I’m troubled by the tattoos because I worry that they are not an expression of artistic sensibility but of a compulsion for self-harm. Or, if I’m going to be really honest, that they are an expression of maternal failure. Surely, children who feel beloved and well taken care of don’t mark their bodies with ugly things. I know this is nonsense. Whereas I see them as ugly and poorly drawn, she sees them as beautiful. They have nothing at all to do with me. They are hers and hers alone, an expression not of unhappiness or depression but of style. Her style.
This tattoo, however, was something else entirely. It was not only ugly to me, but it was on her lovely, perfect throat, where only the highest of turtlenecks could hide it. Even though I’d spoken to my daughter as recently as yesterday afternoon, even though she’d sounded fine, cheerful if a little stressed about her finals, I flipped out. A person who thinks she might one day have a job in the “straight” world, who anticipates meeting and wanting to impress people older than herself, who imagines a range of future selves doing a range of exciting and interesting things, would never get a giant black tattoo on her neck, would she?
And then my younger daughter pointed out what I had missed. (Because, yes, by then I had gotten out of bed, with Instagram open on my phone, and my freak-out had woken her up.) The tattoo depicted an emoticon. It stood for “meh,” signifying indifference.
Forget imagining a job in the straight world. A person who feels such existential apathy that she inscribes “meh” on her body does not anticipate any future at all. A person who wants one of the first things others know about her to be that she does not give a shit, is not a stable and well person. That person is depressed. That person is at risk. That person’s mother needs to change out of her pajamas and get on a plane and swoop her up and bring her home and wrap her in cotton batting and protect her from everything in the world, including herself.
I am, I know, particularly anxious when it comes to my eldest child. This anxiety is based, unsurprisingly, on guilt. I have forced upon this child a Ph.D.-level expertise in her mother’s mental illness. Her studies began almost as soon as she popped out of the incision in my belly, eyes wide and watching, perfect bow of a mouth ready for a kiss. A few days after we brought her home from the hospital, after the adrenaline had faded and the Vicodin worn off, I started to experience disturbing images, fantasies as vivid as dreams, though they overtook me when I was wide awake.
I would be nursing her with perfect contentment, and then, suddenly, I would see in my mind’s eye an image of me smothering her. I would be walking through the house with her in my arms, humming a made-up lullaby, and as I passed the knife block on the kitchen counter, I would imagine myself grabbing a blade and slitting her throat. I would be bathing her in her little tub, and I would imagine letting go and watching her sweet face slide beneath the water.
The more I tried to suppress these horrible intrusive fantasies, the more vivid and frequent they became. I was convinced that there was something terribly wrong with me. I wondered if I was suffering from postpartum depression. I wondered if I was evil. I wondered if I was a mother or a monster.
This was in 1994, when the Web was in its infancy. Had it even occurred to me to search the Internet, there would have been nothing there to find. I didn’t go to the library or consult a therapist, either. Instead, I kept mum about what I was seeing in my head, even as the images influenced how I dealt with my baby. I was fearful, worried I’d lose control and hurt her. I was anxious about being alone with her, clingy with my husband. Even after the images faded, I felt their effect on my mothering. I lacked confidence. I didn’t trust myself.
The intrusive images came back again, even more intensely, when my second child was born. By that time, however, I was confident enough in my capacity to love my baby to ignore them. When they returned after the birth of my third child, in 2001, Google was finally there to help.
Surely, one of the greatest benefits of the Internet is its capacity to create community among strangers. No matter how bizarre your symptoms, you can find fellow sufferers. Convinced your skin is extruding tiny fibers? Welcome to the Morgellons community, with Joni Mitchell to sing your anthem. Find yourself imitating everything that surprises you, including the barking of a dog or a passerby’s fart? You probably have Miryachit, a disease also known as Jumping Frenchman of Maine, and you can find others just like you online. None of us need ever again feel isolated in our pain.
When I turned to Google, I found out I was one of many women who suffer from the disabling, intrusive, obsessional thoughts of postpartum obsessive-compulsive disorder. Mothers with postpartum OCD do not spend their time scrubbing their houses clean (oh, how I wish that were the case). They share common ghastly, unspeakable fantasies. They imagine stabbing their babies, drowning them, throwing them out of windows. In extreme cases, these thoughts cause mothers to avoid their babies, for fear of harming them. Fortunately, those who suffer from this awful disorder don’t harm their babies; tragically, they are at high risk of suicide.
The syndrome, luckily, is very responsive to treatment with SSRIs. I was on Zoloft when I had my fourth child, and I never once thought about killing him. Or least no more than any other parent does.
My firstborn bore the brunt not just of my postpartum OCD but of my inexperience and lack of confidence in dealing with it, and this pattern was repeated throughout her childhood. Besides my husband, who was an adult when we met, she has lived the longest with my untreated shifting moods, and benefited least from my efforts to stabilize them. And so I am on high alert for any sign of emotional pain in her.
I stared at the photograph of the horrible mark on her neck for a while, fighting tears. Then I sent this text:
Hey honey. Are those new tattoos on your throat?
The sub-text to this text? DON’T HURT YOURSELF. DON’T HURT YOURSELF. DON’T HURT YOURSELF.
She didn’t reply.
So I sent this text:
We love you honey. And we really want to hear from you. Please call us.
Subtext: I CAN BE AT THE AIRPORT IN FORTY-FIVE MINUTES.
She didn’t reply.
“One of us needs to get on a plane,” I said to my husband. “The last flight’s in an hour.”
He pointed out that it would take me nearly that long to get to the airport.
That’s when the phone rang.
My husband resisted my attempts to pry the receiver from his fingers. He listened for a few minutes and then wordlessly passed me the phone.
“Look at the geotag,” my daughter said.
“What?” I said.
“On the photo. Read the geotag.”
“Print shop 1 AM,” I read.
“Print shop,” she said.
“Print shop?”
“I’m in the print shop. What is in the print shop?”
“Prints?”
“Ink, Mom. There’s ink in the print shop.”
“You made a tattoo with print shop ink?” Stealing! Also, toxic!
She texted me another photograph. It was of her hands, stained blue.
“I’ve been working for hours on my final prints. I’m covered in ink stains.”
“It’s…an ink stain?” I whispered.
“You really need to chill.”
I wonder if I would have been more “chill” if this had happened last night, between Microdose Day and Transition Day. Would I have been better able to manage my anxiety? Would I have hesitated before rushing to the decision to hop on a plane? Still, a month ago, I might have been on my way to the airport by the time my daughter called. But who can know? I think perhaps the only conclusion to be drawn is that freaking out about your kids is normal, and even the most microdose-mellowed mama is still a mama. And a Jewish mama at that.
* * *
* Name changed to protect the guilty. You know who you are, “Maxine.”
Day 22
Microdose Day
Physical Sensations: A slight tingling about ninety
minutes after dosing, a flash of something that feels almost like dizziness. A tender stomach.
Mood: Irritable when I woke up, but that passed after I took the microdose.
Conflict: None.
Sleep: About six and a half hours.
Work: Productive, if a bit scattered.
Pain: Minor.
Though my mood is fine today, I’ve been wishing that I wasn’t taking LSD. Not because the protocol isn’t working, but because there’s another drug I wish I could take. Remember that back in the first chapter I told you that I’d taken MDMA six or seven times? It wasn’t in my glorious clubbing days. I didn’t really have any glorious clubbing days.*1 I started using MDMA about ten years ago, with my husband. Though I know it will make some people dismiss me as an unrepentant, drug-addled idiot, I’m not about to stop being completely honest with you now. We credit the strength of our marriage at least in part to our periodic use of the drug. Neither of us has ever taken the drug recreationally. We’ve never even been to a rave. We use MDMA purely as marital therapy.
We were inspired to try MDMA by a pair of guest lecturers I’d invited to speak to my seminar on the War on Drugs at UC Berkeley. Alexander Shulgin, known as Sasha, was a Bay Area pharmacologist and chemist who specialized in synthesizing and bioassaying psychoactive compounds on himself and on willing subjects. Known as the father of MDMA, Sasha Shulgin was not the first to synthesize the drug: the credit for that goes to the pharmaceutical company Merck. But Sasha was among the first to ingest the chemical. According to the story that he told my law-school class, he and some friends were on the Reno Fun Train in 1976, heading up to Tahoe for a weekend of gambling and carousing. His companions were drinking alcohol, but instead of joining them, Sasha drank a vial containing 120 milligrams of MDMA. He described the feeling like this: “I feel absolutely clean inside, and there is nothing but pure euphoria. I have never felt so great, or believed this to be possible.”
Sasha, who referred to the drug as his “low-calorie martini,” shared it with a friend, Leo Zeff, a former U.S. Army lieutenant colonel and psychotherapist who was so impressed with the drug’s potential that he came out of retirement to proselytize about MDMA’s therapeutic possibilities. Zeff trained hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of therapists around the country in how to use MDMA as a tool in their practices. Ann Shulgin, Sasha’s wife, who accompanied him when he lectured to my class, told us that she herself had used MDMA, and also administered it to couples. She said that in her couples counseling practice she could accomplish more in a single six-hour session with MDMA than in six years of traditional therapy. Her patients could plumb their most vulnerable depths, safely and even joyfully, with the kind of trust that even years of therapy couldn’t engender.
From about 1976 to 1981, MDMA remained a virtual secret among networks of psychotherapists who found it a profoundly important tool, especially in the treatment of couples, but who were hesitant to publicize or publish their findings for fear of hastening criminalization. Inevitably, however, word got out to recreational drug users. In 1981, a group of chemists in the Boston area—known, imaginatively, as the “Boston Group” rebranded the drug as “Ecstasy” or “XTC”—and increased the pace of production, stamping out thousands of little colorful pills decorated with characters reminiscent of SweeTarts candies. In 1983, one of their distributors, with the financial backing of investors from Texas, massively increased both production and distribution. The “Texas Group” held huge “Ecstasy parties” at bars and clubs, circulating posters and flyers, and aggressively marketing the drug. In 1985, as the psychotherapists had predicted would happen once use spread widely, the DEA placed MDMA on Schedule I, thus ending nearly a decade of successful therapeutic use.
Before the Shulgins first came to lecture to my class, the only thing I’d heard about MDMA was that it depleted spinal fluid (this turned out to be a legend of the drug war, with no basis in fact) and transformed users into sex fiends. (Another myth. Though it greatly heightens the senses, the drug actually impedes orgasm and, in men, the ability to sustain an erection.) Sasha and Ann referred to MDMA as an empathogen or entactogen, a drug that enhances feelings of emotional communion and empathy, allowing for an opening up of communication. This, they said, was what made it ideal for couples. It allowed them to discuss potentially painful or divisive issues without triggering feelings of fear and threat, but of love. A love drug!
When I first began considering following the Shulgins’ advice, my husband and I had four small children, busy careers, and sleep deficits that challenged the concept of empathy, let alone its reliable practice. We were stressed out, and though we would never have considered our marriage anything but happy, we were definitely communicating less than before we had children. We felt a little bit, we used to say, like foremen in a factory on swing shifts. We’d pass the children off to one another with sufficient instruction to ease the transition, and then head off to our own work. When we were alone together, we were spent and exhausted, encrusted with baby cereal and just a soupçon of puke, and though we still enjoyed one another’s company, at times we lost the sense of intense communion we had once had.
Still, as compelling as was the possibility of opening up the lines of communication in a circumstance that enhances feelings of empathy and love, it took years for my husband and me to work up the courage to try the drug. I was afraid of MDMA for the same reason I was afraid of LSD: I didn’t want to have a bad trip, and I didn’t want to die. It was only after I’d read everything I could find about the drug that I became convinced that it was not, in fact, hallucinogenic. The walls would not breathe or change color. Moreover, the drug is relatively safe so long as you’re not stupid enough to source your pills from a wild-eyed stranger wearing a pacifier around his neck.
Though MDMA in its pure form is not particularly dangerous, even at high doses, there have been fatalities, including among healthy young adults.*2 MDMA raises body temperature and inhibits natural thermoregulation, increasing the risk of heatstroke. For this reason, probably the worst thing to do under the influence of MDMA is dance wildly in a packed room or beneath the desert sun. MDMA can also increase heart rate and raise blood pressure, making it dangerous for those who suffer from high blood pressure or heart disease. Additionally, MDMA can cause water retention. So, for example, if one takes it at a rave, and then chugs water to counteract the possibility of dehydration, one can suffer from hyponatremia, or water toxicity.
Furthermore, MDMA certainly affects the brain. We know this because tolerance develops with repeated use, and can eventually become chronic. Heavy users don’t experience the positive effects of the drug, no matter how many pills they “stack,” or how much they ingest. Though there is no clear answer yet as to why this is so, it seems likely that some neuroadaptive process is going on. This means, in laymen’s terms, that MDMA changes your brain chemistry in some way, though we do not know whether these changes are destructive or problematic.
However, there has never been a fatality or even an injury when MDMA is used in a carefully monitored therapeutic setting. Moreover, with a single, moderate dose, there is no need to be concerned about neuroadaptive processes. My husband and I decided that if we modeled our MDMA experience on the one developed by therapists like Zeff, were careful to regulate temperature and water intake, and put in place an emergency plan, we could safely take the drug.
We prepared far in advance for our first MDMA experience. We hired a reliable, mature babysitter to take care of our kids for three days, and arranged for one of their grandmothers to be on call in case of emergency. Both to enhance the experience and to minimize side effects, we followed a protocol of supplements that we found on the Web site of the Erowid Center, a clearinghouse for information on consciousness-altering drugs. We also planned to take an SSRI after the MDMA wore off, something Erowid users recommend in order to restore our depleted serotonin. Though the medical evidence for the utility of this practice is scant, it couldn’t hurt.
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After first making sure emergency medical care would be readily accessible in the event of a bad reaction, we drove down the coast to a small hotel on the beach, checked into a spartan though comfortable room, and promptly collapsed on the bed in blissful unconsciousness. By the time we woke up the next morning, we were so deliriously giggly from a night of unaccustomed sleep that for a moment we considered backing out. Who needs chemicals when you can get high on a good night’s rest?
Still, we’d paid for the babysitter and planned so carefully, it seemed like a waste of both time and money not to go forward.*3 We skipped breakfast (per the instructions on Erowid) and went for a hike out onto the cliffs above the beach. When we were precisely a thirty-minute walk from the hotel, we took the pills. My stomach clenched in panic as soon as I swallowed the drug. Forget the research! What if my spinal fluid vanished? I could feel it evaporating already. What if my brain overheated? A fried egg! That’s what a brain on drugs looks like! I knew that for sure, because Nancy Reagan told me so!
“Look at me,” my husband said. He held me by the shoulders and stared into my eyes. His pupils were not yet dilated.
“This is good,” he said. “Nothing bad will happen.”
“Promise?”
“I promise.”
A few deep breaths later, as the fog lifted over the Pacific, we hiked slowly back to the room. We stripped, got into bed, and waited for the best sex of our lives. Whatever myths the Shulgins had sought to dispel, the drug must be called Ecstasy for a reason, right?
Not so much. MDMA certainly enhances the senses. It makes touch feel glorious. The drug first came on with what I can best describe as a wave of warm, sensual tingling. I even got wet. But neither of us experienced the profound sexual arousal we’d anticipated. In fact, nothing about the experience was what we had imagined it would be. We didn’t rock the bed like a wrecking ball. We didn’t trance-dance into a fatally overheated stupor. We didn’t see fairies dancing in the sky, or any other visual hallucinations. The drug is not, as I said, hallucinogenic.
A Really Good Day Page 16
