Here is the truth: I was lucky. I had a healthy child, health insurance, a supportive partner, and a village.
This is true, too: I was an adjunct college teacher with no paid maternity leave, and Christopher worked ten/twelve hour days. It was early 2008, the first months of the recession. The value of our condo had plummeted and costs were climbing. The winter was awful, gray sky for months. I had a hard time breast-feeding and was terrified to talk about it. The baby was losing weight so we borrowed money to pay for a lactation consultant and eventually figured it out, but still: the mental job I did on myself was the equivalent of a power drill through the shoulder bone, not to mention a then undiagnosed and particularly gnarly thyroid disorder. Inside the mess of my head was a single clear thought: I want to be saved.
* * *
Jesus. How do you write about depression in a way that’s not depressing?
* * *
Lott came over to hold the baby. I locked myself in the bathroom and turned on the water so it sounded like I was showering. Then I sat on the floor in the dark and cried, Mojo’s head in my lap. Afterward, I wrapped a towel around my unwashed hair, you know, to look as though I’d washed it. Lott is a good friend. He pretended not to notice.
Jeff came over to hold the baby. I locked myself in the bathroom, turned on the shower, and got under the faucet fully dressed. The water drenched my sweatshirt, my yoga pants and socks. There’s commentary here about control: my body was no longer mine, my thoughts were no longer mine, my life was no longer mine, but this ridiculous thing I’m doing now? All me, baby. I sloshed into the living room, my clothes heavy and leaking all over the floor. Jeff looked me up and down and said, “You need to hang out with some mothers.”
Dia flew in from Oakland to hold the baby. Her Achilles tendon was shredded from football so she scooted around on a knee walker, up and down the three flights of stairs on her butt. I don’t know if she’d talked to Lott or Jeff, or if she just knew, but when I told her I was going to take a shower, she followed me into the bathroom, sitting on the toilet like we used to when we lived together in Humboldt Park. She rocked my son in her arms and talked through the curtain: “He looks just like you! Are you using soap? Look at his little feet! Use the soap. Megan? Soap.”
Amanda came over, supposedly to hold the baby, but instead she told me to get dressed. I looked at the window. Snow pounded the glass. “We’re not going out in that,” I said. “We are,” she said, tucking Caleb into his tiny snowsuit. He smiled and reached for her thumbs. “Get ready.” I cleaned myself up more or less and we drove to her apartment in Edgewater. Twenty-some people were in the living room, waiting for me to run a writing workshop like I had a thousand times before. But I didn’t feel like before. There was no more before. Amanda put her hand on my arm. “It’s time,” she said. I sat on the floor, my sleeping son in a sling across my chest, and I listened to stories, to love and loss and fear. They got into my head. I went home that night and wrote, just lists in my journal, but still. Amanda made a Google calendar and people signed up to babysit while I ran workshops: week after week, month after month, each sentence another step back to myself. Eventually I felt strong enough to tell a story of my own, this weird little thing about watching another mother on a wireless baby monitor. It turned into something, a contribution, I hoped, to some sort of dialogue.
Postpartum depression—depression, period—is something we don’t talk about.
Why?
Shame?
The hell with shame.
Let’s get into it, the beauty and the mess.
Today I get e-mails from women who’ve recently had babies and are there now, in the thick of it. I get e-mails from the men and women who love them, too. I like to think of us all together, crowded into a football field, sitting in the bleachers. We share popcorn. We do the wave. We see that we’re not alone.
* * *
One early Sunday, a few months before we walked away from our mortgage, I let Christopher sleep in and took Caleb to the dog beach. The lake was still, a mirror, and we waded in midcalf and threw tennis balls for Mojo. He’d wait, body rigid, eye on the ball held over my head, ready to spring, and I’d pitch it as hard and far as I could, trying to throw like Mo’ne Davis. When the ball leaves my hand, he’s off, a fifty-pound missile cutting over the water, then leaping over the water, then paddling through the water toward his yellow target, closer, closer, success! And back to me, tail wagging, proud as hell, rinse and repeat. It was late August and the water was perfect, a bathtub. Caleb was four years old, splashing around until the sun rose above us and then he called out colors: “Pink! Orange! Yellow! Mommy, look!” I looked. It was incredible, the blue of the sky and the blue of the water with a single stripe of sunlight, a path into the sky.
That’s when the singing started.
Behind us, gathered on the beach, people were singing—twenty of them, maybe? Thirty? Black and brown and white: children, middle-, and third-agers,* all in the sand in their Sunday best and many dressed head to toe in white.
“Mommy, what’s happening?” said my son, splashing through the water to grab the hem of my dress. Even so young, having never set foot in a church, he understood the reverence.
“Shhhh,” I whispered, leashing the dog. “Watch.” One of the men—the reverend, the pastor?—took the hand of an older woman dressed in white, and the two of them walked into the water, their clothes seeping as they went deeper and dragging them slow, the sun climbing higher, the congregation still singing from the shore. I wondered if we should leave, if my little family and I were intruding on this private moment, but no. The reverend, water now up to his chest, turned to wave at the group on the shore and then at my small son. He placed his palms together and nodded toward us.
Welcome.
The sun climbed. The reverend held the woman’s hands and they spoke quietly. He asked questions I couldn’t hear, and to each, she nodded yes yes yes. Her white, wet dress streamed around them. Then he took her in his arms, dipping her backward and fully underwater.
I held my breath with her.
She came up drenched, wiping her eyes, laughing and crying and god, the joy. She hugged the reverend, then turned to face the beach, throwing both arms into the air as if she’d just scored a touchdown. Her friends cheered, and she splashed back toward them, switching places with another woman walking to the reverend. Behind her splashed a little boy no bigger than my own. He stopped near us, water to his waist. As she and the reverend got ready to duck under, the little boy got ready, too, holding his thumb and forefinger in front of his face. “One, two—” he counted, watching them carefully, and on three he sucked in a breath, plugged his nose, and went down and up as they did.
Everybody cheered from the beach.
The little boy jumped up and down, laughing and dripping.
“Why are we so happy?” asked my son, jumping with him.
“I don’t know!” he said.
For the rest of the morning, the two of them played baptism, holding their noses and dunking as the congregation celebrated on the beach. I’d never seen anything like it. I’ve had glimpses, I think, like when I first heard Sweet Honey in the Rock sing “I Be Your Water”; the Chicago Symphony Orchestra doing Carmina Burana; standing on Petrin Hill, looking over late-night Prague; in Alaska on Spruce Island, the forest a carpet of moss; that storefront church in Humboldt Park; giving birth in a snowstorm; the floor of a rowboat on Cedar Lake; my dad’s boat in the Gulf of Alaska, all blue and no horizon; Dorothy Allison reading aloud, her voice lifting the ceiling; Joy Harjo on releasing fear; Patti Smith on the moon; and Toni Morrison on learning how to love.
I let the dog off the leash and watched him fly across the sand.
Maybe I was saved.
Maybe we all are.
We Say and Do Kind Things
Sarah and I are drinking. We’re at Little Bad Wolf, a cocktail bar on Chicago’s North Side. It has fancy tacos and great old-fashioneds. Like, really grea
t.
We’ve had a lot of them.
A month earlier, her two-year-old daughter, Sophia, was diagnosed with a brain tumor. She couldn’t shake the flu, and when Sarah took her to the pediatrician they discovered the flu wasn’t the flu.
Snap your fingers.
That’s how fast your life can change.
* * *
Sarah is goddamn fucking sunshine. Weaponized optimism. You’ll be all: I had a shitty day. And she’ll say, Oh, friend, that’s terrible. Put down your things and we’ll have a quick dance. Sarah, you’ll say, we’re in a parking lot. Or: Sarah, it’s raining. Or: Sarah, there’s no music, and she will give you a look. You’ll drop your stuff. You’ll take off your shoes. You’ll dance your face off to the sound of water hitting the pavement and you know what? It’s glorious.
I hope you have a person like that in your life.
One who reminds you to choose joy.
* * *
She’s the first to say she’s blessed: her beautiful little girl; two older boys, patient and sweet; her husband, Scott, in the thick of it with her. They have insurance. They have some work flexibility. They have a village rallying around their family. Within a week of Sophia’s diagnosis, our friends had set up a website to organize the kindness: meals, pickups, playdates. It also allows Sarah to send out updates so she doesn’t have to talk about it every time she runs into somebody at the grocery store.
“What else can I do?” I asked when she dropped the boys at my house, the first morning of who knows how many rounds of chemo. Her face was locked in a sunny smile: brave for Sophia, for the boys, for Scott. I thought she was a fucking warrior. I thought: This is what strength looks like. Not a bodybuilder with the biceps. Not Superman holding up a skyscraper. Not an army of thousands with their guns and their tanks and their bombs—no.
Strength is a mother.
“At some point—” she said through the smile.
“Name it,” I said.
“Not today—”
“You say when.”
“I will need to get drunk.”
* * *
We met not long after I had my son. My friends were worried about me and thought I needed to talk to other mothers, so Amanda called Sarah. She had every reason to say no. She didn’t know me. She had two small kids of her own to take care of, an insane schedule, and who wants to go outside in a Chicago winter?
“Hi!” she said, when I opened the door.
“Hi!” I said, and burst into tears.
I’d never been a crier—“We’re Dutch,” my father says—but at that point I couldn’t stop. At the pediatrician’s office, my tiny son slept in his infant car seat while I filled out paperwork including a long list of questions regarding the mother’s postpartum health. Number five: Have you been crying excessively? Immediately I started crying excessively, there in the lobby with its colored walls and cutesy playroom and happy toddlers toddling around. The receptionist came over with a box of Kleenex, leaned into me, and whispered, “Look at the woman behind you.” I turned, and there she was, infant car seat at her feet, crying her eyes out. “You’re totally normal,” the receptionist said. “You’re all totally normal.”
I still carry those words.
A life raft. A lighthouse. The last canteen in a dying desert.
Crying doesn’t faze Sarah. “It’s lovely to meet you!” she said outside the door, holding a bottle of wine. She wore an impeccable black wool cape and knee-high boots, with long, thick hair to her waist. I stood just inside, holding my crying son—he started whenever I started and vice versa, the two of us caught in a weird ouroboros loop—with snot everywhere and the same yoga pants I’d worn all week, my hair falling out in clumps. “How’s about we switch?” she asked, reaching for the baby and handing me the wine.
Life raft, lighthouse, last canteen.
* * *
If you want to hide out for a night, Little Bad Wolf is your place. It’s small and dark, low lights and wooden tables. Sarah and I sat in the corner, mainlined bourbon, and talked about things that weren’t cancer.
Then we talked about cancer.
Cancer is here now.
Fuck cancer.
“Sophia finally fell asleep,” she said, telling me about the most recent round of chemo. They’re in treatment at Lurie Children’s Hospital downtown—another blessing, Sarah’s quick to mention. The best pediatric cancer facility in the Midwest and it’s here. They don’t have to leave home like so many families do. “I left her in the room with Scott and took the elevator downstairs. I needed air. Space. Something. I went outside, and—do you know the park across the street?”
We build maps in our heads. I’d been to the ER at Lurie several times, when ear infections made my son think his brain was exploding. He was delivered next door at Prentice Women’s Hospital. Our first pediatrician’s office is around the corner. I taught down the street at Northwestern’s Chicago campus. Activists shut down Michigan Avenue following the cover-up of Laquan McDonald’s murder. The Magnificent Mile Lights Festival, now named for a bank. Alice at Lookingglass Theatre. Martin Creed’s Mothers at the Museum of Contemporary Art. I spent hours in what used to be Borders. I buy face cream at Marshall Field’s, which I know was bought out by Macy’s but to a Chicagoan Marshall Field’s is Marshall Field’s. Comiskey Park is Comiskey Park. The Sears Tower is the Sears Tower. The Tribune is the Tribune.
“The park in front of the museum?” I said.
She nodded. “I sat there for a long time. People walked by on their way to work, shopping, playing with their kids, going about their lives as though everything was fine, and I just—I lost it.”
Have you held a friend’s hand as their heart breaks? This woman took care of me, peeled me off the floor. For her I’d kill a dragon.
Except she doesn’t want a dragon. She wants a cure for pediatric cancer.
“I couldn’t stop crying,” she went on. “All these people were staring at me and none of them—No one—”
“No one asked if you were okay?” I tried not to scream. I’d had a lot to drink. My friend was hurting. Her child was hurting. Words can’t fix it, but they are a start: “are” and “you” and “okay.” I thought of the times I hadn’t said them: people I’d assumed were asleep, passed out, wanted to be left alone, don’t draw attention, not your place. What if they were sick? Needed help? Needed shielding from a creepy guy or a loud-ass racist or an online troll or some small act of humanity to make it through the next five minutes? I wanted to show up at that park and yell at everyone walking past my crying friend. I wanted to kick myself for all the times I could have helped but hadn’t. I wanted to go to med school and find a cure. I wanted to raise a gazillion dollars for research. I wanted to give Sophia a unicorn. I wanted to hug Sarah but the table was at a weird angle. I wanted a better angle. I wanted a better world. I wanted to be a better person.
“But then,” Sarah went on, sweeping hair out of her face. She’s a Pantene commercial, that woman. “After I was all cried out, I went back to the hospital and got in the elevator up to Sophia’s floor, and a woman got on with me. She was a nurse, I think. She had on scrubs. The doors shut in front of us, and she looked at me, and you know what she said? She said, ‘Do you need a hug?’”
I watched the memory on her face.
“It’s hard to explain.”
Life raft, lighthouse, last canteen.
“I’m afraid,” she said finally. “And it was nice to feel something else. Even for only a second.”
* * *
A few months after Sophia began treatment, I spent the day with her and Sarah at the hospital. She wears bunny slippers everywhere. Two pigtails stick out of her head. Sunshine, like her mother. “Here are the fish!” she said, dragging me to a wall-size tank. “Here are the donuts!” she said, waving at the coffee kiosk. “Here are my friends!” she said, introducing me to the nurses and technicians who take care of her every week, weight and measurements and tests and procedures, so
many procedures, such a tiny body for so huge a fight.
There are good days and bad days, Sarah says. On good days, they celebrate.
That day was a good day.
There are murals in the elevators at Lurie: happy cities with bright blue skies. Buttons are placed kid high that make traffic sounds, honking and beeping and bicycle bells. Sophia slid across the floor in her bunnies, careful to press each one. She made Sarah press them, too, and me. She made us press ones on opposite walls at the same time, and then we’d switch, the three of us dancing around the elevator, honking and laughing and you know what? It was glorious.
The doors opened then and a woman got on alone. She wore sweatpants. Her eyes were red. Her hands shook. Her breath shook. She smiled at Sophia, nodded to Sarah and me, and then stared ahead frozen as the elevator counted down.
The air was heavy. Grief near tangible.
“Excuse me,” Sarah said, gently touching her arm. “Do you need a hug?”
And for the rest of the ride and a half hour downstairs in the lobby, I watched two-year-old Sophia watch her mother be kind.
* * *
My mother is an elementary school teacher. There’s one rule in her classroom: we say and do kind things. It’s spelled out in enormous construction paper letters hung across the blackboard, starting at one wall and ending at the other. She and her kids talk about it on the first day. What does it mean to be kind? It’s the beginning of an ongoing conversation that continues throughout the school year and hopefully the rest of their lives.
In our house, it was a sort of mission statement, the lens she held up to show me the world. At first it was simple. Say please. If you hurt someone, apologize. Ask how you can make it better. Share your stuff. Don’t take things that belong to someone else like when my cousin Aaron swiped Evil-Lyn, my favorite Masters of the Universe action figure and why was she second in command to Skeletor when clearly she was more powerful? We get older and kindness, along with everything else, gets complicated. The guy in the bar who grabbed me and would only let go if I said please. Apologies saying I’m sorry you were offended as opposed to I’m sorry for what I did and Here’s how I’ll make it right. Sometimes I wonder how the world would be different if we shared resources and opportunities the way our kindergarten teachers made us share crayons. I remember coming home furious from a high school history class on colonization, a screaming example of taking what belongs to someone else. “We took lives,” I told my mother. “We took land. We took culture.” I was a small-town, sheltered white kid. I was all guilt and rage. I stood in my kitchen and yelled the understatement of the century: “it isn’t fucking kind.”
The Wrong Way to Save Your Life Page 20
