After my nephew had gone silent and all I heard was his soft, even breathing, I continued to lie there, caught in a tangle of thoughts, unwilling to leave the dark room for the lit-up apartment on the other side of the door. If I concentrated hard enough, I could split myself into two, peel the years off one part of me and imagine myself as a well-looked-after child, lovingly tended to by the adult half of me. It was a slightly surreal exercise in re-parenting, one that went well beyond the discussions of healing neglected and wounded “inner” children that I would read about in the therapeutic literature by John Bradshaw and his ilk in the years to come. I felt for a moment as though I were my own “good enough” mother, seeing to needs that hadn’t been attended to when they should have been.
I identified strongly with young children, seeing myself as a responsive, would-be adult in their midst who understood their joys and sorrows with harrowing intimacy. (Years later, it made perfect sense to me when someone told me that one’s views on abortion depended on whether you identified with the mother or the child. Although I theoretically subscribed to the correct liberal views on abortion, I sympathized with those who saw it as murderous, and couldn’t imagine ever having one myself.) In later years, as my other siblings married and had children of their own, I became the go-to aunt at family gatherings during the summers at our house in Atlantic Beach. I liked heading down the block to the ocean with a small gang of excited kids and building sand castles or making cakes for an imaginary bakery, just as I liked organizing a game of my own freewheeling concoction called “Boarding School.”
This last was a bizarre but infinitely adaptable mixture of A Little Princess, Oliver Twist, and the musical Annie, which my nieces and nephews vied to take part in. You had to be orphaned or have at least one physically mangled parent to attend the school; then, once you were accepted by me, the school’s tyrannical headmistress, you had to sign on for a series of backbreaking daily chores as well as a choice of demanding studies. I was forever barking out orders and there was always a child who felt overlooked or that he or she had accepted the wrong role. But the game had its own twisted logic and there was something about all the melodramatic harshness and mistreatment that my nephews and nieces found strangely satisfying. (Many years later I would write a profile for The New York Times Magazine about Daniel Handler, the author of the Lemony Snicket children’s book series, and thought I recognized in the ghoulish happenings that characterize these books some of the same spirit that informed “Boarding School.”)
All this interaction and maternal role-playing ideally should have prepared me for becoming a mother myself. Certainly it was something I had thought about for many years, far more than I had ever thought about becoming a wife. I loved the vision of myself holding a baby at my hip, careless but prideful. Such fantasies made it possible for me to imagine that I might reach this life passage without too much angst, too much painful trafficking with my demons. But that was to underestimate their power, not to mention the black haze that stalked my every move, lying cunningly in wait until an opportune moment presented itself.
* * *
I became pregnant—for the first time in my life, at the age of thirty-five—on my honeymoon in Hawaii, at a Maui resort that seemed disconcertingly built to host thousands of people rather than couples bent on intimacy. It was the only night during our embattled honeymoon on which Michael and I consecrated our once-impassioned amatory union by having sex. I had been inattentive about birth control for years, in part because I had been told by a gynecologist that I would have trouble getting pregnant on my own (I had been diagnosed in my mid-twenties with polycystic ovaries, a hormonal imbalance that led to irregular periods and potentially compromised fertility), and in part abetted by the rationalization that I wanted to have a child more than I wanted to be with any particular man and therefore didn’t need to use contraception. Apparently my psyche—or, perhaps, my hormones—needed the legal sanction of marriage to enable the reproductive process.
As it was, I had begun to feel trapped by marriage almost from the moment I entered its portals. I felt as though all my other identities—as a writer, book editor, aunt, friend, daughter—had been vanquished by this one single act, reducing me to a character called a “wife,” who was in turn defined by a “husband.” Feminism may have come and gone, leaving other women with a greater sense that their autonomy was not necessarily hampered by the state of being married, but the minute we officially became a couple, I felt I was no longer anything but the woman wedded to Michael. Already on the way to JFK I felt panicky, as though I were inhabiting an alien being who happened to be carrying luggage that belonged to me, and that there was no way of shedding this creature and recovering my former self. Added to this, I was grief-stricken at what felt like the loss of my mother, the ceding of her primary role in my life to another person—a man, my husband, someone I wasn’t sure I wanted to be with in the first place.
Looking back on it, from the vantage point of having lived without a man for more than a decade and having entertained the thought that I may not have the psychological equipment to be in a sustained and up-close relationship, I feel sorry for what my ex-husband must have gone through. I would get up in the morning in our impersonal but pretty room by the ocean and proceed to sit numbly at breakfast on the terrace with Michael, who exclaimed anew each day over the wonders of papaya. Afterward, on the long stretch of beach, I hunkered down in a chair, reading a mirthless hard-backed tome on the narcissistic personality by a psychiatrist named James Masterson, while Michael cavorted with the waves. He went to look at coral reefs and other local spots on his own, like a vacationing widower, while I remained engrossed in my book.
I recognized that I wasn’t acting wifely but felt helpless to do otherwise. I raised my face to the sun, imbibing my beloved rays, and wondered, once again, what was wrong with me. Perhaps I was meant to live on a commune, lose my problematic self in the service of the larger good as I worked side by side with other women in a hot kitchen, all of us dressed in faded, nun-like clothes. Perhaps I was meant to make my way through the world on my own—live more on the edge, like Amelia Earhart, or bear a child as a single mother and write radical manifestos. Or perhaps I wasn’t cut out for heterosexuality to begin with, there was always that possibility: Was I concealing a deep Sapphic urge out of fear that I wouldn’t fit in with family or friends? Given my singular attachment to my mother and lack of paternal connection, it would have made perfect sense for me to become a lesbian—except for the crucial fact that I had never felt sexual desire for a woman.
Meanwhile, Michael inquired if I’d like to accompany him on a whale-watching expedition, which was the last thing I wanted to do. The most exertion I could manage was to take walks and the occasional swim. In truth, I felt psychologically so precarious that I imagined myself disintegrating whenever I looked into the bathroom mirror—as if my face were about to fragment into pieces in front of my eyes in my own personal version of a horror movie. I couldn’t figure out what I was doing on this laid-back island, with its many T-shirt and surfboard shops, and with this man permanently installed at my side. In addition to being in a quasi-dissociative state, I was suddenly besieged by guilt for abandoning the religious observances of my childhood. I hadn’t been Orthodox for more than a decade now, but I had dipped in and out of the context of Orthodox Judaism as I pleased, trekking frequently to my parents’ for Friday night dinners, occasionally showing up in shul on Saturday mornings, and imagining that I might return to its confines one day with an equally faithless but all the same religiously knowledgeable mate by my side. Now here I was, married to a man who—aside from having a mother who liked to make ethnic dishes, like brisket and kasha—was minimally conversant with Jewishness and had none of my nostalgia for all that had been left behind.
* * *
After our ten days away, I returned to the city tanned, despondent—and, unbeknownst to me, carrying a child. Although I should have been thrilled to discover
this fact, especially since I had doubted my ability to get pregnant in the first place, I instantly felt trapped by the future barreling its way toward me. How was I going to deal with being a mother when I was still locked in an ancient war dance with my own mother, still looking for confirmation of her love? And what about the father of this child, who just happened to be my husband, who was part and parcel of this claustrophobic arrangement called marriage that I had impetuously stepped into after years of vacillation? Where did he fit in? Nothing seemed clear, except that life was hurtling ahead, with or without my cooperation.
20
I read recently of a study that, utilizing PET scans, has identified a potential biomarker in the brain that can predict whether a depressed patient will respond better to psychotherapy or antidepressant medication. This sounds like a step forward and no doubt there will come a time when brain scans will be able to create 3-D images of the landscape of despair. But in the interim I plug up my psychic holes with large quantities of both therapy and medication, hoping one will stick where the other fails. I imagine the inside of my head as scarred and bloody from the battles that have been waged there. I can’t tell anymore whether it’s my chemistry acting up or the ancient griefs I carry with me rearing up in response to a present provocation, the old nature/nurture conundrum: I only know it hurts to have to go on.
I have spent more than four decades and gobs of money in psychiatrists’ offices, exhuming my memories in an effort to understand their pernicious effect on me; indeed, I could be said to be a one-person boon to the faltering therapeutic industry. Do I have trouble with object constancy—with holding on to other people, keeping them in mind when they are not in front of me instead of letting them drop over the edge—because my mother regularly let me fall off her radar? Am I skittish about the thrust and pull of intimate relationships because there was no one to rely on except my inconstant mother? Then, too, was it inevitable, given my nonexistent relationship with my distant and often terrifying father, that I would end up fearing men as much as I was attracted to them? Inevitable that I would get married to a man I was fiercely ambivalent about, and equally inevitable that I would get divorced? Could I have been anything other than lonely as an adult, given how lonely I felt as a child?
To this day, I don’t know what I feel about the whole therapeutic enterprise, whether I would have been better off never delving into the wreckage. I don’t really believe so; in many ways I think therapy has saved my life, offering me a means of understanding myself and the family I came from. It is because of the shrinks I’ve seen, all of them, the talented and the not-so-talented, that I can say, with the poet John Berryman, in the first of his Eleven Addresses to the Lord: “I am still here, severely damaged, but functioning.” All the same, the business of self-disclosure remains a curious and slippery one, despite many years of practicing it; there is always so much one is tempted to sidestep, if only in the interests of preserving an already deflated sense of dignity—so many crevices of shame and regret and pure, undiluted guilt that seem hazardous to pry into. Do you admit to your long-ago bout of shoplifting in Sephora that reveals you for the petty criminal you are underneath your show of moral exemplitude? Or the inexcusably cruel remarks you hurled at your daughter in a fit of ire? Is the relief of confessing to your sins in an officially nonjudgmental atmosphere worth the writhing inner discomfort that accompanies it?
The curious thing is that, although both my parents are dead, I feel breathless with anxiety when I talk about the past in a session even now. I am hardly able to finish my sentences or provide telling details, although you’d think the ongoing narrative of my story, pieced together as it’s been over the years, would flow easily by this time. Why am I still protective of those who did me ill, so afraid to render a final verdict? Is it masochistic or self-preserving—or a bit of both? Then again, what can you do with the knowledge that there was something ineffably wrong with your family, the only family on offer?
I think of an eminent shrink, one of a growing cast, I consulted in my mid-twenties when I was skittering toward another depression. He had an office at Payne Whitney and was known for his rapier intelligence. I believe he had met with my parents about one of my siblings before I saw him, but in any case he leaned over at the end of the hour and said, calmly and decisively: “You know, both your parents are crazy.” I felt a stab of sorrow upon hearing these words—for myself, stuck with crazy parents, and for my parents, who didn’t know they were being written off as crazy by this psychiatric eminence. I realized as soon as I heard it that I would repeat his verdict to my mother, if only because I told her everything, and that in the process of relaying his words to her they would lose their power. My mother would surely dismiss them, as she dismissed everything she didn’t want to look at, with the strange-sounding German word for nonsense. Quatsch!, she would say, putting an end to the matter.
While I am on the subject of psychotherapy, I shouldn’t overlook the crucial matter of the listening Other, the therapist him- or herself. In my many years of therapy I have never developed a set of criteria by which to assess the skill of a given practitioner, the way you would assess a dentist or a plumber. I tend to attach to the latest therapist more easily than would make sense, given my generally vigilant critical powers, and then at some point he or she will reveal some insurmountable failure—a tendency to speak in homilies or an inability to retain a piece of information I consider crucial—and I move on. And yet, although my faith in the curative potential of therapy has taken many knocks over the years, I persevere, convinced of the power of my unconscious life to misdirect me, to keep me stuck in the captivity of my childhood. It is, admittedly, a slow and incremental process, not to mention an expensive one, this attempt to untangle the threads of one’s interior life in forty-five- or fifty-minute sessions several times a week, week after week, month after month. I understand how other people can look at it as a folly—as a waste of time and money, lacking in concrete results—but for me it has been invaluable.
21
It is late on a Saturday morning in October and I am lying in one of two twin beds pushed together in my brothers’ old bedroom, unable to move because of the din in my head, the rush of violently tinged thoughts that keep coming at me. My hair is unwashed and I am wearing a crumpled nightgown, as though I were in an ongoing state of recuperation. I am thirty-five years old and suffering from postpartum depression, although no one has seen fit to articulate this diagnosis as of yet. My mother has come in to say hello on her way to shul, acting as though all is well. She knows otherwise, knows that I am thinking obsessively about drowning my weeks-old daughter in the bathtub—the same one where Jane used to give me wordless baths—because I have told her as much.
Part of me loves Zoë and everything about her, from the smells of baby powder and diaper rash ointment that cling to her after she has been washed, to the way she flaps her chubby legs in the air when she is happy. My daughter is very cute-looking, with a ruff of red-blond hair that stands up like a rooster’s comb, a rosebud mouth, and an easy disposition. She is not given, like some other babies, to wailing noisily until her face turns red; when she cries she does so gently, ingratiatingly, as if not to disturb the universe.
But I also feel hemmed in by her, overwhelmed by the constant presence of such a needy being. And right underneath this feeling, I feel enormous rage at my own unabated neediness, my sense of having been starved of the nutrients I myself needed in order to grow into a confident adult. Surely there is not room enough for both of us in this world: How can I protect her if I am still searching for a lap to crawl into? Surely she’d be better off if she’d never been born. I envision cradling Zoë’s tiny body in my arms and pushing her head under the bathwater, how trusting she would be—I am the same person, after all, who nurses her when she’s hungry—and how quickly it would all be over. I am aware that it would be a terrible, “sick” thing to do. No one would sympathize with me, I am aware of that as well. I would be v
iewed as monstrous, no matter the condition that led me to do it, as Medea incarnate. I would be carted off to a prison or a psychiatric hospital for the rest of my life. Nothing would be the same ever again.
Postpartum depression remains largely hidden in our culture, like other kinds of severe depression—and is, to this day, barely given its due as a legitimate clinical condition, although the recently issued recommendation by a government task force for all mothers-to-be to get screened for depression before and after giving birth is certainly a step in the right direction. Mothers who kill their children in such a state—Andrea Yates, for instance, who drowned her five children on a June morning in 2001, after suffering repeated bouts of psychotic postpartum depression—are often seen as nothing more than criminals, unworthy of empathy, deserving of only the most dire condemnation. I was asked to write about Yates for Talk, a magazine started by Tina Brown after she left The New Yorker; the magazine went under before I could write the piece but not before I had researched it. Yates’s hospital records and other documents helped me to understand more of her case, revealing the intense pressure put on her by her strange religious convictions and her husband to continue having more children. Both the evidence of her acute psychological suffering and the danger pregnancy posed to herself and others are there in black-and-white, yet these factors were all but ignored in the original rush to judgment.
This Close to Happy Page 14
