sure I had already told Nonny what the password was once already," David said. "But I told her again. No big deal. I guess you were at the grocery store."

"That's it!" I cried. "I was lying here trying to figure it out."

Imagine you have this killer headache and there's a cure for it, but the price is you lose little pieces of your vision. So you take the cure and the headache goes away, but from now on when you look out your front window there are big blank spots in your field of vision. Which is worse? Yesterday I was invited to a book party at the Chevy Chase Club for Manic Depressive Illness, a re-issue of the definitive text by Fred Goodwin and Kay Redfield Jamison. (Hey, I only go to the most fun parties.) I got downtown early and spent a profitable hour and a half at Filene's Basement on Wisconsin, and then took Military Road over to Connecticut, and as I'm driving through northwest Washington I am passing roads that I am pretty sure I used to be intimately familiar with--but honey, they are gone now. Pfffft! 41st Street. Reno Road. 39th Street. Didn't I once live on 39th Street? I may never know.

It seems the deal, as I told my husband, is that I can have a sick brain, a brain that is oozing dysfunction, but which fundamentally holds information--or I can feel happy, at home in my skin, and not have a clue about things like the name of the eye doctor I've been seeing for the past 18 years, or what I was doing this time yesterday. It doesn't seem like a fair bargain, but that's the way it is. My kids are happy with the new me--they've stopped imploring me to not have the treatments, and they seem to like the fact that I'm happier, more energetic, not wanting to sleep all the time; I'm interesting in playing tennis with them, building pillow forts in the living room, I'm generally a hell of a lot more fun to be around......but. But. BUT. My husband keeps trying to reassure me. "It'll come back," he says, and in the meantime he finds my lapses funny. And so do I, I guess. I mean, you gotta laugh or cry, right?

Okay. What was I talking about again?

The Most Obvious Thing

If it's true that depression distorts your thinking in cartoonish ways, it's just as true that getting better means you're in for some forehead-slapping. As in, "Why the HELL didn't I think of that sooner?" The most obvious things are not apparent when you're depressed--and so later, when you do see them, you feel like the world's biggest doofus, because they were so obvious. See, the thing is, I've been telling myself for about six months now that I need to get back to work but I can't think of a thing to write about--my brain pan was as arid and desolate as the Gobi Desert--no hope whatsoever--and then last night it came to me what I need to be working on, and of course it was the most obvious thing in the world.

It's my friend Meghan Caughey. The very first friend I ever had, in fact. Boon companion of my kindergarten days, whose mother was one of my mother's dearest friends, who (like me) has traveled a long and sometimes desolate path through mental illness--hers a lot worse than mine--and has come out the other side knowing some things about art, and overcoming hardship. How we lost touch for so many years and then found each other again about 10 years ago, and it was as if we had never been separated. How I went out to see her last fall, and we met in the airport in Eugene, Oregon and just stood there and looked at each other for the longest time, and she kept saying, "I see your mother. I see your mother," in wonderment, as she looked in my face, and the tears just rolled down her cheeks and mine.

People who read this, go check out her website. Here is a person who has earned the right to say something, who has something important to say. What a distance we go.

Let The Games Commence!

The Teen Years have begun at our house, oh happy day, which is precocious indeed since our oldest has just barely made it into the double digits, but we pride ourselves on being ahead of the curve. Rebecca got up on Friday morning and decided she was Not Going To School, and the discussion that ensued involved a lot of screaming and Rebecca's being escorted out to the car in her jammies before she changed her mind and decided that, yeah, she would make an appearance at the local institute of higher learning. "Mark my words," I told my husband, "she is going to run away from home before she is 16." Little did I know that my words would prove prophetic before the day was over--but that afternoon, Rebecca found our parenting so egregiously wanting that she decided she could do better in another family, so she left. (Note: Names have been changed to protect the guilty.) This time I did what I told her I would do last time she pulled a stunt like this: I called the police.

This is how you know you are starting to get old, is when the police start to look young to you. The officer who showed up looked like he was maybe 16. I'm sure he was older than that, but I'm also pretty sure I have brassieres that are older than he is. In any event, I sent him upstairs to Rebecca's room to give her a little reality orientation about the perils of wandering around on the street by her lonesome after dark--which, truth be told, is not at all dangerous in our neighborhood, but I didn't want to establish a precedent. I told him that our girl had ADD, and he grinned and said, "So do I"--so it's not true that having this condition dooms you to a life of juvenile delinquency, at least nothing serious enough to keep you off the police force, and there is hope.

That alone would have made it an eventful weekend, but then yesterday showed up in a blaze of gorgeous spring weather, and the four of us made it down to the park, and I got my bike out for the first time in at least five years. And then we came home and had family dinner, which is something we haven't managed to pull off in a month of Sundays, and in the middle of dinner Rebecca made some comment about peas and I found myself declaiming, "I eat peas with honey/I've done it all my life/They do taste kind of funny/But it keeps them on my knife"--and my husband looked at Rebecca with a kind of We're In This Together expression on his face, and said, "She's kind of like Chatty Cathy--you pull the string and you never know what she'll say next." And I looked at Rebecca and our youngest, sitting across from her, and both of them had this kind of I'm About To Have the Silly Giggles expression, and it was a good moment.

So it goes with family life. You never know from one day to the next whether you are going to have to call the cops, or whether it will be a Silly Giggles day. The trick is to be ready for either one--something I can't seem to manage lately without the aid of battery cables, or the medical equivalent, attached to my brain, but which I hope I will soon be able to manage without any electrical assistance whatsoever.

We Have Met the Enemy, And She Is Us

It was cartoonist Walt Kelly, of course, who came up with that phrase, but it's no less true now, in the ongoing feminist debate over the "opt out" myth, as it ever was back in the days of McCarthy and the Commie scares. E.J. Graff has a piece about the scads of stories on this supposed phenomenon in the current issue of The Columbia Journalism Review--the supposed phenomenon in question being the recent "trend" of scads of working women who are "choosing" to leave behind lucrative careers in order to stay home and raise children. It's a great story; the only problem with it is that it's just not true--or, that is, it's true only for a tiny demographic slice of women (white, highly educated at prestigious institutions, in well-paying professional/managerial jobs). --Oops! Also, there's a tiny problem with the word "choose," since a lot of these women may not have "chosen" to stay home so much as just decided to give up jobs which offered no flexibility whatsoever for a person engaged in the work of child-rearing.

So: why is this the story that refuses to die, especially in the pages of the New York Times? Well, because that tiny demographic slice I mentioned earlier is an influential one, and what it does is by no means inconsequential--but also, I think, because reporters these days are more disconnected from the real world than ever before. I speak as a former reporter for the Washington Post and as someone who worked there for seven years, and as a person who has friends who work at the Times, as well as at Time Magazine, USA Today and any number of other hugely influential publications. When I started in the newspaper business, way back in the mid 1970s, I began at the Atlanta Journal. At the time, the Journal newsroom was home to an oddball assortment of hot young up-and-comers as well as a motley assortment of those coasting toward retirement, a few older gents with a drinking problem, some diehard political junkies and one or two folks who used newspapering to pay the rent while they worked at night on the Great American Novel. We didn't have to invent story ideas that got us out of the building so we could observe Life In The Raw; Life In The Raw came to work every morning. One morning, a colleague of mine stopped in his tracks right beside my desk and passed out from a monstrous hangover he had been treating with hair of the dog. He went down like a felled oak. Stunned, we all just looked at him for a moment as he lay face down on the carpet, and tried to figure out what to do. While we were working on this mental problem Frank gradually stirred, came back to life, struggled to his feet and went on his way. "Thank God," my deskmate whispered. "I thought I was gonna have to do mouth-to-mouth." And then we all went back to work.

Times have changed: if this incident were to happen in any modern newsroom, the offender would be hauled off to rehab, or the Employee Assistance Program, or both, so fast it would make his or her head swim. Nobody comes to work drunk anymore. Newsrooms these days are populated mostly by people who went to elite schools and who have their eye on some illustrious media vantage point--the op-ed page of the New York Times, maybe, or Magazine editor at the Washington Post. They no longer, as in the old days, have a brother-in-law who is a police officer; they're more likely to have a brother-in-law with a Ph.D. who works at a think tank. Reporters at the Washington Post who live in the District, which has lousy schools, are quite likely to have their kid in private schools--and they haul in the kind of money that makes that possible. When I started at the Atlanta Constitution in 1979, my salary was a princely $18,000 a year. By the time I left the Washington Post in 1996, it was more than $70,000, and I was by no means the highest paid reporter on staff. I remember that while I was at the Post, it came to light that Janet Cooke, of made-up-Pulitzer story fame, had been discovered working at a jewelry counter in some state in the Midwest. In retail! people whispered. You'd have thought she'd been discovered turning tricks in Soho. At one point during my tenure there, I got the bright idea that it would do us all good to take stock of our collective socio-economic status, just to a)tell us who we were and b) remind us of our differences from our readers. I wrote a memo to Bob Kaiser, then the assistant managing editor, suggesting an in-house, anonymous survey asking questions like, "Did  you go to private school?" and "What kind of work did your father did when you were growing up?" Kaiser's answer was swift and unequivocal: absolutely not. In retrospect, I guess he was probably right. Somebody would have leaked the results and we'd have never heard the end of it. Still, I think I know a lot about how it would have turned out.

So the fact that the "opt-out" story refuses to die is really just an example of journalistic navel-gazing, and that old rule of the newsroom: when in doubt, write about yourself (or people like yourself). These days, the truly adventurous reporter goes abroad (something I never had the guts to do); everybody else stays home, sussing out "trends" from the safety of their newsroom computer screen. Or, if they are like me, they realize they can't maintain even the semblance of a home life and combine it with the kind of work week demanded of a reporter these days, and they decide to stay home. Except I didn't "opt" out. I was pushed.

Flying Blind

That's what I'm doing. I find myself thinking, You must be insane, to let people attach electrodes to your head and run electrical current through your brain--and then I catch myself: of COURSE you're insane, dimwit, that's why you're doing it. You can see how a certain tendency toward circular thinking is built into this process. The truth is, ECT (Electroconvulsive Therapy--a better name for it would be Seizure Therapy) is a step nobody takes unless they're desperate, so coming up with a reasoned, well-thought-out list of pros and cons is not usually a prominent feature of the whole decision-making thing. And so you wind up where I am: wondering if, having lost your mind, you're now preparing to flush it down the toilet.

In this, as in almost every other medical procedure I have undergone in my life, I turn out to be Medically Unusual. Supposedly, people receiving ECT have some slight "retrograde amnesia," meaning they wake up after the anesthesia not being able to recall the last few moments just before they went under. Not me: I can recall every single moment, which is why the other day I recall that the doctor--an elderly gentleman, I get the impression he doesn't do much of anything else at this particular institution--put an electrode on my right temple, as usual, and then put one on my left temple, which was not usual.

"Are we doing bilateral or unilateral?" I asked, and I heard him say, "Oh!" and he removed the electrode on my left temple. For those of you who don't know, and I'm assuming this would be most people since up to about two months ago I didn't know anything about this either, bilateral ECT is associated with much more memory loss than unilateral ECT (the kind with the electrodes attached to only one side of the head, usually the right). It was too late to leap off the table at that point, but when I woke up I thought a lot about this, and I decided that it scared me shitless--a point of view seconded by my husband when I told him about it. Don't get me wrong: I know doctors are human, I understand mistakes get made in medicine all the time; there was a nurse standing right there who would have, I believe, caught this error even if I had not said anything, and it's possible the doctor himself would have caught his own error. But still.

So now, in addition to my usual baggage load of doubts and fears, I have this added feature: an all-too-vivid demonstration of how things can go wrong, and do. This happened, mind you, at a highly regarded institution of mental healing, not some suburban community hospital.

So tomorrow my job is to get on the phone and have a heart-to-heart discussion with the psychiatrist I initially consulted at this place, to ask about the mechanisms they have in place to prevent such errors from happening. Maybe he can convince me it never would have happened. Maybe I'll wind up asking him for the name of somebody in another city who can take on my case. Maybe I'll just decide to say, once and for all, to hell with it. I just don't know. All I know for sure is that I needed this additional wrinkle about as much as I needed--well, I started to write "a hole in my head," but given the way things are going, I may HAVE a hole in my head before the week is out. With scorch marks around it.

Once More, Dear Friends, Into the Breach

So five sessions of ECT is not enough.

This is a discovery I have made the hard way: by getting five sessions of ECT, feeling much better, and deciding that this was all I needed. The effects lasted about two weeks--two weeks in which my energy level went up, I began wearing make-up again, I re-started my exercise program, I began cooking meals for my family again....everything seemed different. And yet the anxiety was gradually building. It was as if I was waiting for the other shoe to drop--and finally, late last week, it did.

There's no way to put down on paper the thoughts inspired by severe depression without sounding melodramatic, or fake. That's because depression inherently distorts thinking; any faithful rendering of what depressive thinking looks like would come out cartoonish. My thoughts ran along the lines of what a miserable mother I was, how toxic my presence was to my house, how much better off my husband and children would be without me if only they knew it, how much I would prefer to be dead if only there was a means of getting that way without inflicting enormous pain on innocent people. And the shame: my God, the shame. What business did I have feeling terrible? Why was I inflicting this on my family? Why couldn't I just get off my ass and enjoy the good things life had given me? And so on. Not to mention that I was an economic liability--unemployable, unable to write, unable to do anything more demanding than maybe a job in retail...providing I could stand up all day, which I probably couldn't.

My husband came home from work to find me sitting on the floor of my office, sobbing. From time to time one of the kids would come knock on the door. "Mommy, are you okay?" they would ask. No, I'm not okay. But I'll be out soon. It's okay. You're okay. It's just...Mommy feels bad. But don't worry. As if that would help.

Saturday passed in a haze; Sunday passed pretty much the same way. Last night I downloaded a program from The Infinite Mind and listened to it on my Ipod while taking my walk through the neighborhood. The program is one I trust; it was begun by Dr. Fred Goodwin, who is the former head of the National Institute of Mental Health, and one of my sources from my reporting days. I know the people involved with the production company that produces it, Lichtenstein Creative Media, some of whom have their own mental health issues. I know that the sources the program uses are not perfect, in the sense that medicine is not perfect, but that they are the best sources to be had on any particular topic. This program was about ECT; it was one I probably should have listened to before I went for my first treatment. Yes, the program said, there are problems with memory loss. On the other hand, ECT is the most effective and rapid treatment for severe depression that medicine knows about...and there are ways to minimize the memory loss. I listened to this, and I thought: What point is there having a brain if life is not worth living? What good are intact memories if you cannot enjoy a simple afternoon with your own children?

This morning I got on the phone and talked to my shrink, and we realized that we had miscommunicated; he is not opposed to ECT, just not up to date on it; as for his remark about "shock jocks"--well, it was just slang. "Sometimes they call themselves that, but I shouldn't have used that language around you." Once I responded to the initial treatments, he asked, "Why didn't you talk to me about stopping?" "Because," I said, "I thought I was on my own." And he apologized for that; it was a position I should never have felt myself to be in, he said. At this point, he thinks I should go back.

So I hung up from talking to him, and and then I picked up the phone again and made the call. The only thing worse than making that call was not making it.

Every Nerve Exposed

Perhaps it's part of recovery from depression; perhaps it's a sign I haven't really recovered--I dunno. But these days I find it tough to read the news. Scooter Libby gets convicted, and I am outraged at the exposure of the reporting practices of my former colleagues in the news business (the underlying message behind the whole trial being the game in which high-ranking administration officials leak things they shouldn't be talking about to reporters carefully selected for their willingness to "spin" stories a particular way, and the reporters' willingness to be used in this way in exchange for scoops--when, that is, they report the leaks at all, and I don't know which is worse). It's an outrage fed by my own experience of reporting in Washington, which tells me that 99.9 percent of all reporters, Seymour Hersch and Charlie Peters being notable exceptions, firmly believe this is the only way to get the news. At the same time, I am utterly depressed at the spectacle of high-ranking Bush administration officials so clearly less concerned about the truth of whether Iraq was in possession of WMDs than they were about whether they could get the public to believe Iraq had WMDs.

So I put down my newspaper and go online and read a funny piece in Salon by Garrison Keillor about parents who practically hire interior design firms to help their third-graders with their book report dioramas--and then run across a letter in response that speaks of kids "whacked out on Ritalin"--which, since my own daughter suffers from ADD, brings up painful memories of the neighbor who last Christmas made a snarky comment about my daughter's supposed unreliability, serving as a potent reminder of the kind of prejudice that my daughter is, unfortunately, already far too aware of. So much for comic relief.

So then I check my e-mail and run across an article about the long-term effects of psychological torture, in Common Dreams , which features a picture of a section of the barbed wire fence at Guantanamo--a place which will, in my opinion, go down in history as a far worse blot on America's legacy than our forced internment of Japanese citizens during World War II.

And it's all so painful. Is it me, just seeing the bad stuff? Is it the standard definition of news, which posits that it's only news if something goes wrong? Is it the journalists, and the stories they aren't reporting--the foster care program somewhere that works, some new advance in making solar power affordable for the masses, the discovery of some bird thought to be extinct?

I don't know. All I know is that tonight I am looking forward to popping a beer and watching "American Idol."

What To Do When There's Nothing To Do

I have a friend--I'll call her Serena--who I've known for 15 years. We met under unusual circumstances: I was working for the Washington Post, and following some paramedics around for a series of feature stories one hot summer, and her teenage son got shot one night while I was hanging out with the paramedics. I still remember the reaction of the driver I was with when the call came over the radio: "How the hell did somebody manage to get himself shot in Foggy Bottom?" As a matter of fact, Serena's son lay on the sidewalk on the same block as the Four Seasons Hotel when we got there. It was about 1 a.m. and I remember being grateful for a chance to peel off from the driver I'd been hanging out with, because (like many people in that high-stress line of work) he had come to work drunk. It had been nerve-wracking, tearing around the city, running red lights and breaking the speed limit, in the company of a driver who reeked of liquor.

So I went to the hospital with this young boy, thinking he was probably some young punk who had gotten in a fight or something, and it turns out: no. Not at all. He was the product of a middle-class family in an upscale suburban neighborhood, who had been hanging out in Georgetown with two of his friends, there to see a movie and maybe pick up some girls, as teenage boys from the Washington suburbs have always done. To this day his shooting remains unsolved.

I don't remember meeting Serena, exactly; in my memory, the next thing that happens is that we are friends. We spent a lot of time hanging out together at George Washington University Hospital, where Serena's son clung to life for a week or so. The shooting left him paralyzed from the waist down, and my plan was to write about the shooting and its aftermath--to cover the story of a young black kid from a perspective the Post didn't get to often enough, i.e., as victim, not perpetrator. Serena was a small woman, feisty, a chain smoker with a raucous laugh who impressed me with her resilience. A blow that would have staggered almost any parent knocked her over, too, but only for a day or so; after that, she focused intently on what needed to be done. They had to remodel a bathroom, so that her son's wheelchair could manuver there. They'd have to build a ramp into the house. Therapy appointments had to be lined up. Schoolwork needed to be kept up. The daily, tedious work of recovery went on; the devastating psychological blow to her son's self-image had to be dealt with. At one point there was a medical crisis and her son needed a blood transfusion. She was the same blood type and went to donate her own blood to give to him; like many people, and a great many people in the black community, Serena did not trust the general blood supply. The trouble was, she didn't weigh enough to fit the donation guidelines. Before the doctors could discover this, she went outside and picked up some rocks and put them in her pockets, then came back inside and stood on the scales. "Just made it!" she cackled later. She was a tough broad, no doubt about it.

One night I was cooking dinner in my tiny little condo kitchen when the phone rang.

"He's dead," Serena said flatly. I felt my knees give way. I slid down and sat on the floor against the refrigerator. There had been a blood clot--a common complication of paralysis victims, where the lack of motion in the extremities can cause blood to pool. This clot had broken loose and made its way to her son's heart. He'd been talking to a friend on the phone one minute; the next minute, he was dead.

I was not a parent then--I hadn't even met my husband--but even then I could not understand how a person could live through something like that. A random crime, an indifferent police investigation, and then, just when the vague outlines of a New Normal could be glimpsed through the fog--utter disaster. It took everything out of Serena, as you may imagine. For a while, I wasn't sure she was going to make it.

As it happened, that summer I was having problems of my own--a major episode of depression, a boyfriend who had treated me badly, money troubles, problems at work. Serena and I forged our relationship over many a late-night telephone call over many a glass of wine. We talked about anything and everything--shoe sizes, the best place to buy groceries--except our respective grief. That was a subject too big for either of us, and besides, we knew too much about it already. So we talked about other things. It helped that Serena was black and I was white, because I was a Southerner, because white Southerners--some of us, anyway--have always been able to have frank conversations about race. We do not suffer from the illusion, shared by so many, that blatant race discrimination is a thing of the past, or something best left out of "nice" conversations. We've been there; we've seen it; it's shaped our lives. Serena and I were not that far apart in age; both of us could remember vestiges of the Jim Crow era, albeit from opposite sides of the fence. I told her about the dentist I went to as a child, who had two waiting rooms, one marked "Colored;" she told me about how buying shoes meant gambling that what you saw would fit, because if you were black you weren't allowed to try on shoes and then put them back on the rack.

Years passed. Serena slowly--and I do mean slowly--emerged from her grief, and my life changed, too. I met my husband, and ended up moving to the suburbs not far from where Serena and her husband lived. We stayed in touch, although truth be told, I was not always a good friend to Serena: my life got busy, kids entered the picture, and Serena's penchant for long, late-night phone conversations increasingly didn't fit into my life very well. But there was always a bond. One Christmas, after a year in which I don't think I had called her more than once, I got a Christmas card from her that said simply, "I will always love you." And I thought: I don't deserve this.

Now Serena is dying. She has cancer, and it is inoperable, and I don't know what to do. The last time we spoke her voice sounded weak, and she told me she was in hospice treatment. Every time I've called her house since then, I get a voice mail machine that says it is full and cannot take more messages. I worry about just dropping by and disrupting her rest by pounding on the door when she can't get out of bed; I worry about not dropping by, and not getting to see her. I want to do something but I don't know what. Mostly, I just want to sit beside her bed and hold her hand and laugh at one of those long, funny stories she tells so well. Time is short. I have to go.

So tomorrow, I will. I'll just get in the car and go, and hope that somehow somebody inside that house will hear me, and that Serena will be able to see a visitor. It's what you do when there is nothing else to do, because I have to tell her what she has meant to me. And if this is the only place where I get to do that--well, it's better than nothing.