How Bad Can It Be? Bad Enough

The thing about motherhood and depression is that you forget how bad it can be. I feel fine at the moment, I have felt fine for months, but I was browsing through my journal (obsessive journal-keeper that I am) from two years ago, and this is what I found:

It was a week of pure hell. No work accomplished. Spent most of the days in bed. My memory of Monday is of sitting down at my desk and not being able to find some piece of paper, and of being so enraged by this that I could barely speak. My headaches returned; my hands shook. I was extremely irritable and did not want anybody to speak to me or even touch me. Needless to say, I didn’t want to go anywhere or do anything. I didn’t want anyone to see me. I felt like the psychic equivalent of a leper: loathsome in my own eyes, an object of pity and horror to others. Being with the kids was almost impossible because I was exquisitely sensitive to noise. Happy noise was painful; screams and fights were unbearable. Except for a few minutes of cuddling in front of the TV, provided they were extremely quiet, I avoided them. They would follow me around the house. Rebecca would say, “Mom—"

“WHAT?” I would answer, and she would say, “Never mind” and I didn’t even feel sorry. The more distant I got the more they craved my attention. It was like fending off a nest of snakes. Arms, legs entwined me whenever I slowed down, and sometimes one of them would just hurl herself at me. “Not now,” I would say. “Just a minute,” I would say. “I’m busy,” I would say. Their demands never stopped. An ordinary “Mommee” sounded like a shriek to me; sometimes I actually covered my ears. As for David, I could barely stand to talk to him. “Do you think you’d be better off in a hospital?” he asked. “No,” I said. “A hospital is a shitty place to be sick.” He said later that frightened him more than anything—it was a tacit acknowledgment that I wanted to go there, which I did. If only they had any good hospitals to go to, I would have. In the middle of this, David left town for three days, which enraged me. I would have been angrier, though, if he’d stayed home, since that would have meant I’d fucked up his job, too—one more thing to feel guilty about. I lost my cellphone. I lost my car keys. I made lists and lost them. I slept. A lot. 

I prayed for healing. “Anytime, anywhere, in whatever form,” I said. “I’ll take whatever you have.”

Nothing amazing happened. Saturday morning, in fact, was as bad a day as I’d had all week. David ended up taking both kids to the Arboretum. When he came back, both kids were exhausted. I went upstairs with Suzanne and lay down with her, and fell asleep, and as I did I remember having a feeling a profound sense of comfort, and a sense that I was deeply in God’s care. I could hear Suzanne's breathing, and feel her little body next to mine, and I felt a deep calm.

I don't remember how that bad time got better, exactly, just that it did.