The back door bangs open.
"Mom, is it supposed to rain today?"
"I don't know."
"Are we supposed to have any bad weather any time today?"
"I don't know."
"Because the wind's picking up out there and it kind of scares me and Katharine, but we really want to play outside."
"Well, go outside and play until it starts to rain, and if that happens, then come inside."
"Okay! Thanks, Mom!"
It's called Postpartum Depression, or PPD for those of us (too much) in the know. I've done a fair amount of research on this subject, both in the professional sense and in the Reality Bites sense. PPD is a subtype of depression which is not to be confused with the "baby blues," which virtually every new mother has for a few days or so. PPD is to the "baby blues" what a tsunami is to an ocean breaker. It makes you want to die, and this in spite of the fact that you have a new life to nurture and cherish. That's one of the worst things about it, in fact--that it happens at a time in your life when there is so much cause for joy. And that is also why so many women suffer it in silence, white-knuckle their way through the first year or so of motherhood: they are ashamed to be feeling so shitty when everyone expects them to be happy. Shame on top of depression is a lethal mix.
Here are just a few quotes from some of the women I interviewed for my book, The Ghost in the House (HarperCollins, 2006), who talked about this subject:
“I was afraid of her and ashamed of myself. I used to watch [my baby] sleeping and wonder with pride at how beautiful and perfect she looked. Then I would cry because I felt so sorry for her for her having such a screwup for a mother.”
“I lost me. I never knew me. And if I had a gun in the house, there wouldn’t be a me.”
Depression is a disease of recurrence; once those toxic neural pathways in the brain are ignited, they catch fire much easier the next time, and the time after that. That means any woman suffering from PPD is at risk of being on her way to a lifetime struggle with a disease that is the leading cause of disability in the world, according to the World Health Organization. And PPD, like maternal depression in general, is a disease that has a unique ability to spread the damage to the next generation. Research by Sherryl Goodman of Emory University, who co-authored the survey on which much of my book was based, has found that women who suffer from depression, especially women who suffer from depression during pregnancy, are more likely to have babies who are fussy, hard to soothe, colicky. The result, when the baby is born, is a vicious spiral: an unhappy baby who unknowingly creates more anguish for an unhappy mom, who then has trouble caring for this unhappy baby, who...That's what happened to this mom:
“My daughter cried for 8 weeks constantly. Finally, I was crying too. She barely slept. I barely slept…Finally, I stopped my life. I spent the entire morning deciding if I should give her up for adoption. It was that bad.”
Older cultures were a lot smarter about PPD than we are, and some still are. Some cultures routinely seclude a new mother for 40 days following delivery, a time in which she has nothing to do but rest, recuperate and care for her baby. Even in Elizabethan times, this was the case. Today, our "enlightened culture" ships new moms out of the hospital in 48 hours or less (even those who had C-sections); mothers who work for small employers (50 employees or fewer) are entitled to zero maternity leave. Zero. Is it surprising that doctors in this country aren't particularly attuned to this problem, and miss the diagnosis even when it's staring them in the face?
Here's a quote from a mother who is a physician, who suffered from PPD after the birth of her own daughter:
"The mother has to be pretty bad before someone picks it (PPD) up. In my experience, the physicians weren’t asking—the pediatrician, the obstetrician, the specialist. I didn’t see my internist, but I doubt she would have asked either—it’s not something we are trained to ask about.”
Today is Blog Day for the MOTHERS Act (S. 1375 ), otherwise known as The Moms Opportunity to Access Help, Education, Research and Support for Postpartum Depression Act, or MOTHERS Act. This proposed legislation, sponsored by Senators Menendez and Durbin, would ensure that new mothers and their families are educated about postpartum depression, screened for symptoms and provided with essential services. In addition, it would authorize money to be awarded as federal grants to researchers who are exploring the causes, diagnoses and treatments for PPD.
I end with one last quote--this one from an older mother who raised all her kids while struggling with depression, at immense cost to her and them.
"Depression is the parent with the most power."
Think about that for a minute. And then, when you're done, call or e-mail your senator.
It is now 8:13 p.m. East Coast time, and it was approximately 2:45 p.m. when I picked up my six-year old at school. Two hours after that, her 10-year-old sister came in. In that five and a half hour period, I have learned that:
I "never" play with my six-year-old.
I have a heart made of ice because instead of playing with her I chose to talk to the computer repairman. This proves I don't love her.
I am negligent. I did not make sure that my six-year-old had boots for Boot Day tomorrow. And they said it was going to be Boot Day ON THE ANNOUNCEMENTS, which if I had been there in her classroom with pencil and paper taking notes, I would have KNOWN.
I have no fashion sense. The outfit I laid out for tomorrow to the six-year-old was rejected with thinly disguised horror. "Uh......" (sharp intake of breath) "...no."
I am incompetent. The 10-year-old comes home, looks for bread to make a sandwich and is outraged. "You haven't gone to the store YET?" Similarly, I have not yet gone to the craft store to purchase items she needs for her Halloween costume. And she has been waiting a whole DAY. For God's sake, what have I been DOING all those hours she is in school?
(Sigh.)
My problem is I just ignore this stuff, or pretend to ignore it, or just say "give me a break" without explaining to any of my offspring that the world does not, in fact, revolve around them, until eventually I become aware of the fact that I feel like pounding my fist into a wall. Which is what I could do at this moment.
That's it. No insights, no great thoughts. Just a rant. And I'm done.
Our oldest, Rebecca, is 10. She is an amazing kid: wonderfully kind, funny, smart, a sucker for animals. She has her own pet-sitting business. She's in the talented and gifted program at school. She also has ADD.
Some people don't understand this. There was the neighbor, for instance, who scoffed when I told her that Rebecca had seen the neighbor's cat in our yard, right before we had to take our cat to the vet due to a bite. "This is the kid who lost my house key," the neighbor said. "Well, you believe her if you want to." And the fact is that, yes, Rebecca did lose this lady's house key when she was pet-sitting for them; she went to a movie and put it in her jeans pocket, refusing to leave it at home because the key was "my responsibility, Mom." So of course she misplaced it, and she was embarrassed, and she cried, but the damage was done. Rebecca was right about the neighbor's cat, by the way--I've seen it half a dozen times in our yard since myself--but that doesn't matter. "I am well aware of Rebecca's issues," the neighbor said icily when I tried to explain to her that ADD has nothing to do with character or trustworthiness. A kid who can lose a house key is...well, what else need be said? Whether Rebecca was just born defective, or whether her defects are the result of our lousy parenting I don't know, though I'm sure my neighbor has it all figured out. When she sees me now, she gives me a big fake smile. My children are quiet and well-behaved! her smile says. Yours are unruly and loud. That makes me a good mom, and you a bad mom. Isn't it obvious?
Kids with ADD can be brilliant or average; ADD is not a mark of intelligence. ADD is like having a musical group which lacks a conductor. The group may be a garage band; it may be the London Philharmonic--but whatever it is, it has trouble getting its act together. When something is out of Rebecca's sight, it's gone--pffft! She has trouble writing things down (and her handwriting is awful anyway)--but she's a whiz at the computer. She knows how to program the remote way better than I do. Her mind works on large concepts--she's the kid who asked me recently, "Mom, what is a liberal?"--but ask her what her math assignment is and you'll draw a blank stare. It's frustrating as hell to live with. To be the person experiencing it must be frustrating as hell to the 10th power--and this probably explains why ADD kids are prone to tantrums. Rebecca's tantrums are legendary. The first one she ever threw, at 18 months, got the two of us kicked out of public building in downtown Washington D.C. As she got older, she managed to keep herself more or less together at school. Home was where she let the fury out, and the person who got the full force of it was usually me. That's a whole book, right there.
ADD causes social problems. Kids with ADD tend to interrupt a lot; they have no brake between brain and mouth. To other people, this probably seems rude. Sometimes Rebecca conveys the impression of being completely tuned out of what's being said to her. I know that she's probably heard it, but other people think she is zoned out or just showing how bored she is with them. She also has trouble reading social cues: if someone brushes up against her in the hall, she's unable to tell whether it was purely accidental or some kind of harassment--and the default option, for her, is to get mad. "Maybe she didn't mean to, honey." "Yes she DID, I hate her and I'll never speak to her again!" And I wasn't there. How do I know?
Rebecca has two or three good friends, girls I cherish because they are capable of seeing past her quirks and able to appreciate who she is--but they have other friends, too, and schedules of their own. Most kids just give her a wide berth. There are two moms of my acquaintance--the cat lady is one--who do not allow their children to play with her. Or maybe it's me they object to; since I've obviously screwed up Rebecca, they may be afraid my bad parenting will taint their own children. Whatever the reasons, the consequence is that Rebecca spends a lot of time by herself. Two days ago, I was telling her a funny story about a trip to Paris I made with my friend Ann 20 years ago, and the misadventures we had there. The stories had Rebecca laughing, a sound I love to hear, and so I didn't think too much about it when she said, "I wish I had a friend like that." But later, it dawned on me what she meant: she wanted a friend she could be wholly herself with, a friend for whom she was not "my friend with ADD" or "my friend with the problems" and not a friend who, she secretly suspects, has to "put up" with her at times. Maybe she already does, and she just doesn't give those friends enough credit. I don't know. All I know is that she is lonely. She rarely complains. But I know.
If you are a parent and you have a kid with ADD, you have a new part-time job. It's called "writing memos to teachers." Also chauffeuring: there's a formidable array of doctor and therapist appointments that go along with this, not to mention social skills groups--if you're lucky enough to find one near you. You also get to experience grammar school and middle school (and high school, too, I'm sure) all over again. When your kid has homework, you have homework. This weekend was science fair weekend. I loathe science fair--to me, it teaches kids to hate science--but there it is, it has to be done, and around here it meant last night about a three-hour siege of screaming and tears and threats to leave home and wails of "I HATE THIS!!" When it was all over, my hands were shaking and my husband was tight-lipped and furious. It's like that a lot around here. Other families have regular old weekends going to the mall or to soccer games or just hanging out at home. At our house, it's a terrific weekend if we get through it without a meltdown.
At a party a week ago, I sat beside a woman whose son is now in his mid 30s. The son had ADD, or some kind of learning disability, but when he was in grammar school people didn't know as much about ADD and so he was never diagnosed. He was hard to handle--rebellious, refused to do his homework, an academic underachiever despite his obvious intelligence. His parents were at a loss. "Did you ever feel like other parents blamed you?" I asked her. "Of course," she answered quietly. "All the time." Her son is doing okay these days; he has a job and a stable relationship after many years of turmoil. She told me that he'd called her one day, out of the blue, to say, "Thanks, Mom, for being such a great mom."
She was thunderstruck. "Honey, what did I ever do right?" she asked.
"You never gave up on me," he said, and as she told me this story, tears ran down her face.
This morning, I was in my office Googling "ADD" and "private schools" when Rebecca crept into the room behind me. "I'm sorry, Mom," she said quietly. I turned and put my arms around her, my head against her chest, and I could hear her heart beating. She knows I love her; I didn't have to say it. And she knows this, too: I will never give up on her.
...there is some welcome comic relief.
It's the Night Before School. The 10-year-old is having yet another hissy fit and is upstairs moaning, "I'LL NEVER SEE MY FRIENDS...." over the realization that her middle school class schedule is....well, what it's been since last Thursday, but she's just now decided to freak out about it. The six-year-old is in the bathtub for the second time, having emerged the first time with her hair still a mass of gooey hair conditioner. We're bearing down on bedtime, and the six-year-old is stalling.
"Get out of the tub NOW," I say.
"Okay," she says, and hauls her sopping little six-year-old self out of the tub. "But first I hafta do my WET NAKED DANCE! YEAH, BABY! OH YEAH OH YEAH OH YEAH!"
...And as if shopping weren't bad enough, I am now dealing with two drama queens who are suffering from severe cases of pre-first-day-of-school jitters. Waiter? Can you bring us another round of Xanax?
I remember the pre-school jitters, I keep telling the girls, who of course don't listen--so I'll tell you, dear readers. When I went to elementary school, back when the dinosaur tracks were still fresh, you were in elementary school up through grade seven. And then the state of Georgia, in its infinite wisdom, packed you off to high school, where you were a sub-freshman (a lower life form even than algae). I went from a one-story elementary school with four halls and about 500 students to a sprawling three-story complex of buildings housing about 1,500 students, some of them with prison records. (Okay, I don't really know about the prison records. But years later, as a reporter for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution assigned to cover legal affairs, I ran across the name of somebody from my old high school on a list on Georgia Death Row inmates. I remembered his sister from my school bus; she had a face like a hatchet.)
Anyway, I asked my older sister to help me through my first day, and she grudgingly agreed. (I realize now high school was no picnic for her, either.) The first day of school came, she walked me upstairs to my homeroom (room 225, Mrs. Stephens), pushed me in with a shove between the shoulderblades, and said, "See ya." That was my "orientation."
These days, educators have pre-first-day-of-school orientation, and it helps.....temporarily. The effect wears off after 24 hours, though, at least around here. My 10-year-old, Rebecca, has already had one freakfest this morning because her best friend wasn't available for a playdate. Said best friend is at home stressing out about how she and my daughter don't have a bunch of classes together, and my daughter's reaction was not sympathy--oh, no, that would've actually made sense--but outrage that her best friend didn't feel like coming over right that red hot minute. "She's like, 'Oh, it'll never get BETTER...'' Rebecca said to me in exasperation, and I said, "Yeah, well, I've seen that reaction a lot myself"--just in time for Rebecca to interrupt me with a geyser of tears and the proclamation "I DON'T HAVE ANY FRIENDS!!!" Etcera, etcera. Here's some advice: if you are the parent of a tween, do not allow yourself to express amusement at irony. It only riles 'em up more.
Suzanne, the six-year-old, meanwhile, has been busy developing a great big honkin' Attitude, which has been piled on top of an already existing Sassy Streak, so that we are treated to a run of comments like, "Hello Mommy poo poo head, I love you more than anything....NOT!" Suzanne has been lobbying for a playdate too, but six-year-olds are more tied to their parents' schedules than 10-year-olds are, and so far our quest has been fruitless. I bent over the other morning to kiss her awake and her first words upon returning to consciousness were, and I am not making this up, "I NEVER GET ANY PLAYDATES..." This has begun to morph into "Mommy, you don't love me..."--delivered while giving me this Bambi-eyed look, and I am ashamed to say that I have fallen for this way too many times. "Of course I love you, Bunny," I've said, and I've stopped to give her a big hug, only to hear the same thing again about half an hour later. Yesterday, my too-long patience finally snapped, and I told her that for the past two weeks, since her dad's taken some vacation time, we've done nothing but hang out with our kids and try to show them a good time with trips to the pool, outings to Luray Caverns, trips to the waterpark, movies, etc.etc.etc. and how telling me I didn't love her was just NOT FAIR and if she did it one more time I was gonna SCREAM.
So she stopped. Her new complaint? "Nobody does what I tell them to do." I'm going to refer her to her sister, who has long held a similar grievance. Because I have to go look for the Xanax bottle.
I've spent the afternoon shopping with my 10-going-on-14-year-old, who starts middle school on Monday. I need to lie down.
I thought (silly me) I knew a thing or two about how to put an outfit together, but today I found out I am hopelessly Fashion-Impaired. I know this because my daughter tells me so, very loudly, every time I pick something off the rack to test her reaction, which is always "NO."
"I want to be stylish," Rebecca tells me. "Not dumpy." Okey-doke. I see a pair of capris, gray pinstriped with a pink belt. This, I think, would go nicely with the array of pink shirts she has picked out (she loves anything as long as it's in pink), but it turns out I am wrong, wrong, wrong. This time, she doesn't even say no; she sees me pick it up off the rack and holds up her hand as if I am a vampire and she is wielding a crucifix. She turns and walks away, looking at the racks of clothes and pronouncing, "No, no, no, no and, let's see, NO." You'd think she was Anna Wintour, that's how imperious she sounds. But I bet Anna Wintour doesn't wear ratty pink and white sneakers with a t-shirt and polyester pants when she is making her fashion pronouncements. Or any other time, for that matter.
"There is NOTHING here," Rebecca announces a moment later, after having given the juniors department a thorough 30-second assessment.
"Let's keep looking," I suggest, which is greeted by a loud sigh, and if there were a thought bubble above her head, it would read, Why did God curse me with such a dimwit parent? I catch the eye of another mom one aisle over. "I hear nothing," she says, and grins.
"Mom," Rebecca says, speaking distinctly so that even a dumbass like me will understand, "I said I want stylish." Stylish, apparently, means heavily decorated. Solid colors are out of the question; the more sequins, the better. "Good Lord, Rebecca, are you auditioning for the Porter Waggoner Show?" I ask. She turns those beautiful hazel eyes to me and fixes me with a blank look. "What?"she says--which gives me the giggles, because it was a good line, you have to admit, and I just wasted it on the wrong audience; even my fellow mom has moved out of earshot. But it doesn't matter, because Rebecca has been distracted by a pair of leopard-print leggings. "These would go great with my new leopard print top," she says, and I think, Yeah, if you want to look like Eartha Kitt circa 1965, but this time I keep my mouth shut. What do I know? I am just a mom. A mom who still has a finicky six-year-old princess to shop for and who is wondering, at this moment, what it would have been like to have had boys.
When I was a kid, summers were unplanned. This sometimes meant stretches of excruciating boredom, but for the most part it was pretty heavenly. In my memory, those summers--I am speaking here of the period from when I was six to, say, 12-- stretched out for impossibly long periods, and they constitute a kind of golden era of my childhood. My sister and I woke up each day with no particular plan, no camp to go to, no program of self improvement. This left us free to explore the neighborhood and do things like perfect the art of making mud pies and bring them into the house. We attempted to dig our way to China via the back yard; we created elaborate "pretend like" games in the back yard with the rooms of our "house" marked off with sticks. We read a lot of books--my mom took us to the College Park Library, which I recall as a dark place with heavenly air conditioning and shelves of endless delight where I made the acquaintance of Walter Farley's "Black Stallion" series. In the spirit of scientific inquiry, we once made catnip tea with some catnip leaves we found in my mom's cupboard, tasted the results and decided it tasted worse than ditch water, and then had the brilliant insight to tie the used tea bag around the cat's neck. (Note to file: cats can, if sufficiently motivated and while under the influence of a mind-altering substance, climb a tree backwards--and no, I would not encourage my own children to do this.) There was also Vacation Bible School (we were given no choice, and besides my mom was the director) and ironing, which was one of those chores that never ever went away. And we watched TV. Every day at 11 it was "Hollywood Squares," followed by re-runs of "Father Knows Best" at 11:30; this was followed by the "News at Noon" on WSB-TV, which was followed at 12:30 p.m. by "Armchair Playhouse," which was a two-hour movie, usually a re-run of some 50s fare. Obviously, the fact that I can recall this schedule in minute detail 40 years later tells you that I lost entire brain lobes to the Boob Tube--and that, I tell my kids, is why mommy is not a Nobel Prize winner today.
Anyway, we have been experimenting with this approach to child rearing around her for the past three weeks, and I can report mixed results. On a day-to-day basis, life has been pretty free-form: lots of breakfast eaten in front of the TV, lots of running of mundane errands, lots of time at the community pool, lots of playdates. It's been fun to wake up each day and think, What shall we do?--and to do some of the things that are on my list of Neat Things to Do That I'll Probably Never Get Around to. Suzanne and I explored the Aquatic Gardens in Washington, D.C., which is one of the city's least-known botanical treasures; we got there early one morning and watched the lotuses open. Heavenly. Rebecca and I have gone to a family wedding in Alabama, and tasted the dubious joys of wilting in our best clothes in 90-degree Birmingham heat because the bride must've decided sometime last winter that the Birmingham Botantical Gardens would be a lovely spot for a reception. (Not in June, honey--at least, not in Alabama.) We've gone paddle-boating at the local park. We've watched the Fourth of July fireworks on the lawn of a local office building, camped out in lawn chairs. The kids have been berry-picking; we've explored a local horse farm. We've hosted sleepovers. We set up the sprinkler in the back yard and ran through it; we had a picnic. I have introduced my oldest daughter to ironing, carrying on a mother-daughter tradition (unlike my mother, though, I don't make her iron her dad's shirts; it's pillowcases and napkins only).
But in the interest of journalistic objectivity, I must report also that there have been days from hell, when the kids seemed to take sadistic delight in discovering every single one of each other's psychic buttons and using this knowledge to inflict sophisticated types of psychological torture, usually while in the back seat of the minivan. There has been a fair amount of screaming, "I'M BORED!!" in tragic tones, and more than once I have gone upstairs to lie down with a headache, exactly the way I remember my own mother doing when we were kids. These past three weeks have also been a brief experiment to see if my kids could ever OD on TV, and the answer is: no. Their capacity for endless hours watching "Fairly Odd Parents" and "Spongebob Squarepants" and "Drake and Josh" is exceeded only by their memory of every plot twist in every episode, because they have seen them all before at least six times. My 10-year-old, in particular, is capable of spending the whole day parked in front of the tube--an amount of TV viewing which many an elderly stroke patient in a nursing home would have trouble tolerating, and they have an excuse.
On the whole, my conclusion is that there's something to be said for Quantity Time, as opposed to Quality Time. That picnic in the back yard, for instance, would never have happened if I'd planned it; it was a wildflower of a moment that just grew out of the circumstances at hand: the day was gorgeous, the kids were out there playing already and I decided at the last minute to order pizza for dinner. But Quantity Time is a delight which, like really good chocolate, a person should taste only in limited quantities.
Anyway, the kids start camp next week. THANK. GOD.
It's summer. The 10-year-old is in Georgia with her Aunt Nonny and my six-year-old and I are having a week at home, just us. Today she had a friend over to play, and in the middle of the afternoon she runs into the kitchen: "Gimme an I!"
"Eye!" I say.
"NO." She draws a big breath. (Those blue eyes, those adorable freckles, the curly pigtails--oh God, I want to eat her up.) "Just listen. Gimme an I! Gimme an L! Gimme an O! Gimme a V! Gimme a E! Gimme a Y! Gimme a O! Gimme a--" She pauses, thinking. Then: "Gimme a U! Gimme a M! Gimme an O! Gimme a M! Gimme a M! Gimme a Y!" She runs away, then skitters back. "Gimme a exclamation mark!"
A while back, I posted something about Leslie Bennett's book The Feminine Mistake: Are We Giving Up Too Much? , in which Bennetts argues that women who drop out of the salaried workforce (note the adjective) to raise kids are making a dumb decision because they will be forever economically penalized. I was pretty hard on ol' Leslie because I thought she was placing the blame on moms and not the culture in which we live; Bennetts responded to that criticism (which was made by many others besides me) by saying basically she wasn't taking sides, she was just a reporter reporting the facts. I think it boiled down to a question of tone, and the fact that maybe Bennetts underestimates the difficulties some mothers face in combining career with child-rearing--a feat she was able to pull off herself rather successfully.
Anyway, all this made me rather interested in today's Kojo Nnambdi Show, on WAMU (88.5 FM) in which the panelists were discussing the benefits of marriage. The panelists included Stephanie Coontz, who teaches history and family studies at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington and who wrote, among other things, the book The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap (Basic Books, 1992). Here's my question:
So, okay, Leslie, you got your facts straight (though the existence of this phenomenon was never anything I took issue with). This is a reality I'm living with right now--though I have to say that my life has resembled Leslie Bennetts' life in many ways, the chief one being that I have never entirely dropped out of the labor force. I quit my job at the Washington Post when my oldest daughter was born 10 years ago, true, and I did not go back to the job that was waiting for me there after my year of maternity leave. My reason was really simple: I did not want to work at a job that would require me to devote roughly 12 hours out of my 24-hour day, with commuting and everything else, when I had a baby at home--and there were no flextime, telecommuting or job sharing options available to me (note to Leslie: please re-read this sentence). I took on contract work with my former employer. I freelanced extensively. I wrote a book. I did the math just the other day and, on average, I have contributed roughly $23,000 a year to the household income for each of the 10 years that I have been "not working" and home with my daughters. But still, in dollar terms, there's no doubt I have paid a price.
In human terms, the jury is still out. When my oldest daughter was three--about the time I was thinking hard about returning to the full-time work force--it began to become apparent that there were Issues looming. She had tantrums--all kids have tantrums--but these were mind-boggling tantrums the likes of which nobody had ever seen. She'd been a high-strung kid from day one, and with that gut feeling that moms develop, I was getting the vibe that rough times were ahead. And they were. Over the next four or five years, she was a part-time job all by herself. Either I was dealing with a meltdown, or recovering from the effects of one, or looking up stuff on the web to explain them, or talking to school officials, or finding the right testing and psychologist, or going to therapy sessions, or....Trust me. It's a long list. Anybody who has a kid with ADD or Sensory Integration Disorder or autism or any other neurological issue is going to know exactly what I'm talking about. Her exact diagnosis doesn't matter here; suffice it to say that today she has a therapist, a psychiatrist, an occupational therapist, a pediatrician and several highly involved educators--all first-rate, all actively involved in helping her find her way through the mine fields she's been given to negotiate, and they have all made a huge difference. Yesterday, her therapist said to me, "Who could have done more for her? Look at what you've hooked her up with." My husband has told me much the same. The fact is that being a person with way too much experience with mood disorders and psychiatry provided me with tools to a) detect a problem at the very beginning and b) figure out, eventually, ways of dealing with it. Had it been up to my husband alone, it wouldn't have happened--not because he loves her less, but because his life has not included anything like the experiences I've had. Could I have done all that and held down a full-time job? Hell, no. That combination would have taxed a person of robust health who could get by on six hours of sleep every night, and believe me, I do not fit that description. It was either me, or nobody; it was a career or her.
So here we come to the big question, the one Leslie Bennetts asks: did I give up too much?
I don't know. All I do know is that today she graduated from fifth grade, and she was beaming. She made the honor roll; she has friends; she is (mostly) a happy kid. Next fall we start middle school, so stay tuned, but today the sky is blue and things look okay--not perfect by any means, but definitely okay. And, yes, there are days when I miss my old life; there are days when I yearn for the independence and sense of mastery I got from bringing in big bucks. During the dry spells that every writer goes through (this one has lasted about a year--so, note to the Cosmos: enough already!) I sometimes think, Boy, what an idiot I was. What a dumbass. If my kid turns into a heroin addict someday, I guess I'll know I made a bad bargain; if she wins the Nobel Prize, I'll know I did the right thing. And who knows what lies in between? Not me, not Leslie Bennetts, not anybody.
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