These are a collection of pre-blog journal entries. In reverse chronological order.
Passing It Down to the Kids 07.25.2005
Tonight at the pool Rebecca
had a meltdown. She didn’t have her goggles, so she was borrowing Suzanne’s.
Hers were at home, in her dresser drawer, which is a rotten place to keep
swimming goggles, but then this is a kid with organizational problems. So she
wore the goggles for about 15 minutes and then Suzanne said she wanted her
goggles back and I called Rebecca over and suggested that she give them to
Suzanne for awhile, seeing as how they were, after all, hers. Huge scene
ensued. Red face, screaming, tears, holding on to me for dear life because she
didn’t want to leave the pool. David grim faced, humiliated; Suzanne babbling
and, for the most part, unconcerned—except that I did catch her smiling once at
her sister’s distress. To her credit, she was trying not to, but she did smile.
And Rebecca saw it, which just racheted up the hysteria several more notches.
People were staring—some, I’m sure, with disapproval.
Screw them. They have no
idea. The only good thing about Rebecca’s depression—the only thing—is that we got help for her years sooner than a lot of
parents would have. When I was her age, with the same symptoms, my parents had
not a clue. At least David and I have a clue. But that’s the only good thing.
Rebecca screamed at me all
the way home—the usual: I am a rotten mother, I don’t care about her needs, she
wishes she was dead, I love Suzanne better than her, she is never talking to me
again ever, let her out of the car RIGHT THIS SECOND—all interspersed with
ear-splitting screams. I am calm. I have been here before. We get home and I
say to her, “If I were you, I’d get up to my room before Daddy gets here.” (We
were in separate cars.) “NO I WON’T!!!” she screamed. Her face, at these
moments, is frightening—those green eyes look ferocious, evil, as if she is
possessed. I got out of the car and said to David, “Do me a favor, and just don’t
talk to her.” She went upstairs; within 30 minutes she was okay again. She
apologized to me, to Suzanne and to David.
And here’s the thing. While I’m
drying Suzanne off after her bath, Suzanne said to Rebecca, “I have an idea
about the goggles.” Rebecca started to growl at her; I said quickly, “Tell me
your idea, Suzanne, don’t talk to Rebecca about the goggles just now,” and
Suzanne whispered in my ear, “I could have them one day and she could have them
the next.”
They both break my heart, in
different ways—Suzanne, with tenderness; Rebecca, with her ferocity.
And it just made me think,
the whole time, of the many rages I have had—the bookcases I have ripped bare,
the precious objects broken, the screaming fits I’ve had; and the way I spoke
at those times to God was the same way Rebecca spoke to me tonight. And I said
to my daughter in my heart, You will learn. I love you even in this state. I
can’t give you anything right now because you are not in a position to
receive—and I know that infuriates you even more—but I can’t help it; it’s
where you are. And all I can do is sit here and wait until your fury has
exhausted itself and you come back to me.
Rebecca has insight at the
age of eight that I did not have until I was in my 30s, which gives me hope.
But events like tonight—when some transitory and minor frustration just rips
through her limbic brain like a brushfire—also make me fear for her. I see this
difficult road ahead of her and I wish to God she didn’t have to travel it.
Those are the bad moments.
There are others, not so bad. Getting in the car the other morning on our way
to drop Suzanne at Anne’s and Rebecca at camp, Suzanne says to Rebecca, “Tell
me a story.”
“Okay,” Rebecca says. “I’m
going to use real names, but it’s just a story, okay?”
“Okay.”
“Well, Rebecca and Suzanne
were in the car getting ready to take Suzanne to day care and Rebecca to camp,
and Suzanne was being an annoying little brat. She was really irritating. And
she kept talking and irritating Rebecca and Rebecca said, ‘Suzanne, please
stop.’ But Suzanne wouldn’t stop. She just kept talking and talking and Rebecca
said, ‘Suzanne, PLEASE stop talking.’ But Suzanne just kept talking and finally
Rebecca got really really angry…..The end.”
There’s a pause from the back
seat. Then Suzanne said, very soberly and without a trace of sarcasm, “That is
a great story.”
In a Dark Time 01.31.2005
Bad time. Body aches;
anxiety; hard to concentrate on anything; no pleasure anywhere. The pleasure is
in not feeling pain. All I want to do is sleep.
Depression is the result of
sensitivity to change: changes in hormone levels (monthly or circadian); changes
in amount of daylight; changes in life. Depressed people are out of synch with
the universe, and that is the root cause of our suffering.
The question for today is, as
always: do I try to work? Or do I just give up and sleep? If I could think of
anything that would help, I would do it. Maybe it’s best to just crawl in bed.
Christ, for a little peace.
The other day I thought, if I bit somebody today, they
would DIE.
Another
Philosophical Moment 12.19.2004
When I was in the psychiatric
hospital, I said to myself, If there is a God, it is not anyone I have ever
met. This was true. It was a turning point for me, away from the simplistic
religion I’d been taught as a child. I needed to give up religious practice
entirely, for a long time, to get purged of that. Even now I’m not completely
purged—there’s a bad taste in my mouth I’ll never entirely be rid of. I don’t
like institutional religion; I’ll never feel comfortable in a church. But
somehow in recent years I’ve begun thinking about God.
Iris Dement sings, “I don’t
know just where God lives/Ain’t even sure of exactly who God is/I’m not sure
there’s a church that deserves to take God’s name….” That pretty much sums it
up for me. All I know is that the more I surrender to something outside of me,
the more I am willing to be the agent of something outside myself, the greater
the things I can accomplish. For me this is like trying to use a ham radio,
getting the frequency right sometimes and then losing it again. I flounder and
fail and I doubt myself, and I have periods of despair. But somehow in recent
years I have sensed something else happening to me that is good, a kind of
growth. It turns me outward more and more, away from the prison of self.
Someday my kids will ask me:
Why is there evil in the world? I will answer with another question: how do you
know it’s evil? Because we know what good is. How is that possible? How did
good come into the world? When a python swallows a field mouse, the snake isn’t
evil and the mouse isn’t good; it’s just the way life is. Joseph Campbell
believed that to God, everything in our reality is like that—value-neutral—that
God sees them outside the temporal stream, and that good and evil and purely
human constructs. I can see how he might have arrived at that conclusion, but
to live in this world I find it necessary to bring some judgments to bear, so I
call some things good and some things evil. We have to do this. We are only
human; we can only understand so much. And there is the necessity of
self-preservation, both personal and societal. (Which is also the only good
argument for prisons.)
We spend a lot of time
thinking about evil and not much time thinking about good. Thinking about Good
makes you look punch-drunk, slap-happy, simple-minded. I used to hold Mr. Rogers
in contempt for this very reason. I confused him with Alfred E. Neuman. But Mr.
Rogers was onto something: good is profound, and it’s all around us, just as
much as evil is. I read somewhere in an interview with him that as a child he
was disturbed by watching the news and seeing bad things happen to people. He
asked his mother why those things happened, why God would let people get hurt.
“Look for the helpers,” she told him. “Whenever bad things happen, sooner or
later you will find a helper around.”
It’s as good an answer as I
could ever think of. Our job is to find the good and expand it, and then dare
to show it even in the presence of evil. Whenever we manage to pull that off,
something powerful happens.
Child of My
Heart 12.14.2004
Last night, I was in my
study catching up on some things. Rebecca and David were in the family room
watching "Harry Potter," and Suzanne (who is 3) was in the living
room watching "The Fox and the Hound" because she finds the Harry
Potter movies too scary. I was planning to join her in just a moment or two. So
when I got done, I come out of my study and saw Suzanne sitting on the sofa,
her face all red and tears just pouring down. I said, "Honey, what's the
matter?" and she pointed at the TV--where the fox had just been dumped in
the woods, far from all his friends, by the mean bad man--and she said, "I
was just cwying because it was so sad, Mommy, it was just so sad." I
scooped her up in my arms and we sat there and watched the movie for a few
minutes. She regained her cheerfulness in a minute and when David came in to
see what we were doing, I told him about what his daughter had been doing
(which broke my heart)....David smiles at her and Suzanne says, "I was
just joking, Dad, I wasn't weally cwying." So there’s empathy, which seems
to me rather sophisticated for a three-year-old, and then embarrassment about
having displayed emotion, which seems positively adult-like.
A few months ago, something
similar happened--I was in the kitchen and she was in the living room watching
"Dumbo" and she came in just sobbing. I said, "Suzanne, what's
the matter, honey?" and without speaking she grabbed my hand and led
me into the living room, where the movie was showing Dumbo having just been
separated from his mother. She just couldn't stand to watch it alone.
Just writing this makes my
throat clench up.
More Philosophical Moments 09.22.2004
What is it about this desire
to hold onto moments? I kiss David goodbye for a trip, lay my cheek against his
shirt and feel its starched fabric against my skin. I watch Rebecca running
away from me, late to school (again), her legs impossibly long, that golden
hair in the early morning sun. I look down into Suzanne’s face, smiling at her
talk about her “spicy red balloon,” and I am stunned, once more, by the
radiance of the smile she returns to me, the spark behind those clear blue
eyes. –All this, and I want to say: stop. I want to hang onto it—to do what,
I’m not sure. Put it in an album? The tenderness of these moments pierces my
heart.
Part of what I feel is fear.
It’s going—I can’t stop it—I will never be able to capture this thing called
life. The sweetness always carries the taint of death, what Roethke called “the
dire dimension of a final thing.” What if I were to lose them, or they were to
lose me? How would they live? How could I? And yet, in a deeper part of my
mind, I believe that this is all an illusion, that everything that has been, is
still; everything that will be is already here. If we can look into telescopes
and see the beginnings of the universe, it’s obvious that “now” depends
entirely on your point of view. My fear is really a desire to control. But I am
only human, and I desperately desire this control. I want to run this show, to
slow the projector down at my favorite parts and fast-forward through the
boring stretches or the pictures too horrible to bear.
And yet the longer I live,
the more I am convinced that our job here on earth is to embrace it all, to
open wide and swallow, and that every moment I spend denying myself this
experience—through some humdrum idea of duty to my shopping list, or just pure
laziness—is to suffer a kind of defeat. The real thing to fear isn’t death;
it’s the failure to notice. And yet this kind of wakefulness I experience
sometimes—not often enough—is really painful, in the most joyous kind of way.
It’s so much easier to just read the paper, turn on the car radio, go through
the motions. “Here,” the universe keeps saying. “Here. Look at this!” And every
once in a while I fight through the fog of unconsciousness that most of us
spend our lives in, and I do see.
Conversation with Rebecca:
“Mom! I have a great idea for
saving money!”
“What’s that?”
“We can send our old
refrigerator back to the store and make a refrigerator out of a hollow tree! I
just learned how!”
“Yeah?” And so she tells me,
in excruciating detail, how we could cut the door in the bark of the tree, top
door and bottom door, and then hollow out the inside, and put our food in
there.
“What would keep things
cold?” I ask.
She looks at me with pity;
clearly, I am stone simple.
“Ice.”
“Okay, but where would we get
it?”
Why did God curse her with
such a parent? “We’d get it at the STORE. Duh.”
“Okay,” I say. “But we’d have
to drive the car to the store to get it, wouldn’t we?”
It used to be that I’d have
to take her even further down this road before she got it, but she’s getting
quicker every day. Now she looks thoughtful.
“Oh,” she says. There is a
pause. Then: “I think I’ll stick to clipping coupons.”
Childhood Moments Part V 09.15.2004
Me (to Rebecca): “How is it
that you know you don’t like certain foods when you’ve never even tried them?”
Rebecca: “It saves time.”
Who Needs Smart
Bombs? Send ‘Em Toddlers. 04.23. 2003
We have painters here, which
means that suddenly I'm spring cleaning (something about those grimy
windowsills and several years' worth of bug carcasses)...Anyway I'm in
Rebecca's room yesterday and year Suzanne behind me. I say to myself,
"Better get her out of here before she gets into Rebecca's paints" and
turn around, only to find Miss Suzanne standing there in her socks a pool of
yellow paint looking at me like "So what's your problem, lady?" So
far this week she has tangled the phone cord upstairs so tightly that when I
picked it up to answer it I nearly gave myself a concussion; the whole thing
came up with the receiver and I had to spend 10 minutes untangling the cord.
Then she managed to wedge my Tupperware so that I cannot open the bottom
kitchen drawer. After that, she demonstrated that she can access the kitchen
counter by climbing the back of an easy chair and crawling over the counter
divide that's between the kitchen and the (new) family room, at which point she
immediately went for a bottle of prescription pills (I snatched them out of her
hand just in time). Following this, she poured half a container of talcum
powder on her carpet, then led me into the room where she did this, pointed to
the mess and says, "Ooooh, nooooo!"
And just now, as Minerva was
leaving, she stuck her head in my study door and said, “Rebecca is watching TV
and Suzanne is sticking a broom handle in the VCR.” Gotta go.
Childhood Moments
Part IV 02.01.2003
Suzanne
woke up from her nap today and clamored for somebody to come get her. She got a
haircut last week, and now has an adorable cap of curls, all frizziness gone.
She was still in her jams and sopping wet, so I stripped her naked and put her
on the changing table, where she stood up to look out the window, as she always
does. But this time she turned to face me. Looking mom in the eye! What fun! So
we explored each other’s faces for a minute, and then I pointed to a little
scratch on my face that she’d made the night before. And perhaps remembering
she’d done it, she leaned toward me and kissed it—just the tiniest touch of
those soft baby lips against my face, like a butterfly’s caress. How much I
love this stage—that wriggling little body, those pink, round baby buns, the
protruding toddler tummy. The changing dimensions mark the passage from
babyhood to childhood.
We’re Going
to Bomb Who? 01.22.2003
This
is a weird time. We are preparing to go to war—though for exactly what is not
clear to me, or lots of other people. But more people are ginned up for it,
oiling their rifles, getting ready to ship out, bellowing rhetoric about
crushing evildoers and nipping them in the bud. A while back, the big evildoer
was Quaddafi; then Osama bin Laden; now it’s Saddam Hussein (even though North Korea
says outright it has the nukes those
U.N. inspectors have been looking all over Iraq
for). I read a quote in Time
from John le Carre who says that the deflection of American anger away from bin
Laden and toward Hussein by the Bush administration “is one of the great PR
conjuring acts in history.” We are told that Iraq has ties to al Queda (what
Arab country wouldn’t?), that there is hard evidence from al Queda prisoners
taken in Afghanistan last year that Iraq had something to do with 9/11.
Condoleezza Rice herself said so, and Donald Rumsfeld. I haven’t seen it. The
most the Post has turned up is something said by some prisoners at Guantanamo
. If there were
anything on disc or on paper, surely somebody would have made a midnight call
to Bob Woodward by now; if ever a document cried out to be leaked, this would
be it. But nothing. We just have to take their word for it—and, appallingly,
millions of Americans seem to. Or are too interested in the Super Bowl to care.
This must be what it was like before the Spanish American War, when all you
could hear was “Remember the Maine
!”
So stupid. So cynical.
Whatever
Doesn’t Kill You Can Hurt You Really Badly 01.15.2003
Suzanne
nearly broke my nose the other day. I had been doing my knee exercises upstairs when I heard her
huffing and puffing her way up to find me. Such an adorable baby! So when I
finished I lay down with her on the bed to horse around a little—she loves
that. Next thing I knew, something whammed me right between the eyes so hard
that I was seeing stars. All I could do was lie back and say, “Oh! Oh! Oh!”
After a minute I became aware of Suzanne softly patting my shoulder and saying,
“Mom? Mom?” I don’t know if she gave me a head butt or a full body slam, but
she is remarkably strong for a baby her age and when she wants to, she can pack
a whallop. Today, three days later, the entire right side of my nose is a
brownish-orange and is sore and swollen. I think she almost did break my nose.
All I know is, I don’t ever want to experience getting my nose broken if it
hurts worse than that.
But
she was really sorry. That night, in the bath, I was watching her and smiling
down and she put her finger to her own nose and said, “Mom? Mom?” She wanted to
know if it still hurt.
There’s
a wall in Rebecca’s school devoted to “students of the month”—one from each
classroom. Rebecca has noticed it, because Chad
and Natalie, who she plays
with a lot, were both on it for their respective classes in the same month.
Yesterday I picked her up and she pointed to the wall and said sadly, “I’ll
never be student of the month.”
“Why
not?” I asked.
“Because
you have to be respectful and good and nice,” she said.
“But
you’re good and respectful and nice,” I said.
“Yeah,”
Rebecca said grimly, “but Miss Pippert has to SEE you doing it.”
The Washington
Sniper 11.15. 2002
There
is a sniper running around shooting people, including a 13-year-old boy shot
about two miles from here as he was walking into school. So far, eight people
dead and two wounded, including a woman killed last night. Rebecca’s class
cannot play outside at recess, and everyone is on edge. As usual, I didn’t
think it was worth much worrying at first—until the boy was shot near here.
Since then the stress level has been racheting up, and—as usual—depression is
right behind. My body aches, I have a lump in my throat, my eczema is flaring up,
I can’t concentrate on anything requiring sustained mental effort, I feel
constant anxiety, I have headaches. I am stress-sick. There is nothing I can
do, nothing most of us can do, except wait for it to happen again (likely) and
wait for the police to catch him. The guy can’t be everywhere at once, and yet
everyone acts as if he is lurking in the bushes right outside the door.
Irrational, but that’s what humans do.
If he
keeps it up long enough, eventually everyone will incorporate this, too, into
their lives—just as we manage not to think about the potential for sudden death
while navigating the Beltway at rush hour. People have gotten used to a lot
worse than this. It’s just another thin layer of dread on top of the ones we
carry around with us already: random crime, accidents, cancer, terrorism.
Sunday
I went out shopping alone, to try to get some relief. I was sitting in a
Starbucks reading the NYT magazine when I came across a story about an
earthquake in a backwards, rural area of China
. A teenaged girl survived the
quake but was caught from the waist down under a heavy wall several stories up
from the ground. There was no equipment to move the wall, nothing anybody could
do, nothing to do but let her die. Her mother sat with her, cradling her daughter
in her arms, until death came. It took 14 days.
I read
this, and got to the words “14 days” and felt my face and neck get hot. “Ah!” I
said involuntarily, and pushed the magazine away from me like it had plague on
it, and sat there trying not to cry. Then I did my grocery shopping, feeling an
urge to bolt from the store, to run away from what I’d just read, to—where?
Some planet where there is no random suffering?
If I
can hardly bear to read it, how is it possible to endure this? If that were me
and my daughter, I would stop breathing. I would not be able to live. This
mother lived, though. She told the story, she said, because she wanted it
recorded, and after this time she would not speak of it again. I understand
that. She will carry that story with her like a stone under her tongue.
People
survive this, and worse, for the same reason some people live and grow old in
wealth and happiness—which is to say, for no particular reason.
So, if
there is a God, what is he thinking?
And,
whether or not there is a God, what am I supposed to do? Give me something to
do.
For
this reason—for the stupid, muddled human reason that doing something,
anything, seems preferable to not doing anything—David and I loaded up the van
yesterday with baby stuff we no longer use (a car seat, the Exersaucer, a
diaper pail, a child’s seat, toys, clothes, dishes) and took the load to an
apartment complex I’d learned about where a bunch of recent immigrants from
Central America live. They are the people you see pushing mops at the food
court at the mall, or hauling mulch onto the traffic island at McDonald’s, and
I’d often wondered where they went home to. This was it—a barren but neat
complex of buildings that might have been designed by a prison architect: two
long rows of two-story buildings, punctuated at regular intervals by one door,
one window per apartment. Gray walls, no paint, a parking lot full of beaten up
but serviceable cars and trucks. “These people have nothing,” said the woman I
had talked to about this place, and I saw what she meant. A few people came out
on the balcony of the second-floor apartments, curious about the unfamiliar
minivan, but the two people I spoke to obviously did not know much English. We
unloaded our stuff at the rental office, with the help of an older woman with
dyed blonde hair who was manning the phone there. I put the Exersaucer down
next to her desk, and patted it once, thinking of the hours my babies had spent
there, absurdly reluctant to see it go.
“Isn’t
it stupid, the way you get a sentimental attachment to things you no longer
have any use for?” I said to the woman.
“Yes,”
she said, succinctly.
And Life Goes On….. 09.05.2002
An afternoon around here:
School gets out at 2, and the
walkers are the last to be freed. Rebecca comes trudging down the hall looking
for me, and when she sees me her face lights up. She always gives me an
enthusiastic hug. “Hello, Pumpkin,” I say. “Was it a good day?” And so we start
home, me prospecting for details of my child’s life, Rebecca doing a running
commentary on everything we see. She likes to explain things. “Mom, why are
those dogs barking?” “Oh, that’s just what dogs do. They have their territory
and they think we’re on it.”
Pause, while Rebecca digests
this not-very-satisfactory answer. Then she comes up with her own. “Well, I
think they’re barking at the cat” (an old neighbor of the dogs who is squeezing
under a fence out of the dogs’ line of vision). “Okay, sweetie,” I say. I’ve
learned there’s no point in engaging with her on subjects like these. She’ll
ask me questions and four times out of five she doesn’t find my answers
acceptable or interesting, so she just makes up her own.
So we get home, and then we
get into the Daily Rant. This is Rebecca venting all the meanness she’s had to
store up during the school day. She does this by tormenting Suzanne—picking her
up and trying to put her various places, as if Suzanne were a large doll. But
Suzanne isn’t really the target; Suzanne is just a useful way of picking a
fight with me. I let them fight it out for a while, since Suzanne is good at
defending herself, but after the fourth or fifth time Suzanne comes into the
kitchen wailing and obviously distraught, I warn Rebecca sternly. Then she
says, “So?” in this extremely uppity way she has developed lately, and I send
her to her room, and we’re off to the races. Wails, screams, tears, threats,
kicks, ultimatums…followed finally by sniffles and, finally, a small voice
says, “Mom, I need somebody to cheer me up.”
Obviously what I
should do here is just remove Suzanne as a provocation and a tool—go off and do
something fun with her—but there’s dinner to fix, and unless I keep Suzanne
occupied for every minute, sooner or later she will go back to the living room
and onto Rebecca’s radar screen. It doesn’t help that lately Rebecca has been
developing an Attitude. I'll say,
"Rebecca, if you don't stop torturing your sister there will be no TV for
the rest of the day." "So?" she says. "I don't care."
This in a very screw-you tone of voice. So things escalate, and eventually I
send her to her room and…here we go again: more wails and screams and
protestations of utter despair.
That’s bad enough, but lately
Suzanne has developed this really disconcerting habit: while I'm in the middle
of something—a phone conversation, the crossword puzzle, cooking dinner—she
will walk in the room and suddenly scream "BAH!" loud enough to be heard down the block. Some days they
both get going at once. Rebecca's noise I am somewhat used to (to the extent
one can ever be used to living with a human air raid siren) but the randomness
of Suzanne's outbursts is really more than any human being should be asked to
bear. My eczema is breaking out and I am starting to develop an eyelid twitch. The afternoons seem very long these days.
And War Came
10.30.2001
These times feel like the end of the world to me. We are
getting involved in a war that may last the rest of our lives, in some form or
the other, and the penalty for dissent—for daring to suggest that U.S.
foreign policy
over the last 40 years may have created the soil in which this horror grew—is
ostracism or marginalization or worse. We are dumping bombs on Afghanistan
—cluster
bombs, that is, which break up into thousands of little bomblets, to cause the
maximum amount of human casualties. They are not made to destroy buildings, but
human flesh. They have a high failure rate—about 20-30 percent, I think I
heard—and their casing is yellow, which also happens to be the color of the
food packages that we are dropping. A nice touch. One yellow package means you
won’t be hungry that day; the other yellow package means you’ll never be hungry
again. Afghanistan
is, by the way, one of 81 countries that al-Queda is supposedly operating in,
so I guess we are starting with the “A’s” and working our way down the
alphabet. There has to be some method to this madness. Yesterday the feds
announced there was a 100 percent chance of another terrorist attack in the
next week. Don’t know where, don’t know exactly when, don’t know what to look
for, but we’re warned. I guess. Of course, the “100 percent chance” of attack
came and passed with no incident, which you can read as either the government
secretly thwarted another horror or that the government doesn’t know what it’s
talking about. One thing is for sure, and that is that we will never know.
We’re
flying the flag out front, because I do love my country. I wanted to fly it
upside down, as a symbol of distress, but David vetoed this idea; he said it
would be interpreted as simply a mark of disrespect and would get our house
vandalized. He’s probably right.
Nine Eleven
09.23.2001
Even now, almost two weeks later, I go to bed at night
trying to unspool the movie reel in my head, trying to make it so that the
plane is not there. That impossible image—a commercial jet flying so low, right
into that huge tower! It does not compute. I’ve had dreams like that, of being
in a 747 flying under bridges, of having to watch a plane crash. This was like
that, and so that makes it all the harder to believe. It’s like a nightmare
that has become so awful that your mind says, “Enough. Time to wake up now.” My
mind won’t accept that there is no way to somehow reverse the reel, to make it
so that it does not happen. I want to think that this is one possibility in an
unbearable universe, and that having been shown that it could happen, we can
now make sure that it doesn’t.
No, my logical mind says, it’s real.
And so my brain flips over into denial. I’m so numb that
the other day I heard someone on the radio say “—in these trying times” and I
thought, What trying times? –Oh. I hold Suzanne and I think, not here. Nothing
could ever happen to her, or to Rebecca, or David, or anybody I love. We’re
Americans! We live in Maryland
!
These things happen to people who had the poor judgment to be born in Kabul
or the West Bank or Somalia
!
We’re going to war, but nobody knows for sure who the
enemy is, or where he is, or how many of them there are, or what plans they
might have or what weapons. Other than that, we’re the baddest thing on the
planet, and we plan to squash our enemy like a bug. People compare this to
Pearl Harbor, but at Pearl Harbor we knew the Japanese did it; we even knew
where to find Japan
.
Now, we don’t even know where Osama bin Laden is (or at least that's what the
official line is—lately I’ve begun to view everything in the newspaper, even my
own Washington Post, as a kind of Kremlinologist, a daily posting of what “we”
want “them” to think we’re thinking). We don’t even know if Osama bin Laden is
the genius behind this; there’s some talk that he’s the figurehead, the
visionary, etc., but really just a fighter; there are others, supposedly, who
are better military strategists and planners. So we spend billions to track
down this one guy and kill him, only to create a martyr and thousands of new
converts, and not even significantly damage their ability to plan strikes
against us.
There is so much good about this country, and so much
bad. There are the hundreds of skilled workmen who saw the towers fall and just
got in their trucks and drove to New
York
, because they knew their help was needed—a
reminder that this country’s gene pool is made up of people who had the
gumption to get up and go somewhere else when famine or war or poverty came. We
are good people—enterprising, individualistic, tough. We’re also greedy and
lazy and sex-obssessed; turn on BET or MTV and watch people grinding their crotches
into the camera. Osama bin Laden calls Western culture “licentious”—well, even
a blind hog roots up an acorn once in a while. We have collaborated with
regimes that foster poverty and oppression. We’ve done everything we had to do
to get the oil to keep our minivans and SUVs running, no matter what enemies we
made to do it. We sent the CIA to train the freedom fighters in Afghanistan
and
then, once the Soviets were out, we walked away from the devastation that was
left.
I keep thinking about the finale to “Candide,” and the
words: “We’re neither pure nor wise nor good/We’ll do the best we know/We’ll
build our house and chop our wood/And make our garden grow.” I do not know if
plan that constitutes sanity or the worst kind of denial. I do not know.
Rebecca: “I saw a big building fall down!”
This is the only world Suzanne will ever know.
Childhood Moments
Part III 08.07. 2001
Rebecca says to me, “Mom, I need some paper.” “What
for?” “To do my homework.” So I give her a bunch of my printer paper, and she
sits down at her desk and gets busy scribbling with a ball point pen. After
awhile she comes to me and hands me something. “What’s this, sweetie?” I say.
“It’s a letter.” “Can you read it to me?” Here is what she wrote (I wrote it
down immediately afterward:
“Dear Mom. I love you so much. I love you as long as the
grass. Your arms are so wide open, and your tears start to dry. Love, Rebecca.”
Snapshot
05.01.2001
I walk into the kitchen. Suzanne is in her baby swing
and I lean over to say hello, and on my deathbed I will remember her sweet,
small round face cupped in my hands, looking up at me with delight.
They All Come Out
of the Womb Different, Don’t They? 04.26.2001
Suzanne is Miss Bright Eyes, a smiley baby who is
utterly and effortlessly charming. When she fusses, it is with a specific
reason in mind: change a diaper, feed her, or just pick her up, and she is all
smiles and charm again. When I walk into the room, she cranes her neck to see
where I am, and gives me a blinding grin—but, still, she seems less fixated on
me than Rebecca was, and is equally generous with her affections when David or
Rebecca are around. I think she’s going to have curly hair, judging from the
soft fuzz that’s growing on her head now, and she is going to be fairer-skinned
than Rebecca is. Somehow, to me, she looks more like a Thompson than Rebecca
did—and the full toothless grin she has looks like pictures of me when I was
about eight or nine months old. Maybe all babies’ toothless grins look the
same, maybe it’s just wishful thinking, but I think I see a resemblance. She is
a cuddly baby, folding herself into the folds of whoever is carrying her, and
so far her temperament seems very easy going: I can put her to bed at night
while she’s wide awake but quiet, kiss her and walk out the door, and she will
either cry very briefly or not at all. At the same point with Rebecca, we were
putting her into the crib asleep, handling her like she was plutonium, hoping
that we didn’t pop an ankle joint or sneeze before we crept out of her
room—because if we did, it was all over.
Number Two Arrives
01.26. 2001
Suzanne has slid into our lives as easily as a tongue in
groove; it’s as if she’s always been here. Rebecca’s birth was a seismic
upheaval; Suzanne’s was serene.
I feel much, much less anxious with Suzanne than I did
with Rebecca, but that is not to say things have been easy. I have had all the
postpartum symptoms I had with Rebecca—it’s just that with Rebecca, there
registered a 9.5 on a scale of 1 to 10, and with Suzanne they’ve measured, at
most, a four. Even so, I am taking a lot of meds: Paxil and Ativan, plus
medicine for hypertension (my blood pressure has soared since delivery), plus
antibiotics for a slight inflammation around the site of the incision.
Breastfeeding has gone much better than it did with Rebecca, but even so I
doubt I’ll be able to keep it up for too much longer; Suzanne is outgrowing my
milk supply, and—as with Rebecca—the decision to cut out night nursing (because
sleep deprivation literally drives me insane) has basically spelled the
premature end of nursing. I can keep her satisfied from about 6 a.m. to noon,
and from then on it’s only a partial solution at best. And after 7 p.m., she’s
entirely on the bottle. This time around, though, I am finding it easier to
reconcile myself to this eventuality.
I would give almost anything to be able to nurse easily,
but breast milk is not worth my sanity. That was a calculation that I found
unbearably hard to make with Rebecca; somehow, this time, it’s easier. Not
easy, but easier.
Election Night
11.08.2000
It was a wild election night. CBS declared Florida
for Gore at
about 7 p.m., and then, a little more than an hour later, took it back. I
stayed up to 10:30, waiting to see what Florida
was going to do, and then, because the trend didn’t look too good for Gore,
went to bed. I figured bad news could wait. At 2:15 David came to bed and told
me that Florida
had been declared for Bush. He was revved up, too excited to sleep, so I got up
and we turned on the television in time to hear CNN and CBS declare the
election for Bush. It was kind of horrible, but at least I know that our votes
for Nader didn’t lose Gore any electoral votes; he carried Maryland
handily. I wanted to hear the
candidates speak, but things dragged on and on, and finally we turned out the
lights. At 5:45 or so, Rebecca came up and woke both of us up, saying she
wanted to snuggle with us. Instead, she spent about half an hour squirming, and
so finally I got up with her, hoping David could sleep a little more. I came
downstairs, turned on NPR and, what do you know, Florida
was doing a recount, Gore had retracted
his concession and things were still up in the air. It’s now 3:15 p.m., the
recount is still going on, and there is talk that some 3,400 ballots in Palm Beach
County
got erroneously marked for
Buchanan when they should have probably gone for Gore. (Apparently the ballots
were confusing and there were a bunch of geezers down there who couldn’t figure
them out. Nobody seems much inclined to do anything about it, and indeed it’s
not clear what could be done.) The absentee ballots, mostly from military
people presumed to be Bush supporters, are still out there, about 2,300 of
them, and there’s less than 1,700 votes separating Bush and Gore. If Bush wins Florida
, he will be the
first president since 1888 to win the electoral college but lose the popular vote.
The House has gone Republican, but a couple of Senate races are also still up
in the air, and things there are almost evenly divided.
Number Two Is On
Her Way 09.27. 2000
I am very pregnant, with some but not all of the usual
pregnancy complaints. Heartburn, mainly, and finding a comfortable position in
which to sleep. But overall, this pregnancy—okay, let’s face it, I’ve named her
already: Suzanne—though David refuses to talk about names for some
reason—anyway, Suzanne has been much easier on me than Rebecca was, and let’s
hope that is an omen for the future. Second children are supposed to be easier,
right? (Okay, I wasn’t.)
Mentally, I am becalmed—absent-minded, and not inclined
to read anything more intellectually stimulating than, say, People Magazine.
Life has slowed down and this time—unlike last time—I am inclined to let it.
When I was pregnant with Rebecca by this time I felt like I was swimming in
molasses; accomplishing the tiniest thing each day took the utmost effort. This
time I have (almost) given up already; I am entering my Late Bovine Period, and
it’s okay. There are worse things than being a cow, and that’s being a cow with
a magazine deadline.
Childhood Moments
Part II 05.18. 2000
Rebecca (coming up to me while I’m typing at my
computer): Mom, can you play wif me?
Me: (very busy, trying to check e-mail): No can do,
sweetie.
(pause)
Rebecca: Then we have to BUY some can-do!
Childhood Moments Part III 07.01.2000
Rebecca: Grandma, look at my shoes!
Grandma: They’re pretty, honey, but don’t you have them
on the wrong feet?
Rebecca (looking down, just to doublecheck): No, these
are my feet.
Childhood Moments
Part I 04.01.2000
Me, groggy, early in the morning. Rebecca, equally
groggy, comes into the bathroom wearing a soggy pull-up, with her hand stuck
down the back.
Me: Rebecca, take your hand out of your pants, please.
Rebecca: I can’t, Mom. It’s stuck!
Me (playing along): Okay, let’s get it out. (pulls out
her hand, with appropriate sound effects)
Rebecca (wicked gleam in her eye): Oh, look! It’s going
back in again!
And, Once Again,
Up from the Hole 02.01.1999
Things are some better. I finally called Michael Diamond
and got him to prescribe some anti-anxiety pills, and though they make me
fuzzy-headed, they do allow me to function. I spent last Wednesday in bed, most
of the day. My body hurt. My brain hurt. Everything hurt. And still, nothing
silences the little voice in my head: get up. Quit malingering.
If the illness doesn’t kill you, the shame of having it
will.
Winter. 01.26.1999
Why is this always such a bad time of year? It is next
to impossible to start a task. My brain is a creaky engine that works in fits
and starts, so that somehow, by the end of the day, interviews are done and
calls are made and words appear on paper—but the process is excruciating. It’s
like I have to consult the manual on how to breathe; nothing is automatic. I am
aware of the fact that my life is going well, that I have no major worries,
that there are many reasons to be happy—but always I feel as if I have a secret
sorrow, an old loss that nobody knows about. I forget it for a moment, and
then—wham! it’s back to remind me. Oh, that, I think. But what is “that”? I
can’t remember.
Ordinary Life,
Part II 01.12.1999
Yesterday Rebecca and I came home from playgroup and she
wanted to watch the Teletubbies tape. I put it on for her, thinking I’d get her
to go down for a nap momentarily, but she got more and more excited by the
tape. “Dance, Mom!” she kept imploring me, and she’d drag me back into the
living room to prance around with her. So finally, why I don’t know, I got two
metal bowls out of the kitchen cabinet, one big one for me and a smaller one
for her, and we put them on our heads and marched around the sofa in time to
the music. The look on her face when I put the bowl on my head was pure joy and
light: Why didn’t I think of that?!?
Ordinary Life Part
I 04.27.1998
These are sweet days, the best days of my life. My
little girl is happy and healthy (mostly, except when her nose runs), I love my
husband, I love our life…and why is it so hard to write about happiness without
sounding insipid? The days are made up of quiet pleasures. We take Rebecca to a
country fair with Jean and Carl and Katie, where Katie is mesmerized by the ducks
at the petting zoo and Rebecca pets the baby calf. Where Carl and David are
both balancing their little girls on their shoulders, standing in a grassy
meadow after lunch, talking to each other several yards away from us and I say
to Jean, “Wish I’d brought my camera,” and realize, as I glance at her, that
she was thinking the same thing.
Or we work in the back yard, Rebecca pouring water from
one bowl into another on the deck while David mulches the azaleas and I pull
weeds from the ivy bed. Our neighbors, Penny and Joe, come over to the fence to
tell us that they are expecting; her baby is due around Thanksgiving, near
Rebecca’s second birthday. It’s a cool April day, just warm enough in the sun,
and the breeze is playing music among the leaves. I’ve bought Rebecca a sliding
board (courtesy of grandma) and she now has that and a sandbox, so the back
yard is Nirvana to her. She goes up the sliding board ladder over and over,
grunting with the exertion, her little legs barely able to navigate the last step
at the top—then stands triumphant at the top, waving to Marie next door, who
doesn’t see her. Look at me! Every day, there is dawning comprehension; her
speech gets clearer and the words more specific and appropriate. She is in love
with her mom and dad, running to us across the yard with her arms held out
stiffly behind her, like David does when he imitates an airplane…so pleased
with herself, hurling herself into my arms and just as quickly wanting down
again. Now what? That’s her motto. Pour sand from one bucket into another. Now
what? Check out Kelly, the dog behind the fence next door. Now what? Find Dad,
to see what he’s doing. Now what?
Drugs. Again.
07.20. 1997
Back on the meds--Wellbutrin this time. No time yet to
see if it works.
My mind’s on fire. I walk around, I look more or less
normal, I talk, I play with Rebecca, but the reality is that at this point a
hospital stay is starting to look attractive. It gets worse as the day goes on.
There is no pleasure anywhere in the world. I am too sad for tears.
Reality bites
07.17.1997
Last night Rebecca was up for several hours. I don’t
know if it’s teething or the heat or an ear infection or all three, but it took
two and a half hours to get her back to sleep. David finally resorted to the “crying
it out” tactic, and that finally worked. It’s been hellishly hot in her room,
so that was part of it. I put a tiny fan on the end of her crib, but it turns
out she doesn’t like it; David said she kept turning around to look at it and
making a face. In any event, I tried for 15 minutes or so to get her back to
sleep--not very long--and when she was restless and fussy and sweaty, and I
couldn’t get comfortable in the rocker, I just snapped. I kicked her door open
and walked into our bedroom and handed her over. Then went downstairs to the
guest bedroom, pulled a pillow over my head to block the noise, and thought
about how nice it would be to never wake up again.
David just left with Rebecca to go over to Arthur’s for
dinner. I watched them drive away and
thought, What if I never see them again?
I have to get some help. This has to stop. I can’t do
anything-- I can’t write, I can’t be a wife and mother, I can’t feel joy, I
can’t be myself--I can’t even fucking TYPE--until I get rid of this slimy thing.
This ugly slimy thing.
Depression 07.17.1997
It’s coming. Checklist:
--Irritable
with David, especially in the mornings. Sometimes extreme, resembling those
anger attacks I used to have years ago. Yesterday morning I broke a coffee cup,
and it took me half an hour to calm down.
--Persistent
feelings of sadness and self-doubt. Paralyzing.
--Fears
about my health (I got incredibly worked up over a routine mammogram) and
Rebecca’s safety.
--Days
when I cry for reasons I can’t explain
--Anxiety
(taking Klonopin for, but that’s a short-term solution)
--Sleep
disturbances. I never sleep through the night, regardless of whether Rebecca
gets me up. Though this has been going on for so long I don’t know if it counts
anymore.
--No
libido.
I’ve been trying to do without meds, because I wanted to
think I had this problem under control. But I feel myself sliding.
And keeps on
dawning… 04.15.1997
The pleasure of work. The
smell of fresh laundry. Folding it, making into neat, clean piles what had been
a soggy pile of dirty clothes smelling of spit-up. Bathing my baby, pouring
warm water over her sudsy head, seeing her squint her eyes tightly shut,
holding her wet and naked against my body to warm her, the smell of her when
she’s dried off and powdered and in a clean pair of jams for bed.
Cooking--peeling carrots, grating orange peel, chopping basil--seeing a meal
come together out of whatever had been in the refrigerator. Planting pansies in
the urns at the front door. Even scutwork, like vaccuuming, scrubbing the
toilets--when I’m done, the gleam of a clean bathroom, the sense of order
restored.
And time: lying on the floor next to Rebecca, lost in
each other, making nonsense sounds, seeing her work on new skills, like rolling
over or discovering her toes. She turns toward my voice, reaches for my face;
her hands explore my mouth, my hair. When I put my face up to hers, she tries
to bite my nose. Little baby pants the whole time--hah!....hah!--and squeals of
delight. She lies on the floor, amusing herself, and then I come to her. When
she sees me; her whole body goes rigid with anticipation--mouth a perfect O,
arms and legs outstretched, waving: pick me up! Come play!
This is life as I remember from my own childhood. Home
had a heart; it was a refuge. On good days, the floors were polished, the rugs
vaccuumed, there were nasturtiums in a cobalt blue bowl in the center of the
kitchen table; there was the smell of pork chops frying, and the dappled square
cast on the kitchen floor by the late-afternoon sun through the screened back
door. The days had a rhythm. The climax was my dad’s arrival home from work. We
ran, screaming, out to his blue Corvette, climbed on the hood and rode down the
driveway, yelling for no reason in particular. Uncomplicated joy.
Reality begins to
dawn 01.27.1997
I need help, and yet I don’t want to ask for it. Partly,
it’s my own defensiveness--a feeling that help isn’t there to be had, so
there’s no use even asking. And partly it’s from the outside: in a society
which sees motherhood as a lifestyle choice, new mothers are just expected to
do it alone. I keep seeing women with babies in stores now, and some of those
babies are very small, and I think: how can they do that? Aren’t they as dazed
and exhausted as I was?
I saw a guy in Baby Superstore several weeks ago with a
tiny infant. He was with a woman who was walking slowly and who still looked
slightly pregnant. I said, “That’s a very new one,” and he said, “Two days
old.” She should have been home in bed. What a nutty society this is.
What’s also shocking is how devalued I feel, how lacking
in self-confidence--not just in mothering but in other aspects of my life as
well. Instead of getting up in the morning and putting stockings on for work, I
put on a pair of ratty jeans that make me look even more overweight than I am
(I am too demoralized and too pressed for time to go shopping for a pair that
look better), and I spent a large part of every day dealing with urine, shit
and vomit. Is it any wonder I don’t think of what I do as important anymore?
Postpartum
depression 12.15.1996
In those first two weeks,
overwhelmed by a kind of terror I’d never felt before, I would collapse in bed
at strange hours--day and night began to blur into one long twilight--and I
found myself relying on a trick my mother had taught me in childhood when I was
afraid of the dark. “Hold our your hand beside your pillow.” she told me, “and
your guardian angel will hold it while you go to sleep.” I remember vividly
feeling the soft brush of an unseen hand against my own, my palm warm and
tingling as I drifted off to sleep. I hadn’t thought of that more than twice in
30 years, I suppose, and yet I found myself doing it, as needy as a
four-year-old again. “Help,” I said, over and over--addressing myself to the
cosmos. Over and over, until I fell asleep.
Now that I think about it, it seems that the entire
first two weeks of Rebecca’s life, it was always 4:30 p.m. on one long
afternoon of a nuclear winter. I felt intense dread, and an itchy anxiety
vividly reminiscent of the old days of serious depression, the winter of
1990--a harbinger of horrors to come. And then ,the second week, David had to
go to Boston
for 36 hours for some business meeting. For two days--from the moment I learned
about the trip until he walked out the door--I couldn’t even think about his
leaving without tears. It felt like I was dying, or he was dying. The thought
of being alone with Rebecca was unbearable. Alarmed, David got Kate to stay one
night, and my father-in-law came the second night until David got home from the
airport. Their presence helped immensely, but nothing could fundamentally shake
that awful, overwhelming fear.
Even now, just writing these words, I feel residual
tears--just at the memory of how terrified I was. For no reason.
Rebecca is born
11.22.1996
…A lot of bustle. I closed my eyes against the nausea
and the cold, and then David came in, sitting just to my left. I felt no pain
during the surgery, only some intense tugging sensations. I couldn’t see
anything. There was no sound except for the doctors’ mutterings to each other.
“Placenta is posterior,” I heard Bulger say; David made some remark to the
anesthesiologist. And then: a tiny gasp. Rebecca.
What does a baby think when she’s being born? Is this
memory somewhere buried in the coils of the brain? It must be like dying--to
leave one state of being behind for a new one, unimaginable, horrifying and
new. I wouldn’t be surprised if babies feared birth the way we fear death. Why
wouldn’t they? How could they know what lies ahead?
Then, a moment later, a real baby cry--not a loud wail,
but a kind of agonized breath, uttered once, and then quiet again. The nurses
had taken her away and were suctioning her nose and mouth, cleaning her up.
Within a few moments they had handed her to David, and I saw her for the first
time: dark hair, fat round cheeks, eyes just slightly upturned at the outer
corners. Clearly, David’s child. I couldn’t hold her, but I think I touched her
cheek as David held her close in his arms. She was quiet, eyes shut.
A few minutes later--how long I’m not sure--they were
done sewing me up and took me into the recovery room, where I held her for the
first time. I put her to my breast, and I think she sucked briefly. Both of us
were exhausted.
I never could have imagined this. My old life is
gone--blown away more completely than if a bomb had destroyed my home and my
workplace and everything I own. I am left with my husband and this child.
Everything else is unreal. I am a new person, as raw to this world as if my
skin had been peeled away.
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