“You’ve switched countries, you’ve put your career on hold, you’ve become a mother, while all the time trying to adjust to married life with a man about whom you’re frequently uncertain . . . and that’s before we factor in the fact that the birth of your child was a difficult experience for yourself and for him. Now, when you add up all that, can you really sit there and tell me you think you’re making too big a deal about all this?”
“I just feel so . . . I don’t know . . . inadequate.”
“In what way?”
“Every way.”
If our conversations had a general theme, it was this long-standing feeling of inadequacy—the perennial worry of the perennial B student (which I was throughout high school and college) who never felt she was achieving her potential . . . who was always just about “all right” at everything, but could never excel. And it didn’t matter that I had done time on a major newspaper, or had been a foreign correspondent, or had the reputation for being very confident on the professional front. In private, the doubts always loomed—and I kept wondering when I’d eventually be found out.
“But you never were ‘found out,’” Ellen Cartwright said, “because you were obviously very good at what you did.”
“You’re just trying to make me feel better about myself.”
“Actually, you’re right—I am trying to do that. You should feel positive about such accomplishments. I mean, the way you talk about the Boston Post, you make it sound like you were hired to work the till in some supermarket. Can’t you see what you’ve already accomplished?”
“What I see,” I said, “is someone who threatened the life of her child.”
How I wanted to see things differently. But during the first two weeks on antidepressants, I still felt sheer, absolute terror about even just looking in on Jack. I articulated this fear on a regular basis both to Ellen and to Dr. Rodale. And when Tony danced around this question all I could say was, “I just can’t see him yet.”
After two or three times, Tony had the good sense to stop asking me that question—because it was so obvious that I couldn’t handle it. He didn’t even mention visiting Jack—though I knew that he poked his head into the children’s ward every night that he came to see me.
But Dr. Rodale remained as direct as ever—and seemed to be using my inability to see Jack like my initial inability to eat: a benchmark hurdle that, once crossed, would indicate a further return to stability . . . not to mention a sign that the antidepressants were finally kicking in.
Certainly, I was beginning to feel a gradual undercurrent of . . . what? Calmness? Not exactly—as I could still suffer from episodes of extreme anxiety. Chemically induced bliss? Hardly—as I often had to lock myself up in the bathroom to sob uncontrollably. And as for the amelioration of guilt . . .
“So far, I would call your progress steady and encouraging,” Dr. Rodale said as I entered week three of the antidepressants. “You’re eating, your moods seem steady, you’re doing positive things like reading and listening to music . . .”
Yes, but appearances can be deceptive. Because every morning, when I finally climbed out of my drug-induced coma, the realization of where I was (and the reasons that had brought me here) came crashing in on me with desperate ferocity. It took the next dose of antidepressants and a long private hour with Glenn Gould on my Discman to force me into a false sense of quietude.
From the outset of my admission to hospital, Sandy was phoning constantly—initially monitoring my progress (as I found out later) by talking to the nurses. She also spoke a few times with Tony. He managed to talk her out of coming to London after my admission to St. Martin’s, correctly telling her that I was in no fit condition for visitors. Then, when I was back in the land of the moderately functional, I told her that it wasn’t the best moment for a transatlantic visit, hinting that I really didn’t want her to see me in my current condition. The fact that her eldest son had just broken his wrist in a bicycle accident kept her on the other side of the pond . . . to my intense relief. But we still spoke daily. We agreed on a specific hour (four PM in London/eleven AM in Boston—when she had a half-hour break from her morning teaching load), and she’d call a pay phone in a visitors’ room down the hall from where I was. As it was outside visitors’ hours, it was always empty. Both Ellen and Dr. Rodale considered it an important part of my recovery to maintain close contact with family—so the phone was considered mine for that half-hour period every afternoon.
At first, Sandy sounded like she herself needed a course of antidepressants—or so said Tony, who actually called her in Boston to break the news about my hospital incarceration. Even when I finally started to speak with her, her anxiety was apparent and, comme d’habitude, she had spoken to every possible leading expert on postpartum depression in the Greater Boston area. Not only that, she’d also made contact with some heavyweight professor of pharmacology at Harvard Med, who gave her the low-down on my antidepressant load (“It is absolutely the right dosage for you”). And she also established telephone contact with Dr. Rodale (“Well, you are my only sister,” she said, when I expressed a certain wariness about such interference), who she also thought sounded like good news.
“Oh, she is,” I said in one of our early phone calls. “As long as you obey her every command.”
“Well, at least you didn’t get sent down for shock treatment—which, I’ve found out, is a last-ditch solution over here.”
“They use it here too,” I said, thinking about poor scrambled Agnes.
“Hey, that doctor’s gotten you back to some sort of equilibrium.”
“I wouldn’t go that far.”
“Believe me, from the stories I’ve heard—”
But I didn’t want to hear such stories. I just wanted to be out of here.
“You’re going to have to let them be the judge of that,” Sandy said, surprising me with her “the English doctors know right” stance. “You’re still fragile. I can hear it.”
Then, just to underscore the fragility of everything, word came back about Agnes. It was nearly three weeks since she’d checked herself out, and I’d had a variety of roommates since then—all short-term internees, and all of whom I treated with polite diffidence, using my Discman and assorted reading matter to keep my distance. I was also allowed to take a walk in the hospital grounds whenever I wanted to—so, once a day, I’d put on the street clothes that Tony had brought me and spend fifteen minutes walking around the inner courtyard of the hospital. It wasn’t exactly the most aesthetically pleasing of spots—as it was a concrete quadrangle, with a patch of green in the middle, around which the hospital staff smoked cigarettes. While I made my daily circle around this grubby enclosure, I always found myself thinking how easy it would be for me to escape—even though I was here of my own alleged free will. In fact, I believed that Dr. Rodale encouraged me to take this quotidian walk to enforce the fact that I wasn’t a prisoner, and also to get me to accept the reasons I’d ended up here. Because I’m certain that Ellen informed her of the escape fantasy I articulated regularly during several sessions.
“So what’s this ‘escape fantasy’?” Ellen asked me when I first brought it up.
“It’s simple, really,” I said. “I get dressed and go out for my walk around the courtyard. Instead, I leave the hospital and head for the nearest taxi stand. I arrive back at our house. I pack a bag. I grab my passport. I jump the tube to Heathrow. I buy a ticket on the first plane to Boston, New York, Washington, even Philadelphia—anywhere on the East Coast . . .”
“And when you get off the plane in America . . . ?”
I shrugged.
Ellen gave me a commiserative smile.
“We all have dreams of leaving,” she said.
“Even you?”
“Everybody. But what you must try to remember at all times is that you have an illness. Depression isn’t a punishment for being a bad little girl. Nor is it a sign of personal weakness. It is an illness—and one from which y
ou will be eventually released. But this is a very serious condition with which you are grappling. So serious that . . .”
She hesitated for a moment, then said, “Dr. Rodale and I debated whether or not to tell you what I’m about to tell you . . . but we decided you should hear it from us rather than from anyone around the unit. You remember Agnes Shale who shared the room with you when you first arrived?”
“Has something happened?”
“I’m afraid so. Agnes jumped under an underground train last week and was killed.”
I shut my eyes and said nothing.
“According to her husband, she’d been doing fine for the first week or so. But then, she stopped taking the antidepressants—because, I gather, they weren’t agreeing with her. The sleeplessness started again. But her husband assured us that she was bonding well with her son—and, outwardly anyway, seemed to be coping well with things. Until . . .”
She reached over and took a sip from a glass of water on the table by her chair.
“Now I want to be absolutely clear about something,” she said. “And it’s something that you yourself need to understand. Agnes’s suicide cannot be conclusively tied to the fact that she checked herself out of hospital before anyone here believed she was ready to leave. Depression is always an atypical illness—by which I mean that it can never be empirically tracked or second-guessed. So, do believe me, I am not trying to put a ‘See what happens if you don’t listen to us’ spin on this story. All I want to emphasize is that we all have to be very vigilant about your condition—because it is still a brittle one. But, given time, you will get better.”
Sandy concurred with this point of view when I recounted what happened to Agnes during our telephone call that afternoon.
“Your therapist is right. You definitely don’t want to surrender to regression.”
Surrender to regression? My dear sister had been reading far too many self-help books again.
But I did realize that Ellen had been right to tell me the story—that it had a sobering effect, making me prudent about the status of my equilibrium and the slow tempo of recuperation.
So I kept taking the antidepressants, and I kept talking three times a week to Ellen, and I kept talking to Sandy (who kept threatening to jump on a plane and visit me—but was far too financially strapped to do so). And when Tony had to skip a few visits because of the usual global crises, I was perfectly sanguine. By the end of week four, the crying fits that marked most days had stopped. When I weighed myself I saw that I had regained half the fifteen pounds I’d lost (and that was enough!). Dr. Rodale let me give up the sleeping pills, because I was making it through the night without interruption. Every so often—whenever I felt myself edging toward that black fathomless swamp—I seemed able to skirt the edge and reroute myself back to more stable terrain. The urge to plunge into this morass was still present, but there now seemed to be a safety mechanism in place—a fragile fail-safe that kept me away from the precipice . . . for the moment anyway.
Then, a few days into week five, I woke up one morning and took my pills and ate my breakfast and announced to the nurse on duty that I would like to see Jack. There was no sudden lifting of the cloud that made me make this decision; no rays of sunlight streaming through the previously fogged windows of my brain. Nor did I have a massive born-again revelation about the wonders of motherhood.
I just wanted to see him.
The nurse didn’t slap me on the back and say, “Great news . . . and about bloody time too, thank God.” She just nodded for me to follow her.
The baby ward had a heavily reinforced steel door, with a substantial lock—a sensible precaution in a psychiatric unit. The nurse punched in a code, then pulled the door open. There were only four babies in residence. Jack was in the first crib. I took a deep steadying breath and looked in.
He’d grown, of course—by a half-foot at least. But what struck me so forcibly—so wonderfully, in fact—was the way he had lost that initial premature, postdelivery amorphous quality, and was now such a distinctive little guy. He was also fast asleep—and though I initially hesitated about picking him up, the nurse gave me an encouraging nod. So, with extreme care, I reached for him and brought him up next to me. Instead of crying, he snuggled his head against mine. I kissed him and smelled that powderlike new-baby smell, which was still prevalent all these weeks after his birth. I held him for a very long time.
That evening, I asked Nurse Patterson if Jack could be moved into my room. When Tony arrived that evening, he was genuinely taken aback to see me bottle-feeding Jack.
“Well then . . .” Tony said.
“Yes,” I said. “Well then indeed.”
Word spread fast about my reunion with Jack. Dr. Rodale was all smiles the next afternoon, informing me that “this was very welcome news indeed,” while cautioning me that I still needed to approach each day with a degree of circumspection, and with the understanding that nothing was straightforward when it came to the skewed landscape of depression.
Ellen, meanwhile, tried to get me to concentrate on one salient point. “Jack will never remember a thing about this entire time.”
“Lucky for him,” I said.
“And I think that once you are fully recovered, you will begin to forgive yourself—even though, from where I sit, there’s nothing to forgive.”
They kept me in for another two weeks. It passed quickly—especially as I was now spending my entire waking day with Jack. They moved him to the baby ward every night (as Dr. Rodale insisted that I get solid uninterrupted sleep), but brought him back as soon as I was up in the morning—which meant that when he stirred out of sleep, I was there to change and feed him. Just as he was also by my side until I went to bed at night. I even started to bring him out on my daily walk around the hospital courtyard. With the exception of sleep, the only time that I relinquished his company was during my thrice-weekly sessions with Ellen.
“The general feeling is that you’re just about ready to go home,” she said at the start of week seven. “The question is: do you think yourself ready?”
I shrugged. “I have to leave here sometime.”
“Have you talked with your husband about perhaps having some help at home with Jack?”
Actually, it had been Tony himself who had brought up this issue—reminding me that, before I’d entered the hospital, he’d found out the name of a child-care agency in Battersea called Annie’s Nannies, and perhaps I’d like to now give them a ring. Though I told Ellen that I would be definitely investigating this possibility, there was also a part of me that felt I should try to make a go of looking after Jack myself—that bringing a nanny in would be another indication of my domestic ineptitude . . . especially as I wasn’t working right now, and Jack was still at that stage where he was sleeping for much of the day. So I wrote a note to our cleaner Cha, asking her if she might be able to come in three additional mornings per week and keep an eye on Jack, thereby giving me a short respite from Baby Land. Tony liked this plan—especially as it was going to be around a third the cost of a full-time nanny. Ellen, however, was skeptical.
“If you can afford it, you really should consider constant help,” she said. “You’re still not completely out of the woods yet . . .”
“I’m doing fine,” I said.
“Without question. Your progress has been tremendous. But surely, you can afford a month or two of full-time nannying, just until you’re at a stage where—”
But when I argued that I could easily handle my son—especially as he was still at the nonmobile stage of development—she said, “I sense you’re still feeling guilty, aren’t you? And still thinking that you have to prove to the world that you are a competent mother.”
I shrugged but didn’t say anything.
“As I’ve been telling you since the start of our sessions together, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with admitting that you can’t cope with certain situations . . .”
“But I am coping now.”
“Well, the cleaner will be able to do most of that for me—with the exception of the nights. And if he starts ruining my sleep again, I can always nap while she’s on duty.”
“All right, that may be so—but I still get the feeling that there’s a certain remorse about—”
“Did Agnes feel terribly guilty about . . . ?”
She looked at me carefully.
“About what?”
“About failing her son and her husband.”
“I can’t talk about another patient. But . . . do you think about Agnes often?”
“All the time.”
“Did you become close while you were sharing the room?”
“Hardly—since I was so out of it. But . . . of course I think about her a lot. Because . . .”
I faltered. So Ellen asked, “Because you wonder if you’ll end up under an underground train yourself?”
“Yes,” I said. “That’s exactly what I wonder.”
“All I will say is what I said to you before,” Ellen said. “Agnes left before any of the hospital staff felt she was ready to leave. You, on the other hand, are leaving with our medical approval. Because we feel you’re ready to get on with life again.”
“You mean, this isn’t life?”
For the first time since we started our sessions, I actually managed to make my therapist laugh.
But before they sent me back to “life,” there was an extended question-and-answer session with Dr. Rodale, whose primary concern was getting the ongoing pharmacological load just right. So she wanted to know every detail about my current sleep patterns, my diet, my mood swings, my sense of calm, my sense of unease, my sense of ease with Jack, my sense of ease with Tony.
“Oh, I’m certain my husband will revert to type as soon as I’m home . . . now that I seem to be back in the rational world.”
The Douglas Kennedy Collection #1 Page 87
